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

Finally!

[bigtallmofo]

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!

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.

Re:Finally!

[shmlco]

You've obviously never had a backup tape or an old Zip or Jaz drive fail to read because of differences in track calibrations or read heads.

Re:Finally!

[Solra Bizna]

It will increase in size, theoretically to infinite density.

So it'll eventually collapse into a singularity and suck up Earth? Wonderful.

-:sigma.SB

I tried to pick up a demo unit last week

[davidwr]

Unfortunately, my hand passed right through it.

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

[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

[EdIII]

Who is to say that they will not license the technology? If they go out of business, somebody stepped into to buy the assets. Technology patented? Patents disappear in 20 years (or they should).

How is the reader susceptible to magnetic fields again? We are talking about just the reader right? If you are referring to EMP blasts from something like a nuclear device, then the fact your holo reader is not working is the least of your problems. Not trying to be sarcastic (at least not totally), but how does EM affect any kind of CD/DVD/HOLO readers?

You are also forgetting the target market here. Somebody like Disney. Didn't we just hear that a FUCKING JANITOR found one of Disney's long lost films in Japan? When you have incredibly valuable content that you have created, and archiving process like this is well worth it. If they don't have working readers in 40 years, I would say they could afford to have a firm make one for them from the plans available on the Internet in 2058.

The technology itself is promising, and "lots of standard HD's" are not a better option, or safer. If you were to evaluate the total costs, standard HD's would cost your more in the long run to achieve the same level of reliability as this holographic technology.

You also need to remember, this is not like a hard drive. It does not have any proprietary IC components, no internal firmwares, no connectors, moving parts, etc. It is a solid piece of holographic material. If you take it out of the case and set it on a desk, you can SEE the data with your own eyes. To get the data back off into a computer system, simply requires some lasers and mathematical algorithms, which I would guess is going to be trivial in a few decades. A hard drive is NOT the same. If you took a 250 MEG HD from over 15 years ago and had to remove the platters, just how easy would it be to find parts that could read those platters again? Remember, the density has changed from 15 years ago. The internal parts and technology in hard drives is substantially different now. At least with Holographic media, you don't even have to TOUCH it. Just set it on top of some lasers and read it with whatever technology you have.

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.

Re:Price

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Um, yea, for a 2D analog photograph. For binary data this is completely irrelevant and meaningless. There ain't no such thing as a low-quality, low resolution bit.

2. Data density is theoretically unlimited. I guess. Unless you start talking about the limits of the information density of your physical medium, or the resolution and accuracy of your read/write process. Whatever you might think, a single atom can only store so many bits.

Another factor: photographic media has the longest proven lifespan - over a century - of any modern media. Sure, if by "proven" you mean look at all those photos I print that are already fading. Oh, you mean those old chemical and film photos? I didn't realize this holographic disk whatever uses film and photo processing. Let's not go back to that again, please, no.

Since there's no physical contact you can read the media millions of times with no degradation. This certainly beats a normal hard disks, where the read head uses a little mini back hoe to scoop up parts of the disk and feed them to the sensor, then has to glue them back in place. And CDs lets not forget. Teh lazers! They rulz?

Holographic media is not affected by EM fields.

Yup, just like flash storage, CDs, printouts, and punchcards. Or maybe you just forgot part? Let me help. Holo disks are also impervious to physical damage, light, lasers, fire, vibration, scratches, dust, EM, radiation.

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?

With this new holo stuff, you can just take your data (or what you think is your data (and which might be corrupt already) or not yours, or incomplete, or broken already) and throw it at this holo disk thing. And then forget about it! By the magic of holo storage, whatever you had meant to put on the disk will eventually be there. Along with the stuff you actually put there. And the fixed up and corrected versions of both of those. And the one where your spelling typos have been fixed up, and your girlfriend's photo looks like (oh, wait, no gf? nevermind then.).

Apparently a holographic medium can be written with "hundreds of holograms being stored in the same physical area".

OMG! A single box! On your desk! with hundreds (hundreds!!) of pieces of data on it! At the! Same! Time!

But apparently, it sure sounds to me like I might hazard a guess that if you look up, your boss might have left the office, so you can stop shilling now.

Re:Price

[wik]

If you want to learn more about this, I suggest Dr. Wilson's talk on InPhase's technology at CMU in November. It's a very accessible and interesting talk for someone who is not familiar with the field.

Re:I'll believe it

[morgan_greywolf]

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:)

You've been watching wayyyyy to much Star Trek. Put the remote down and back away slowly...very slowly...

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