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Data Storage Media

300 gigabytes in the size of a DVD? 276

Posted by Hemos from the what-does-the-future-look-like dept.
Rollie Hawk writes "Although storage space is no longer the premium it once was, physical backups and external media have been slow to catch up. While recordable DVDs may be fine for backing up a single workstation, large servers are still forced to rely on swappable drives and tape backups. But holographic disc technology could be changing all of that in the very near future. Holographic Versatile Discs (HVDs) have been in the works for some time now by various companies, including InPhase Technologies (formerly part of Lucent) and Japan's Optware (which claimed to have made the first recording of a movie on a holographic disc last year). InPhase's HVDs, scheduled for release in 2006, are said to hold 300GB of data, 60 times that of a conventional DVD with only a slight increase in size. That translates to more than a day's worth of HD-quality video. Not to mention the drives themselves can read and write at ten times the speed a normal DVD drive. One of InPhase's partners in HVD research, Maxell, is working towards even more storage on a 1.6TB disc."
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300 gigabytes in the size of a DVD? More

300 gigabytes in the size of a DVD?

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  • ~Chicken and egg? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dada21 ( 163177 ) * <adam.dada@gmail.com> on Monday November 28, 2005 @10:36AM (#14129221) Homepage Journal
    Turner Network Television recently aired [tgdaily.com] a commercial off of the InPhase Tapestry drive. Maxell built that drive for InPhase.

    Data backup has become very expensive for some of my customers. The amount of data a company of even minimal size (50 employees) goes through in a day blows my mind. We've been investing every option but none are cost effective (except when a hard drive goes).

    My dilemma is that as backup storage (such as the HVD) gets bigger, it seems that hard drives quickly outpace the new form of backup storage. 1.6TB discs sound great, yet I'm weary of having that much data on an easy to break/burn/steal disc. 300GB is more feasible as I can see making a few copies of the backup "just in case."

    Nonetheless, the write speeds listed don't seem all that great, and what interfaces will let us copy data at those speeds? Moving 1.6TG of data off of a server without slowing down user access (24 hours per day with offshore employees) sounds like it will still take hours and hours to back up (if not longer). A recovery stage would take even longer.

    For now, I'm happiest with redundancy backups. I don't like mirroring or RAIDx/y or clusters (too many nightmares over the 15 years I've worked with all of it), but having a server dupe itself daily has given us the best turnover and safety margins we've seen, as well as being very cost effective compared to use-once media or (shudder) tapes.

    • Re:~Chicken and egg? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ERJ ( 600451 )
      RAID and clusters are all good and well until you have a fire, or flood, or the roof collapses. That is what off site backup storage is nice for.
    • it will still take hours and hours to back up (if not longer)

      Let me introduce you to Mr. Tape Drive. This reel of magnetic tape is quite possibly the largest method of data backup used, and last I checked, it takes hours and hours (if not longer) to do full data backup of disks. This is why most companies implement RAID 1 or 5 solutions and use tape backup as a weekly or monthly system.

      Actually if I remember the procedure correctly for one of my previous places of employ, there were monthly full back
    • 1.6TB discs sound great, yet I'm weary of having that much data on an easy to break/burn/steal disc. 300GB is more feasible as I can see making a few copies of the backup "just in case."

      what prevents you from doing the same with 1.6tb disks ? create four copies, keep them in separate cities, maybe even countries - should be pretty safe for most uses. of course, becomes easier to steal one, too :)

      Nonetheless, the write speeds listed don't seem all that great, and what interfaces will let us copy data at thos

    • Post Office Bandwidth (Score:5, Interesting)

      by goombah99 ( 560566 ) on Monday November 28, 2005 @11:42AM (#14129801)
      Once again, the post-office will become the king of high latency high bandwidth. Hollywood should quake in their boots over this, not on-line file sharing.

        If these things are inexpensive enough ond can imagine peer-to-peer postal networks popping up. Say you record half of something on on DVD, and you send it to someone. They send you back half of something, and then you send the other half and so-on. tit for tat.

      The problem with the above concept is that it requires the sender and the receiver to actually haveing something each other actually wanted to exchange. But if the disks get big enough you could easily put many things on them increasing the probability that one or more things on their will be something someone else wants to share. It costs you no extra postage to send 1 thing as 100 things now.

      So this might blow that wide open. And sharing 100 to 1000 movies per 32 cent stamp, or sharing every single top 40 song for the last 100 years on a single Disk and it wont take long before everyone has every song and movie.

