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.
Holographic? (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, 27MB/sec, could that be a typo? Seems awfully slow, no?
8" floppies anyone? (Score:4, Interesting)
Mind you, this is hardly a unique problem, only a large-scale concentration of a wide-spread one.
Speed, not size (Score:5, Interesting)
What I would like to see is not a 1TB harddrive, the size I can get today by buying two harddrives, but rather:
Speed: It is a real bottleneck, to wait for disk access. SCSI is expensive for the home user still.
Throughput: What, still under GB/s ?
Reliability: Since a harddrive is capable storing more and more data, it is more and more important to increase reliability, It takes time to fill up a hard drive, it takes a lot of effort if its a lot of data to backup, so more reliable hard drives would eliminate a lot of problems. I don't care about guarantee, that they exchange the disk if it blows up in x years, my data is still lost then. Let's not even talk about what happens if it's over guarantee period. I'd expect a hard drive to work for five years or so flawlessly, more isn't needed since the technology gets obsolete in that timeframe already.
Re:Holographic? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Speed, not size (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, some people would begin to point to FLASH memory systems. While this could eventually become a good replacement for the hard drive for standard home users in several years, if prices continue to drop, there are still issues and concerns about the write limitations of flash. The speed of drives would also increase greatly by using FLASH as a hard drive replacement.
Another thing to note is that most home users do not need faster hard drives then what they currently have. They only access data of the disc on a few occassions and so long they are using the computer memory more then swap/page files nothing is really going to be that noticeable to them.
BTW, if you want your data to be safer may I recommend a RAID solution to help maintain your data, if that is too expensive a solution you can probably save some cost with DVD back-ups since I doubt you have a tape drive lying around and they aren't exactly cheap.
Size not speed for some applications (Score:3, Interesting)
While there is a market for big and fast storage, there are ultimately trade-offs between the two. 1TB in a 12cm disk is going to have some physical limitations, firstly the maximum speed of rotation before the disk breaks itself apart and secondly the data density which if it's using holographic methods will be using the volume of the medium, not just the surface. taking those limitations into account, it's clear to see that improvements in access times and transfer speeds lie with the accuracy of the seek and read hardware, which will be improved over time based on past optical technologies.
So I'd see this initially as a volume storage backup solution primarily, not a hard drive replacement, or even a home-user class backup system. The industry that I work in would be a prime user of this kind of storage. for instance, we're shooting a 28 part stop-frame animated series in High Definition, current calculated storage requirements for all those frames is 14TB. Online storage for editing is a bank of three Apple Xraids with around 8TB in each one, but how do we archive it? Currently it's dumped onto HD tapes, but eventually we'll need to keep the raw stop-frame footage, and we'll need to find 14TB of space somewhere. In that event, 14 holographic discs totalling $1400 is much more appealing than archiving to 1555 dual layer DVDs or 70 tapes, regardless of the amount of time taken to access it, which will most likely be to restore it to the Xraid for future editing and reference.
Re:Holographic? (Score:5, Interesting)
HDTV Screen Size is 1920 * 1080 = 2,073,600 so that is the number of pixels on the highest quality HDTV
2,073,600 Pixels * 30 FPS (Frames per second for DVD Playback) = 62,208,000 Pixels / Second
Pixel is 24 bits * 62,208,000 Pixels / Second = 1,492,992,000 Bits / Second
They are 8 bits in a byte so 1,492,992,000 / 8 = 186,624,000 Bytes / second
1024 Bytes in a Kilo Byte 186,624,000 Bytes/second / 1024 = 182,250 KB/Seconond
1024 Kilo Bytes in a Mega Byte = 177 Mbs per second. So for screens of random data where no compression can take place that is correct.
But the tough part to prove because I don't have the numbers is the average rate of data compression per movie. If we are able to keep compression at an average of 1/6 then we could do it. CNET.com states that HDTV Requires 19.25Mbps for HDTD transmission so I guess it does do the trick.
Why not online storage? (Score:3, Interesting)
Impressive (Score:3, Interesting)
If it works that's some pretty impressive technology but I suspect it has a few problems that aren't mentioned that are currently impossible to solve. What makes me think this is the way that all the major electronic manufacturers aren't falling over themselves to buy this company or developer their own version. If this really worked the first person to market would make a fortune. Who knows, maybe they have soved the difficult problems. It would be good if they had.
Re:Speed, not size (Score:3, Interesting)
I no longer care about the speed of disks. The speeds are adequate - even high quality video will stream just fine at 15Mbps and my machines never swap - but the problem I have is backups. My home directory alone, containing nothing more than mail and work related documents, is over 15GB. My tape backup unit is 10GB. A DVD backup is 4.7GB. They're all too small. I can "backup" to another hard disk (which is what I do) but that's not a reliable archive.
I want a 100GB recordable disc for under $1. It could read/write at 2MB/s (big B for bytes) and I'd be happy. An hour and a half for a backup is acceptable. It's the capacity that is lacking.
Re:Holographic? (Correction) (Score:2, Interesting)
The number you get is not 177 Mbs per second, it is 177 MBps (Mega Bytes per second as you say), whyle the number from CNet is 19.25 Mbps (mega bits per second), and it refers to MPEG2 compression of the stream.
In this case there is plenty of bandwidth available because 19.25 Mbps = 2.40 MBps < 27 MBps. In any case, MPEG4 compression can do much lower bitrates for HDTV video, but I strongly doubt that they will use any kind of lossy compression for their stored archive video.
Re:2010? (was: Re:A few years down the road...) (Score:3, Interesting)
Why erase? Write-once is fine if you can get the cost down. You can always just write on top of the existing diffraction patterns in order to make old data unrecoverable.