Turner Testing Holographic Storage 174
Izmunuti writes "An article in ComputerWorld describes tests by Turner Entertainment of a holographic storage system from InPhase Technologies as a possible replacement for magnetic tape for storing their movies and other programs for playback and broadcast. The article states that each holographic disk holds 300 GBytes." Even more impressive is the cost per terabyte estimated for just a few years down the road.
That's not interesting (Score:5, Informative)
And for my fellow PDF viewing overlords, read this [inphase-tech.com] this [inphase-tech.com] and this [inphase-tech.com].
Re:Holographic? (Score:5, Informative)
On the other hand, reading speed can be tremendous. You get a full page of data for each reading operation. Some people will say you can read "at the speed of light", because all it takes to extract a page of data is to let diffract a laser beam through the holographic media. This is not completely true, as you still have to convert the data from its original optical form to an electronic form suitable for computer. This is usually done using arrays of CCD or CMOS detectors, and their speed is the limiting factor when reading data.
If I can get a hand on several documents that I know to be hiding somewhere on my computer, I will post actual speed figures which might give you a better idea of the typical transfer rates.
Re:Holographic? (Score:5, Informative)
I know that a CMOS detector integration speed of 1ms has been reached several years ago on holographic RAM (I am not talking here about holographic disks). As the integration speed is the limiting factor during the readout, that means you roughly read 1000 pages of data per second.
Usually, these pages of data are arrays of 1024x1024 values, coded on 256 different brighness levels (therefore equivalent to 8 bits, or one byte). That means you can get a reading speed of 1GB/s on that technology.
However, I think most of the research nowadays is turned towards holographic disks, because they are more suited to the "write once slowly, read many times quickly" behaviour of holographic memory. The main problem here is to find (or create) an holographic material suitable for this usage. So far, data density has been much lower in holographic disks than in holographic RAM because of this issue.
Before you just dismiss it (Score:5, Informative)
People once said the same thing [google.com] about blue laser hd-dvd's. And, before that, they were saying it [google.com] about DVD too.
-Eric
Re:Impressive (Score:2, Informative)
Talked to one of their engineers at NAB2005... (Score:3, Informative)
A couple of other interesting facts about the device - the rotational rate of the device is actually extremely slow. You wouldn't see it spinning or even barely moving unless you really looked at it. They use Ultra320SCSI as an electrical interface to the discs. These guys were co-promoting with Maxell in the Maxell booth itself on the media that's in these large cartridges similar to the old MO discs, but larger. The holodiscs themselves were about half an inch thick and were completely transparent, and had excellent archival characteristics and stability (>100 years IIRC). The drives themselves were about the size of a two-drive external SCSI drive box, but fairly long (probably around a foot or slightly longer) and black in color. Media was something like $179 per disc and the drives themselves were $6k-$10k, IIRC. Finally, I asked him why they wouldn't just put the disc into a cube format (read: all your information on your keychain), but he mentioned that the translational control of the cube to read and write the information would be overly complicated electromechanically though it could technically be done.
My guess is that you won't see this technology filter down to the average joe for at least 5-7 years. Hopefully it'll be worth the wait.
Re:To Little To Late (Score:3, Informative)
The problem is that, like all potential backup technology, it will almost certainly be either way too small or priced way beyond the reach of the general public. You could burn an entire spool of 50 DVDs, which would only cost about $15, but would take approximately 8 hours 20 minutes to burn them on a typical 8x drive, assuming you don't burn any coasters (unlikely) and assuming that you religiously monitor it and switch discs every ten minutes for an entire day. Alternately, you could back up your hard drive on dual-layer discs, but you would have to spread it over two days (DL discs max out at 4x, or about 16 hours 40 minutes, or one disc per 40 minutes) and pay $150 for that same backup. Half as fast, costs ten times as much. If this is progress, I'd hate to see what regression looks like.
At the current rate of expansion, I'd expect the 300GB holographic discs to cost $500 apiece.... The good news is that this pattern would also predict about a 10 day backup period, while in reality, they are slightly faster than 16x DVD-R media, with a full backup time coming in at a mere 3.5 hours for that 250GB drive. Not bad.
Sell them for $5 per disc and I'm interested. I'm still betting they end up costing more than an $80, 250GB hard drive, though, in which case they'd be a total eye roll just like magnetic tape....