      • Re:Post Office Bandwidth (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Samus ( 1382 )
        Something tells me there are pretty bad punishments for using the U.S. Post Office to commit a crime. Uncle Sam tends to frown on using him to commit a crime unless of course you are a member of congress or the president. Then it's only a problem if the people find out.
      • "So this might blow that wide open. And sharing 100 to 1000 movies per 32 cent stamp,"

        Yeah... the fact that you don't even know the price of a stamp for a first class letter (currently $0.37, going to $0.39 next month) demonstrates just how prevalent this thinking is: little to none.

        The problem with the USPS is that it requires people to get out of their chairs and walk out to their mailboxes, thereby exposing themselves to actual sunlight. People are inherently lazy.
    • "but having a server dupe itself daily has given us the best turnover and safety margins we've seen, as well as being very cost effective compared to use-once media or (shudder) tapes."
      After the server dupes it's self then you make backups from the duped server. You make more than one copy of the back up and then you locate them in different places. Your bank has a thing called a vault and you can get a safety deposit box their for not much money. Add a safe in house and maybe FedEx to a remote location as

    • Re:~Chicken and egg? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Apparition-X ( 617975 ) on Monday November 28, 2005 @02:19PM (#14131327)
      Well, full disclosure first: this is what I do all day, every day. Backup and recovery, that is.

      So a few comments, because some of your thoughts worry me a bit:

      Backup is expensive. Backup is insurance. Ideally you never need to recover, which means that all that money spent on backup is "wasted". That is life. It is an operational cost of doing business, that many businesses pay because they recognize that the risk of not having one outweighs the expense of doing it. But there it is. And I do recognize that smaller businesses (less than 1000 employees) usually have a harder time understanding the costs and justifying them. So how do you define "cost effective" in backup? There is no conceivable way that it can be run as a profit center and make money. Backups cost the business money, just like their insurance policy. How much is your data worth? That is the core question. How much is it worth? How much will you lose if you don't have access to it for some period of time?

      Point number two is that the massively dominant mechanism for backup today is tape. I would venture to guess that 99.9% of business with more than 1000 employees backup to tape. And it is easy to break, burn, and steal. Again, that is life. We implement reasonable measures to ensure that it doesn't happen, but best practices say to make two copies of any tape: one for onsite, one for off. And yes, if you are concerned about data security (credit card transaction processors, banks, etc.) encrypt the tape. Yes it is expensive, and yet it is worth it. It is not "cost effective" except when you think that you may be out of business if your courier blows it, looses the tape, and the world finds out; just ask CardSystems Solutions. That is the context in which cost effective needs to be understood.

      Further, what interfaces let you copy data at those speeds? Well there are more options than I can outline in this post: multiple SAN interfaces? Multiple LAN segments? RAID array snapshots? Host based mirroring? etc. Lots of options, all with good and bad things about them. But again, RAID arrays are used by 99.9% of businesses with more than 1000 employees. Server duplication is *not* backup. It may suffice for disaster recovery, but it has two enormous problems: it does not preserve data as it used to be at a given point in time (say, at financial quarter end), and it does propogate errors. Corrupted tablespace? You just replicated corruption. User just deleted files? While they just got deleted remotely too. Redundancy accomplishes several things, but none of them are backup. No auditor would be satisfied with that, and if they company is traded publicly, the CIO would likely be fired if that strategy was revealed to the public.

  • *yawn* (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Tyler Eaves ( 344284 ) on Monday November 28, 2005 @10:36AM (#14129224)
    This stuff has been a year or two away as long as I can remember. Someone wake me up when product actually ships...

    • Re:*yawn* (Score:5, Informative)

      by JabberWokky ( 19442 ) <slashdot.com@timewarp.org> on Monday November 28, 2005 @11:24AM (#14129644) Homepage Journal
      It's already started shipping demo units to select big media clients. The same way they have loaner equipment for many different types of new tech (cutting lasers, backup systems, network appliances) for large corporations. It's a perk for clients, a PR tease, and a way to get quotes from "CTO of BigCorp" to be used in their sales literature.

      That's usually a pretty good (but not absolute) indicator that it's about to ship. It's also often an indicator that it's priced for mid to large sized corporations, not for small companies or individuals.

      --
      Evan

    • And wasn't 2005 the year of IBM's nonvolatile MRAM memory? Wazzap with that?
    • I'll sleep just a bit longer while all the bugs get worked out on the first wave adopters. The first wave adopters, you know, the people who spend three times as much and get a lower quality product... the ones who pay for the research and development so that the second wave products are relatively glitch free.

