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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.
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.
- 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
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
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.