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!

[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

[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.