      Wake me up when those come out.

  • Million Bit Parallel Data Access (Score:5, Insightful)

    by peterdaly ( 123554 ) * <petedaly@ix.ne[ ]m.com ['tco' in gap]> on Monday November 28, 2005 @10:37AM (#14129232)
    It's not just that it's a fast drive. It goes well beyond the current method of spinning the disc faster and(or) putting the data closer together to increase performance.

    "Unlike other technologies, that record one data bit at a time, holography allows a million bits of data to be written and read in parallel with a single flash of light," says Liz Murphy, of InPhase Technologies. "This enables transfer rates significantly higher than current optical storage devices."

    That's pretty wild for a single "head" drive. I wonder if this could translate into devices similar to hard drives using similar methods. Hard disks are what I feel is holding back system performance. It's almost always the biggest bottleneck in a system, and has been more or less at a platoe for years, mainly because magnetic media can only do so much in a serial manor.

    -Pete
    • HDD will always be a bottleneck because they require actual physical movement. Even on the high end it is still thousands of times slower than you can move electrons through a bus. The only hardware solution to the problem is to compensate with allot of caching, or start using solid state storage. This is partly why Google stores data on huge banks of RAM.
      • And what's to stop us from switching to solid-state storage?

        You can already get flash drives as big as what, 8 gig? My laptop has only 40gig HDD, and that's plenty for me. I'd go down to 20 or 30 in a flash (ha ha) if it meant switching to steady-state.

        There will always be *something* that's a bottleneck, but concentrating on the bottlenecks can get you the biggest bang:buck performance increase.

        -stormin
    • magnetic media can only do so much in a serial manor

      You know, I have problems myself in serial manors. In fact, I find that being forced to go through the kitchen and bathroom to get the guest bedroom can be embarrassing for all involved.
    • "That's pretty wild for a single "head" drive. I wonder if this could translate into devices similar to hard drives using similar methods."

      Probably not.

      From what I've read, holographic storage consists of storing lots of 2D images, essentially 2D bar codes like on a FedEx package, that are read and written as a unit, all at once. The "head" in a holographic drive is more like a camera than a hard disk head. That's how they get such parallelism.

      Hard drive heads are fundamentally serial. There have been attem

  • seems about right (Score:5, Funny)

    by ajdowntown ( 91738 ) on Monday November 28, 2005 @10:39AM (#14129241) Homepage
    Hmm, maybe now they can put the entire Lord of the Rings Triliogy on one disc. now, if you want to put in the extra features, that is a different story...

  • Error correction and speed (Score:3, Informative)

    by karvind ( 833059 ) <karvind@@@gmail...com> on Monday November 28, 2005 @10:41AM (#14129263) Journal
    From the Wikipedia link:

    "The article notes that the transfer rate is at an average of 1 gigabit/second. That is equal to 0.125 gigabytes/second, or 128 megabytes/second, which is a large leap over earlier storage mediums, whose transfer rates are generally measured in Kilobytes/second. In comparison, a 56x CD-ROM drive transfers at up to 8.4 Megabytes/second, and 16x-speed DVDs transfer at 22 Megabytes/second."

    That is impressive indeed. But I have a question regarding the random errors etc due to statistical variation. How much resources do you have to devote for error correction (eg parity bit etc) ? And wouldn't it be very power consuming to do error correction at such a high data transfer rate ?

    • ASICs (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Andy Dodd ( 701 ) <atd7&cornell,edu> on Monday November 28, 2005 @10:48AM (#14129329) Homepage
      Plenty of people already do error correction at line speed on gigabit communications links with low power costs. To someone developing coding schemes, storage devices can just be modeled as another communications channel.
    • You think actual drives do error correction at the rate you cite? Whenever an error occurs, the rate drops by a factor of ~100, the time to retry and blah blah. The transfer rate is only good if there is no error, like on any other device.
      • Yes, they do. You have to distinguish between the multiple layers of error correcting and detecting codes applied to the media. Modern designs often intentionally accept a relatively high BER at the physical level to gain increased density. These errors get corrected in a hardware decoder at line rates.
    • In comparison, a 56x CD-ROM drive transfers at up to 8.4 Megabytes/second, and 16x-speed DVDs transfer at 22 Megabytes/second.

      Hmm. I hadn't ever thought about DVD's reading that much faster than CD's. It's off topic, but for certain games that required data off the CD (and that don't use copy protection): couldn't you get a pretty good performance increase by taking the files from the CD and just burning them onto a DVD? Lots of wasted space but DVD-R's have gotten dirt cheap these days anyways.

