InPhase Technologies Promises Holographic Drive in May

Anonymous Coward writes "After 8 years of effort, InPhase Technologies is shipping the world's first holographic disk drive next month. They showed it at this week's NAB. With a 300GB 5.25" disk cartridge and a 50-year media life, the Tapestry 300r is aimed at the video and film archive market. They've been promising this thing for so long I'd given up hope that they'd ever ship it!"

Comments

utterly pointless

[timmarhy]

$18,000 could buy me enough hd's so that i could rotate 2 backup disks once a year for the next 90 years.

Flashbacks..

[Grave]

Wow, that brings back memories of 5.25" floppies. Makes me wonder what this tech will look like in 20 years. Internal drives with 3.5" media storing hundreds of terabytes? SD-sized holographic media? Now that this technology has moved from proof-of-concept to a purchasable product (or will be in one month), it'll be very interesting to see how quickly it progresses.

Price

[EdIII]

I can see a hundred posts from people that will completely miss the point. All because of the price. Bitch, Moan, Bitch, Bitch, Moan, Moan.

FTA:

Holographic storage has a couple of neat properties.
 
1. A small fragment of a hologram can reconstruct the entire data image. The fragment won't let you move as far around the image, but for 2D images, like a photograph, it means a scratch isn't fatal.
2. Data density is theoretically unlimited. By varying the angle between the reference and illumination beams - or the angle of the media - hundreds of holograms can be stored in the same physical area.
 
Another factor: photographic media has the longest proven lifespan - over a century - of any modern media. Since there's no physical contact you can read the media millions of times with no degradation.
 
They've spec'd the optical media they use - a 5.25 clear disk in a cartridge - at 50 years.

Spinning Hard drives, Solid State Hard drives, CD's, and DVD's don't have anything CLOSE to holographic media.

Spinning Hard drives could be used, and they are, to store data for long periods of time. Problem is that it susceptible to EM fields and even while not spinning, it might be possible to have some degradation nonetheless. Holographic media is not affected by EM fields.

Solid State Hard drives are better off than spinning ones for sure, but still suffer from the same problems with an EM field AFAIK.

CD's and DVD's long shelf life is a MYTH. Most of them are not manufactured to last longer then 5-10 years. A scratch can easily damage either one of them, and repairs are not easy. Holographic Medium? Apparently not.

So the .50 cent per gigabyte price point may not be that attractive to the average IT guy, but when you have to make ABSOLUTELY sure the data will remain intact it certainly sounds like the way to go. The 18,000$ dollar cost for reader/writer will come down eventually, so that is really not even an issue. Hell, my first CD-R cost me 600$ and I STILL have my 1200$ Pinnacle Micro 4x4.

The fact they actually got it to production and selling it means there is a pretty good chance of seeing a few thousand dollar reader/writer within 2 years.

For those that are really hung up on the price, consider this:

To be REALLY safe with your data you would have remove all single points of failure. A single hard drive on a shelf IS a single point of failure, as is a CD/DVD. So you would need to be constantly "rolling" over the data in multiple RAIDS with snapshots, while at the same time, verifying the integrity with checksums before every snapshot. To take it one step further, multiple locations that synchronize over high speed networks... iSCSI?

Apparently a holographic medium can be written with "hundreds of holograms being stored in the same physical area". Sure sounds to me like you could store quite a bit of data with a considerable amount of recovery capability. I would hazard a guess, that just a few of these written this way and stored in separate physical locations would provide the same level of reliability and redundancy that current solutions provide (such as the one I outlined)... with a 50-100 year shelf life. If you look up the actual costs of iSCSI this sounds like a bargain to me.

Re:Price

[evanbd]

Huh? The theoretical possibilities aren't important -- what matters is what this drive can do, at least when you start talking about price. Physical holograms can no more hold infinite data than analog film has infinite resolution -- there are limitations somewhere, be they high or low. If you push close to those limitations, it won't be scratch resistant -- how resistant it is to damage depends on how much error correction you have, be it in the form of not using the full available resolution or by using electronic ECC techniques. (Care to guess which one is more efficient? Care to guess which one CDs and DVDs use?)

As for longevity -- there's no particular reason the plastics in the holographic storage will have any longer life than CDs or DVDs. If they say it'll last 50 years, then I'm inclined to believe they used decent plastics. But, you can get CD / DVD media that's rated for 300 years. It doesn't matter what damage sources holograms are "theoretically" susceptible to, what matters is what *this product* is susceptible to. Perhaps it doesn't delaminate, but what about heat / humidity / CD eating bacteria?

For archival media, my biggest concern would be whether I can find a reader in 50 years. I think the odds of that are a lot better for CD / DVD than for this -- though if I really care, it definitely needs some sort of maintenance program to make sure the data is intact and readable.

Re:Price

[evanbd]

If you're Disney, or anyone else with data valuable enough to possibly justify recreating an ancient media format reader, then the correct archive solution isn't a single format. It's a storage facility that has people maintaining the archive and updating formats and verifying that the data is still readable. Rather like a library, complete with librarians.

If you're comparing reconstructing a reader, then reading an ancient 250MB disk is easy -- there is tech now that can read off damaged and warped platters through techniques not dissimilar to electron microscopy, and I guarantee it could handle a far-less-dense 250MB drive without issue. Figuring out the low-level formatting would be no harder than for the holo media, and probably rather easier.

Is it really 50 years?

[slashqwerty]

Their main selling point is longevity. You can store the data on a disk and read it back 50 years from now. Will this company even exist 50 years from now? Will anyone have the equipment to read one of these disks in 50 years? Have they published the specs so you can construct your own equipment, should it become necessary? I don't see this working out. Archiving needs to be done with well-known open standards. InPhase doesn't seem to be off to a very good start in that respect.

Re:Finally!

[tomhudson]

Heck, wait 3 years and you'll be able to buy 500 gig usb keys for $100. You can buy an 8 gig kensington USB drive for $30 right now ... they were $120 a year ago. If capacity continues to quadruple every year for the same price point, you're looking at 32 gig for $30 next year, or +/-$100 for 100 gig, 400 gig in 2 years, and a terabyte in 3-1/2. Of course, by then, you'll be able to buy 2TB hard drives for $50 ...

Re:Finally!

[morgan_greywolf]

Why not just use those for backup.

Because it violates a fundamental IT principle: always keep your backup media separate from your reader. With a 500GB HDD, your reader and your media are the same thing.

Keeping media and reader separate helps to protect against total catastrophe.