InPhase Technologies Promises Holographic Drive in May 194
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!"
Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
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:)
I tried to pick up a demo unit last week (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I'll believe it (Score:4, Funny)
In other news... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:In other news... (Score:3, Funny)
Problem is, they forgot to mention WHICH year. As usual.
I pre-ordered my copy of Duke anyway.
Re:Is it really 50 years? (Score:3, Funny)
Oh the RIAA and MPAA are not going to like THAT. Cue the yearly fee to access your movies/music.
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.
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
So it'll eventually collapse into a singularity and suck up Earth? Wonderful.
-:sigma.SB
Holographic Porn Archive (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Finally! (Score:3, Funny)
In college, we christened my friend's Jaz as the "WORN drive" - Write Once, Read Never.
Re:Finally! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:What lifetime are you talking about?? (Score:3, Funny)
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/eat/shower half of the time.
so really it takes at least 6TB to fill 'one lifetime' of porn, if low res jpegs are used, or 204 TB for 4-8 megapixel jpegs, or 616 TB for standard DVD resolution for 1 lifetime of porn, or 3080 TB for a lifetime of high definition blu-ray porn. you can drop that to 1540 TB if you use mpeg-4 compressed HD, rather than 'standard' mpeg-2 compression.
I guess instead of 'libraries of congress' we should start measuring in 'lifetimes of porn' since i went to all the trouble of doing the math.