      Of course
  • You can't fit a 13cm disc drive into a standard enclosure! Who do they think they're going to sell these to!

  • i bet... (Score:2, Funny)

    by thedude13 ( 457454 )
    the Phantom [phantom.net] will contain one of these when it comes out...

  • I need one! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Dark_MadMax666 ( 907288 )
    At my job we use LTO drives( $ 10k per 24 tape drive) + tapes (400 gb compressed on one tape,$50 per tape ) which is ridiculously expensive but works ok . But for home it is not acceptable solution .Right Now I am in desperate need for a backup solution for my home machine - I have 750 Gb and plan go over 1 tb in next quarter. And I am basicaly either have to go with RAID 5 ( ~$1k for 1 TB ) which I dont like since I want incrementally buy more storage - not pay upfront big bucks only to find out t

    • Re:I need one! (Score:3, Interesting)

      by slaker ( 53818 )
      I have around 11TB of disk drives at home. You will too, within the timeframe of something like this becoming available. At that point, 300GB/disc will be just as worthless a 8.5GB DVD would be to you right now.

      Besides, there's no indication that these discs will be available in a writeable format.

      Anyway, a single-drive LTO and, say, four tapes would only set you back a couple grand. If your home data is important, it's not THAT bad.

      Personally, I subdivide and mirror my data on a couple machines. That's goo

      • I have around 11TB of disk drives at home. You will too...

        When I go through my house, and look at all the different media, I'm not sure that I've even got 11 TB of data (assuming reasonable compression). Not that some people don't, but a half-century of accumulating stuff hasn't added up to that much. Probably says something about the type of media that we favor here. I think about this regularly, and estimate that a 1.2 TB hard disk -- something the size of a paperback book in another couple years

      • I have around 11TB of disk drives at home. You will too, within the timeframe of something like this becoming available. At that point, 300GB/disc will be just as worthless a 8.5GB DVD would be to you right now.

        Well maybe... but Jan 2003, WD shipped 83GB/platter HDDs. Today, the highest-shipping disks I know of (Seagate and Samsung) ship with 133GB/platter. That is 60% in almost three years. Granted, it is nice but it is nothing like the recent development in optical media. When they shipped the 250GB drive
    • If you have over 750GB of "whatever" at home that's not even backed up, you should ask yourself if you actually need everything that's there. What is it all? If it was really that important, you would have backed it up on something before now.
    • Why are you talking about backup tapes at work vs RAID at home? RAID is *not* a backup. RAID doesn't save you when you delete a file you shouldn't have. RAID doesn't save you when the there is a lightening strike or your power supply fails and fries your running hard drives.

      If all you are using is RAID, your home machine is not backed up. Get some backup media, even if it's cheap hard drives you can backup to, then sit on a shelf somewhere.

    • I looked over what's on my hard drives and realized that all the data that I need (original stuff I couldn't replace) fits on a 4.5GB DVD, or five if I really relax my standard of what I mean by "need" and "couldn't replace". I bought blank DVDs at US18c/each on sale at Best Buy. I'm really not itching for a better home backup solution. Am I really that different from the typical home user?

      I'm not saying that this technology would find no customers. People that work with images or video need to save raw b

  • 60 times? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by julesh ( 229690 ) on Monday November 28, 2005 @10:45AM (#14129295)
    A "conventional DVD" has two layers, and holds roughly 9Gb of data. 300 / 9 = 33 1/3, not 60. Even recordable DVDs are well and truly available in 9Gb formats by now, and have been for some time. OK, the media is more expensive than single layer discs, but the technology is in people's PCs now. And how much are these discs going to cost for the first few years of their existence?

  • Does size matter? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Red Flayer ( 890720 ) on Monday November 28, 2005 @10:47AM (#14129323) Journal
    Is 300 GB necessary? From a content producer standpoint, I don't want to be able to fit that much content on a single disc... then I can't charge as much for the special 4-disc pre-Christmas release edition.

    From a consumer standpoint, I don't need this either, unless I want to archive all my files, in which case it's easier (and cheaper) to have a second hard drive.

    I understand there is demand for high-volume storage solutions, but I can't see a mass market for them...

    What I do see being very, very useful is the speed upgrade for r/w -- especially for gaming, but I'm sure this applies to other areas as well.

