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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!"
I've dreamed often of the day I could buy a completely non-standard technology that rids me of large quantities of the pesky money I have lying around while at the same time solves the removable storage problems of 3 years ago. Too bad this unit only costs $18,000 and stores just under 1/3 of my hard disk space!
I'm a big tall mofo.
When I can buy it.
But I won't actually buy it until after I hear at least 1 horror story about photonic lifeforms eating somebody's data or something equally bad:)
$18,000 could buy me enough hd's so that i could rotate 2 backup disks once a year for the next 90 years.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
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.
Unfortunately, my hand passed right through it.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
FTA:
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
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.
The data retention time is, in fact, 50 years. If the data turns out to be usable through the years than this will turn out to be invaluable. The film industry currently has a crisis on their hands where more and more "garbage" video of sets when no filming is going on and alternate scenes, interviews and all the things we see on the "extra features" sections on those fancy new blu-ray and DVD discs. They need some way to safely and easily store that media for many, MANY years before the common media supports it, and it the discs last 50+ years? This will be a boon. Especially if damaged discs turn out to be as easily recovered as is theoretically possible. The only x-factor will be whether the discs from the first generation of reader/writers is compatible with future generations. If they are? This is a winner.
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.
InPhase Technologies announces it will also be releasing Duke Nukem Forever by the end of the year.
From TFA:
Which gets us to InPhase's target market: archiving. That's why they were showing at NAB.
I don't get it. No matter how valuable your content, why would you pay $18,000 for a burner and $180 for for a 300GB disc? Just for the price of the media, you can mirror your data across three different brand-new hard disks. Surely the odds of 3 hard disks failing at the same time are lower than that of an untested, brand-new technology with no redundancy?
Maybe I'm too thick, but why would anyone buy this at this price? (Other than the coolness/my dick is bigger than yours factor, of course.)
- 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.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I wonder if the porn we "archive" on it will show up in 3d if we open it up and view the hologram... see it take a life of its own by giving it so much data in a small area :)
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
I remember hearing about the 4.6GB of storage back in the mid-90s, and it was quite underwhelming when it came out. MO never really took off, long-term. This, I think, may be different.
If the technology in this stuff pans out and can be developed economically and scale well over time (MO didn't), I think it has some real opportunities to take off in certain sectors. It's not for everyone, but neither are rackmounted RAIDs, iSCSI and tape loaders.
For naysayers: do any of you think that this company WANTS to release a boat anchor device like it seems to be going by their pictures? If what the company says is true, and this is not vaporware, the physical size of the drive may be a worthwhile trade-off in terms of capacity and reliability. As technology is developed, processes shrink, things get cheaper, and storage capacity gets bigger. I remember old MO drives being big, and as some pointed, out, a single CD-R costing $40.
I'm not going to buy this thing, but I'll certainly be watching its development in the marketplace. It's interesting to watch, just like I did the Apex back in the day.
Which means there is no going back once the disk is written.
Just thought I'd mention it.
http://www.inphase-technologies.com/products/default.asp?tnn=3
It's really embarassingly bad. It makes 2 claims:
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.
This is complete nonsense. A fragment provides a *reduced quality* duplicate of the data image. This is not so bad for photographs, but for digital data it's critical. Bit basic information theory says you can't recover the full image without actually storing the full image.
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.
Again, complete horse hockey pucks. Storage of additional images on a physical medium is certainly possible, but the ability to control the aforesaid 'angle' and recover meaningful data is not infinite. It's limited by the theoretical factors like optical diffraction and resolution, and by the spatial resolution of normal matter made up of real molecules.
he was probably thinking 'still photographs'
if you go with stills, then you can get quite a lot of porn in 2 TB, so 2,097,152 still pictures if the stills are 1 megabyte a piece. if you look at each still for 5 seconds, you get 121 days of porn. compared to 41 days of watching dvd porn movies.
well obviously jpegs can be smaller, so you could have as low as 30 kb per still, or 34 times as many images, or 4,130 days of low res jpeg porn. a far cry from 23,725 days for a 65 year lifespan, even if you sleep/eat/shower half of the time.
so really it takes at least 6TB to fill 'one lifetime' of porn, if low res jpegs are used, or 204 TB for 4-8 megapixel jpegs, or 616 TB for standard DVD resolution for 1 lifetime of porn, or 3080 TB for a lifetime of high definition blu-ray porn. you can drop that to 1540 TB if you use mpeg-4 compressed HD, rather than 'standard' mpeg-2 compression.
I guess instead of 'libraries of congress' we should start measuring in 'lifetimes of porn' since i went to all the trouble of doing the math.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html