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

Re:Price

[samkass]

A scratch loses you data, period. Whether it's holographic or not, you're either trading capacity for recoverability or you're vulnerable to a scratch. There's no magic here. Even with Blu-Ray you could store the data using forward error correction in such a way that complete obliteration of 1/4 of the disc still yields 100% of your data-- you'll just reduce the storage capacity somewhat.

Presumably, however, holographic storage has so much dang storage available that it's not a problem to give some of it up to have enough redundancy to survive typical wear and tear. (And all optical media gets wear and tear just from being spun up and down in non-cleanroom environments.)

And if you're worried about the longevity of CDs and DVDs, scratches aren't really what you're worried about anyway. Most scratches are on the clear plastic and can be repaired. However, some discs were manufactured with chemicals that oxidizes the layers, some with defects in the seal, etc. So your typical "stamped" disc will last decades if free of defect, but less than a decade if it has one-- and there's almost no way of knowing ahead of time. I don't know what substrate the holographic image is being stored on, but we'll have to see if it's completely free of degradation over decades. I certainly wouldn't want to immediately dump important data into this format and throw away the originals yet.

So for now it just remains an expensive unproven alternative... we'll have to see where it goes, though.

Re:Price

[davolfman]

Not exactly. As I understand it holographic media works fundamentally different from an optical disk and no bit is dependent on a single location on the disk. Instead of a scratch taking out several bits from different tracks that the CRC codes make up for a scratch makes a large number of bits loose definition uncritically. In this fashion a holographic disk would take quite a few scratches with no data lost until it started reaching a threshold where all of the bits started to read unreliably all at once. That said I'm coming from Wikipedia so who knows how biased and inaccurate that information is for this particular technology.

Lest it slip by

[DynaSoar]

- We were also told CD and DVD storage was long lived. While 30 years can be expected of a few of the highest grade disks http://club.cdfreaks.com/f33/taiyo-yuden-faq-178622/ 3 years is what most of them manage. Theoretical limits typically don't make it past manufacturers.

- It may indeed last 50 years, but will the equipment it's to be connected to? I've got the first 100MB drive to hit the market. It has lots of stuff on it I want to retrieve. It's a good thing I've kept the 18 year old Apple IIgs it's inside of operating.

Better implemented on solid state holographic storage, but still possible on disk, is the reverse processing of image to beams. (There's a SciAm article from 1995 or so on holographic storage, particularly solid state, that covers this).

Store lots of images on the disk. Illuminate it with a hologram of a target image. Out of each image comes copies of the original reference beams, at a strength proportional to the similarity of the stored image to the target image. Nearly instantaneous, simultaneous retrieval with correlation score built into the signal strength. Lost is the different angles that'd be had in a solid state device, so scanning the disk for reading all the beams and finding those of interest might take a bit longer. The entire US government fingerprint files could fit on one disk and the whole thing searched in seconds, as is often seen on TV. Using it for movie storage makes marketing sense, especially with the initial price tag of $18,000 and disks being $180. But leaving it at that would be a damn shame.

Wow! This is the coolest thing since the White LED

[Fantastic Lad]

Holographic technology turned into a functioning read/write data system? --Just the idea is SO totally cool! The linear storage we've seen to date has been like the Formula One race track of development, and people have come up with some very clever techniques to squeeze every scrap of use out of it, but really, we've been locked in two dimensions for all this time. Adding a third dimension is watershed stuff. Talk about blasting Moore's Law out of orbit!

Think about those early 10 megabyte hard drives. Take that form factor and blow it up over the same length of time and you get some crazy-huge numbers. A third dimension to play with? That's like going from DC to AC in terms of complexity and possibility. Interestingly enough, the establishment resisted AC as well. I half suspect that the math simply demanded more brain power than the old school engineers were willing or able to invest.

I remember the day when a roommate took the indoor cat out to the roof. The cat saw the sky for the first time and wet itself, flattened right to the ground and was basically reduced to a form of catatonia. After living in a one-floor apartment, (two-dimensional), being presented with a whole lot of up and down created a great deal of irritation.

-FL