    IMO, though, I don't see a big enough demand for this to become profitable for quite a long time -- especially if Bluray or HD-DVD is 'good enough' for the average user.
    • If you build it- they will come.
    • Forget the content producer standpoint. People (and companies) have their own data to store. If it were up to content producers there wouldn't be any writable CDs or DVDs in the first place. Content producers never were the driving force behind mass storage, we'd be foolish to let them take it over now with all the restrictions they will implement. Besides, as you say, they only need so much storage, beyond that they won't drive the market.

      I don't agree there's no mass market for high volume storage s

    • Is 300 GB necessary?

      Who's ever going to need more than 640K of RAM? How about that world market for maybe five computers? In fact, there is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home. attributable to Bill Gates (who denies the quote), Thomas Watson, and Ken Olson, respectively

      Moore's Law states that computing power and storage density at a given price point doubles every 18 months, which has roughly held to be true. This technology is filling in a required data point on the curve. The quotes ab

    • I want to archive all my files, in which case it's easier (and cheaper) to have a second hard drive.

      That works fine until you erase the wrong directory and the same directory in the second drive gets automatically erased at the same time. Or your computer catches fire. Or a virus. There are many ways a redundant disk can be fried.

      "Backup" means having copies outside of your computer. Ideally you should store indefinitely copies for each year, so you can go back to the status you had in the past, if needed.

    • Is 300 GB necessary? From a content producer standpoint, I don't want to be able to fit that much content on a single disc... then I can't charge as much for the special 4-disc pre-Christmas release edition.


      As if geeks everywhere won't be flocking to the nearest Best Buy to get their One-disc Star Wars Collectors Set.
      • I would run to the store to buy a disc that has ALL of the Simpsons episodes in HD (assuming the series ends at some point and thus "all" is not a moving targt)...or maybe seasons 1-10 then 11-20 (later...and so on) on single disks. Same would be true for others and the Sopranos or some other hit show or content they really like.
    • I could make TWO complete backups of my Hard drive on a single CD-r.

      Today, i would need 50 Dual layer DVDs....

      I, for my part, would welcome 300GB discs, or even 3TB discs.

      Also, there is no need to push them everywhere. Or do you see all those cds dying out because of dvds (who could also store the audio)?
    • Master reels of old films are being scanned in, today, at 4K (4000+) lines of resolution for archival purposes. The film media are deteriorating; it's a pity we couldn't do it before thousands of films faded away in IP vaults. Lucas recorded Star Wars 1-3 in 4K digital; movies in the future will be in 4K format.

      Eventually, if a capacious enough media exists, those 4K scans will be released to the consumer market, along with 4K video systems.

  • It Won't see light of day: Thank you Hollywood (Score:5, Interesting)

    by denis-The-menace ( 471988 ) on Monday November 28, 2005 @10:50AM (#14129348)
    Once the MPAA, RIAA and every other cultural cartel gets a hold of this, it will die like the DAT tape.

    They should just release it as a means of backing up data and then figure out the copy protection.
    -We get a new storage medium.
    -They squable for 5 years.
    -Then *MAYBE* they come out with a larger capacity disks with DRM for TVs/movies

    • Re:It Won't see light of day: Thank you Hollywood (Score:4, Insightful)

      by wpiman ( 739077 ) on Monday November 28, 2005 @10:59AM (#14129405)
      It is quite possible now that standards could be developed where they simple ignore the US market. Certainly it is the biggest in the world right now- but if they got flack from the RIAA/MPAA cronies in Congress-- they could simply say- ok- you can't have this great technology. They could sell in Japan, Europe, China, India, etc.... Companies and individuals would see these things saving money/time provided by this media in their overseas operations-- and then they would start hitting their Congresspeople ever harder than the media industry ever could.
    • Yeah, who cares about fucking Very Extreme Super High Resolution Video Bullshit. We just want recordable data media bigger than a percent or so of the largest available harddrives.
      • I don't know about you but if I can store xvid videos at really high resolutions on this and display them on a computer monitor that gets better resolution than my television screen then who cares if there is a "player" for it. Data is Data. I don't technically need a DVD player for my television anymore. Especially since when the television finally dies I'm replacing it with a media PC possibly with a projector. The TV DVD VCR combo setup is on the way out.

  • Slight Change in Size? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DaedalusLogic ( 449896 ) on Monday November 28, 2005 @10:53AM (#14129364)
    Even if it is a small change in physical size for the media I'm not too hot on that. I like how our DVD storage is the same size as the previous generation of CDs. The result is that all of my data recorded on CD-R from 8 years ago is still readable and I use it from time to time on our new drives... You can't say that for many other optical or magnetic storage media of odd sizes. Zip Disks, SuperDisks, Jaz Drives... Maybe they're going for a different market, but you think these folks would leave their options open.

