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InPhase Technologies Promises Holographic Drive in May
Posted by
timothy
on Sat Apr 19, 2008 09:41 PM
from the want-to-believe dept.
from the want-to-believe dept.
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!"
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Submission: Holographic data storage - finally! by Anonymous Coward
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Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Finally! (Score:5, Insightful)
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 ...
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Supprisisngly it doesnt make much difference to your numbers over a relatively short period like 3 1/2 years:
today $100 for about 26 Gig (using your starting point of $30 for 8 GB)
1 year from now - 68 Gig
2 years from now - 175 Gig
3 year - 450 Gig
4 years - 1.2 Tera
I have also studied hard drives in the same way
Re:Finally! (Score:4, Insightful)
Keeping media and reader separate helps to protect against total catastrophe.
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Re:Finally! (Score:5, Informative)
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In college, we christened my friend's Jaz as the "WORN drive" - Write Once, Read Never.
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Re:Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
So it'll eventually collapse into a singularity and suck up Earth? Wonderful.
-:sigma.SB
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Re:Finally! (Score:4, Funny)
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Its aimed at people like warner brothers who currently spend gobs of money on climate controlled vaults preserving literally tons of 35mm film, and server farms storing digital raws of movies like LOTR.
This is actually a cheaper alternative for them because they will spend much much more on the hundreds of thousands if not millions of disks then they will on the reader.
And it gives them a storage medium thats effectively ageless, instead of current HDD's that demagnetize over
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I'll believe it (Score:4, Funny)
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:)
Re:I'll believe it (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
utterly pointless (Score:4, Insightful)
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Flashbacks.. (Score:3, Insightful)
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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/ea
I tried to pick up a demo unit last week (Score:5, Funny)
Price (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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lots of standard HD's is a fair better option and a lot safer then some non standard tech that only one company makes.
Re:Price (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re:Price (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're Disney, or anyone else with data valuable enough to possibly justify recreating an ancient media format reader, then the correct archive solution isn't a single format. It's a storage facility that has people maintaining the archive and updating formats and verifying that the data is still readable. Rather like a library, complete with librarians.
If you're comparing reconstructing a reader, then reading an ancient 250MB disk is easy -- there is tech now that can read off damaged and warped platters through techniques not dissimilar to electron microscopy, and I guarantee it could handle a far-less-dense 250MB drive without issue. Figuring out the low-level formatting would be no harder than for the holo media, and probably rather easier.
Parent
Re:Price (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Price (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Price (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Price (Score:4, Insightful)
Huh? The theoretical possibilities aren't important -- what matters is what this drive can do, at least when you start talking about price. Physical holograms can no more hold infinite data than analog film has infinite resolution -- there are limitations somewhere, be they high or low. If you push close to those limitations, it won't be scratch resistant -- how resistant it is to damage depends on how much error correction you have, be it in the form of not using the full available resolution or by using electronic ECC techniques. (Care to guess which one is more efficient? Care to guess which one CDs and DVDs use?)
As for longevity -- there's no particular reason the plastics in the holographic storage will have any longer life than CDs or DVDs. If they say it'll last 50 years, then I'm inclined to believe they used decent plastics. But, you can get CD / DVD media that's rated for 300 years. It doesn't matter what damage sources holograms are "theoretically" susceptible to, what matters is what *this product* is susceptible to. Perhaps it doesn't delaminate, but what about heat / humidity / CD eating bacteria [bbc.co.uk]?
For archival media, my biggest concern would be whether I can find a reader in 50 years. I think the odds of that are a lot better for CD / DVD than for this -- though if I really care, it definitely needs some sort of maintenance program to make sure the data is intact and readable.
Parent
Re:Price (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This is not quite correct. Sure, if you zap them with a large enough static charge it will burn out the chips - but this is more likely to apply to the interface chips rather than the flash that carries data. Flash is also susceptible to radiation. Otherwise it is pretty robust.
Holographic storage however, likely relies on some sort of photo-sensitive dye or phase change materi
This will be quite amazing if... (Score:2, Interesting)
Is it really 50 years? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Oh the RIAA and MPAA are not going to like THAT. Cue the yearly fee to access your movies/music.
Compared to tape, it fails. (Score:2)
A drive is $5000, and an 800 GB tape is $120. Magnetic tape has a very long, provable, verified and *good* track record at being able to retain data. I've read 30 year old 9-track reels, and have cassettes from the 70's that'll still play.
Their drive is 3x the price, and their media is 50% more expensive for half the space. Their only benefit is the holographic media is random access. Bah. If it's for archiving, who cares about random access?
This gadget smells like fail. Their *only* niche is pro
In other news... (Score:2, Funny)
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Problem is, they forgot to mention WHICH year. As usual.
I pre-ordered my copy of Duke anyway.
Target Market? (Score:2, Interesting)
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 t
Lest it slip by (Score:5, Interesting)
- 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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Reminds me of the Pinnacle Apex drive... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Oh, and their product page says it is WORM (Score:4, Informative)
Just thought I'd mention it.
http://www.inphase-technologies.com/products/default.asp?tnn=3 [inphase-technologies.com]
And the article gets it dead wrong (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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In an unlimited universe, everything can be unlimited?