    There are also good things to be said about leaving the past behind, and not keeping the same physical form factor.

    Opinions?
    • I suspect there's no way to make their drive ever read CDs or DVDs. They are such fundamentally different optics, that it probably doesn't make sense. In fact, there may be no room for it. Unlike a regular CD reader, their holographic optical "pickup" will have to consist of an imaging chip, like the CCD chips in cameras (except my guess is that it will be CMOS). This would make it pretty impossible to cram in extra optics to read CD/DVD discs. So, perhaps they just figured it's time for a clean slate. CDs
  • I could back up my entire MP3 and iTunes archive on ONE DISK!

    WAHOOOOO!!!!!!!!!

  • From vunet.com: The discs, holding 300GB each, use so-called Tapestry holographic memory technology to store data by interference of light. They are also able to read and write data at 10 times the speed of a normal DVD.

    From New Scientist: The discs, at 13 centimetres across, are a little wider than conventional DVDs, and slightly thicker. Normal DVDs record data by measuring microscopic ridges on the surface of a spinning disc. Two competing successors to the DVD format - Blu-ray and HD-DVD - use the same

    • Safe to say that the fight between Blu-ray and HD-DVD has now become moot.

      Not really. The media is bigger - it won't fit in a standard 5 1/4" drive bay. Which means a new (bigger) drive bay or only external drives. Neither appealing options. Or shrinking the drives (which is also acceptable and will probably be done). Also this has only been done on a lab scale and no research has been done on the data loss / skip / durability whereas BlueRay/HD-DVD are using CDROM/DVD processes which are well known and
      • Its also not known whether the supporting hardware for a holographic drive will fit in a standard drive bay once they shave the discs down to size.

        Why does the technology have to be a slave to a drive bay's size? If this technology is robust enough and delivers the performance/storage gains enumerated, then why won't computer manufacturers go to the expedient of updating their cases to accomodate it? 300 Gb of storage is too seductive to simply let go because of the inconvenience of the media size. And I

        • Why does the technology have to be a slave to a drive bay's size?

          Because it changes the size of the PC's case. The 5 1/4" disc drive hasn't changed since I was a child... it has outlasted so many changes in media, PC slots, etc... the disc will be resized before the drive is. But again, also note no mention is made as to the size of the support hardware. If we are really pulling millions of bits of information at a time (versus 1 bit in a traditional drive) you'd think the head would be bigger, along with
          • Because it changes the size of the PC's case. The 5 1/4" disc drive hasn't changed since I was a child... it has outlasted so many changes in media, PC slots, etc... the disc will be resized before the drive is. But again, also note no mention is made as to the size of the support hardware. If we are really pulling millions of bits of information at a time (versus 1 bit in a traditional drive) you'd think the head would be bigger, along with the cabling, the mount, the motor, and the hardware required to in
    • A useful technology sits on the shelf, because business didn't think it was a good idea...imagine where we would be if this technology was around in the 80's

      Remember that laser video disk systems were introduced in the 70's-80's and failed to sell. The problem was that the red helium-neon gas lasers required were expensive, and that people wanted recordability. So they bought videotape machines instead.

      It is only very recently (last ten years) that we have affordable semiconductor red (and now blue) laser

  • Losing all your data (Score:5, Funny)

    by TeXMaster ( 593524 ) on Monday November 28, 2005 @10:59AM (#14129413)
    Cool, now I can lose all of my data by just misplacing a single disk. Ain't that grand?

  • Reliability ? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Wudbaer ( 48473 ) on Monday November 28, 2005 @11:03AM (#14129448) Homepage
    I could imagine that those things would be great for doing backups, but: Will they be reliable ?

    When writable DVDs and DVD burners got affordable I was thrilled at first: Finally being able to backup several GB of data to one not too expensive disk instead of on a stack of CD-Rs ! But then reality hit: Compatibility problems between individual brands of burners and brands of media, quality problems with media, even worse durability than CD-Rs; altogether more or less a total gamble if you want to do backups with that stuff. Now my DVD burners collect dust or are mostly used as CD burners only. So what is a high capacity medium good for if it is not reliable besides making expensive coasters and wall clocks ?

    • Re:Reliability ? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by berck ( 60937 )
      Whatever. If you buy decent stuff, there are no problems with DVD media or burners.

      • Re:Reliability ? (Score:3, Informative)

        by Wudbaer ( 48473 )
        Thought so myself. But the usually very reliable German computing magazine c't ran several tests over last couple of years that showed great quality problems even with expensive brand name media and writers. The results they got strongly depended on the combination of burner and media, and considering that even brand name media often is manufactured by changing OEMs makes selection of a working combination mere luck. Apparently it's slowly becoming better, but still.

    • Re:Reliability ? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by sbryant ( 93075 )

      So what is a high capacity medium good for if it is not reliable besides making expensive coasters and wall clocks ?

      That depends on your definition of high capacity, but if you're happy with the amount of data that would fit on a DVD-R, then your answer is DVD-RAM. It's significantly more durable, and it's the only format that drives can read and write at the same time. The +/- RW format disks die eventually, but I've not yet had a DVD-RAM die on me.

      -- Steve

  • Bangin' Bucks (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Monday November 28, 2005 @11:15AM (#14129553) Homepage Journal
    In 1982, I had an Atari 400 (5MHz 8bit 6502) with a tape drive which cost $500. I upgraded its 16KB RAM to 48KB (replacement) for $500, and the tape to an 88KB (double sided) floppy for $500. Now I can get a P4/3.0GHz for $300, a $104 300GB HD, and 1GB RAM for $60. That's 1440x the CPU bandwidth, 16.4Mx the storage, 10.4Mx the memory for a dollar - which is itself worth less than half its value (in noncomputer goods) of a quarter-century ago. And the HD is 1/10th the size (volume), while the other components are about the same size. So it's clear that storage technology has advanced the most during the "PC revolution", by a factor of a thousandfold. The only competing tech is the transformation of my $500 300bps modem and $50:month Compuserve account to a $50 6Mbps DOCSIS modem at $50:month, which is 20-200Kx cheaper for WAN.

    I'm all for putting that 300GB into a cheap, tiny device. All the other cheap, even mobile networked computing has created mainstream demand for archive, beyond memory and storage. But I'm betting on it not because storage tech is somehow lagging. I'm betting on it because that industry is by far the highest performing personal computing innovation we've got.
    • 5mhz?

      The 400 and 800 were tied to the NTSC clock, and were 1.8mhz.

      What a dream 5mhz would've been back then! That would've nearly tripled the amount of stuff one could do during a HBI or VBI.

      I still have all that stuff in storage, but the serial cables to plug it all together have gone bad over the years.
  • Now I'll have to buy the White album again.

  • What? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by george_slater ( 934411 ) on Monday November 28, 2005 @11:28AM (#14129678)
    I'm a little confused by some of the responses I'm seeing here. It seems most people think that this new technology would be a bad thing? The largest complaint I've seen so far is: "What if I lose the disk?" I don't know about you guys, but for me this isn't much different then anything else in the world. If your backup is important... don't lose it!

    If needed, I have some handy solutions to solve the "How do I not lose my disk" problem.

    1. Put it some place that you can remember.
    2. If it's super important, make two backups.
    3. Tie a string around your finger to remind you to always remember where you put your disk.
    4. Ask somebody more responsible than yourself to watch over it for you.

    And if none of these work...

    5. Buy a small cable. Run the cable through the hole in the center of the disk. Buy a small padlock. Padlock the cable around a large object. Make multiple copies of the padlock key and tape them in various places.

    Obviously this is not practical, but it is about as practical as thinking that a new technology is bad because you might misplace it.

  • speed (Score:2)

    by Tom ( 822 )
    Not to mention the drives themselves can read and write at ten times the speed a normal DVD drive.

    They better do. If they hold 90 times more data, then 10 times more speed isn't a feature, it's required.
  • For data backup purposes, 300GB would be great. I find myself burning off about 5 DVD's a week worth of data and I can't keep up.

    However, once we start thinking about the new kinds of technologies for video distribution, therein lies the problem. For now, say you can put 4 episodes of a television show on 1 DVD. So now, we have 7 DVD's for one television season, plus 9 seasons. Movie studios will not give up that business model. Each of those 4 episodes sells for $35-$50. What happens when all of the sudden
  • If content providers and hardware manufacturers are going to invest a whole lot of money on BluRay they are not going to be very keen on investing in HVD for some time..
    HD-DVD costs less right now, so that would be a better choice right now.. if at all.
  • Hell, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD don't even have writers yet.

    Until they do, the storage capacity is completely irrelevant. Otherwise, how is it useful to the counsumer?
  • If this is really coming out in 2006, is there any point to BluRay or HD-DVD?
  • It seems for the past 20 years everyone has been stuck on the size of CDs. Even with DVDs and now these HVDs, the physical size has stayed the same. I know...everyone is use to that size. But that's not what I've been promised in all the not-so-distant-future movies. Discs used in those movies, if they use discs at all instead of some SD stick looking thing, are the size of GameCube discs. THAT's what I'm waiting for. Small, easily carried, easily pocketed. Sony's MiniDiscs weren't a bad idea, but th

  • Stability? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Sw0rdfiche ( 587944 )
    The capacity and speed issues are wonderful. But how stable is the medium? Magnetic media was good for five years minimum. DVDs are good for about twenty before delamination issues threaten the data. In truth there is no stable medium for data. Paper has a better longevity. The best longevity is still clay tablets, but not very practical for the volume of data we need to secure.

    Having dealt with data retention for a good 20 years now, I am concerned that whenever there is news of a breakthrough in storage m

  • It will never be cheap enough (Score:3, Interesting)

    by unfortunateson ( 527551 ) on Monday November 28, 2005 @12:32PM (#14130299) Journal
    Even if it fits in current enclosures, it will never be a consumer-grade product like DVD-RW is now. Home DVD-RW for home theater just dropped below $100, and internal drives for desktops are under $30. Blu-Ray/HD-DVD could get there in 5 years (doubtful, as HD will remain a premium item for most of that time).

    Until there is a demand for prerecorded media with 300GB on it, there won't be the impetus to make these items cheap. They'll remain in the computer-room-only expensive category.

    What might make this technology fly is not a 300GB, 13cm platter, but a PSP UCD-sized disk for portable media with, day, 20GB on it. However, I suspect that falling flash memory prices will overtake this too quickly for it to have much impact on portable media players, camcorders, etc.

    It will be valuable and marketable to the server room customers, but don't expect Dell to include these babies in a $399 desktop for at least 6 years.

  • How is read/write working ? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Cochonou ( 576531 ) on Monday November 28, 2005 @12:40PM (#14130381) Homepage
    In holographic media, read and write operations are usually done using different laser wavelengths. You use a "recording" wavelength to record an interference pattern in the media, and a "reading" wavelength which will diffract into the interference pattern and restore the original image.
    These wavelengths need to be different because holographic materials work like photographic films. If you try to read the hologram with a wavelength to which the holographic material is sensitive, you will destroy the interference pattern, and therefore the data.
    Wikipedia states that a 532nm laser is used for both reading and writing operations. That means they use a different way to store the hologram. Would anyone have more information about this ?
  • I'm sorry, but this sounds more than a little problematic. At ten times the write speed of a normal DVD, it sounds like buffer underruns would be the rule rather than the exception, unless you were able to use a medium-sized hard drive as a buffer. That means that you're looking not so much at the problem of disc errors from the drive's own hardware, but rather from disc errors because existing hardware can't keep up with it. It would be nice if write speeds could be decreased for compatibility, but this

  • There is already one useful application: (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MtViewGuy ( 197597 ) on Monday November 28, 2005 @04:16PM (#14132541)
    The storage media for digital theater projectors.

    So instead of having to install a bank of hard drives just for single 120-minute movie in uncompressed digital format, you can reduce it all to a single HVD disc plus protective caddy weighing at most 5-6 ounces. This could drastically cut the cost of digital theater projection, since all you need is a small player connected by a high-data rate cable to the digital projector itself. You also have the major advantage of drastically reducing media duplication and shipping costs, too.

  • Man, I was reading about this last decade! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Fantastic Lad ( 198284 ) on Monday November 28, 2005 @08:36PM (#14134338)
    I was reading about working models and all the technology being in place for full production of these holographic recording devices. In 1998!

    This is moronic. This is annoying. I am beside myself with frustration. (Well, not really. --I don't actually care.)

    The fundamental truth of the matter is that the technology which is readily possible, and the technology which is actually made available to the public, are decades apart. After all. . , why nip the spirit of profit in the bud when you can produce and sell entire production runs of stone-age computer tech one incrementally advanced stage after another? Heck, this keeps the economy 'healthy' during peace times, ensures jobs and an appetite for more and more junk technology. "Planned Obsolescence" is reality.

    When everybody gets all excited about the big "new" thing, I groan. We're being led on and sold crap because there are miles and miles of money to be made between now and when the really good stuff is released, which of course, only happens when it doesn't matter anymore.

    So who cares? Just let me have enough technology to do what I need to do. Those needs were well met about five years ago, so honestly, I don't really care about any new so-called 'advances'.

    And the band plays on. . .


    -FL

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