InPhase Technologies Promises Holographic Drive in May

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!"

Re:Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

RTFA its not a consumer product.

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 time (weather you use them or not) and CD/DVD's that are fairly fragile and, not to mention ultimately quite bulky.

Keep in mind this is their first public model, at 300gigs. I fully expect multi-terabyte offerings in a year or so. According to the article potential data storage is nearly unlimited, its just a matter of fine tuneing the laser controls. If the device was engineered with that in mind, its possible that firmware updates could actually increase storage size!

Also the device was manufactured to fit in a standard size optical device bay, so you wont need new hardware to add it in.

Re:Finally!

[hcmtnbiker]

But you're also forgetting that holographic drives are inherently associative(at least in theory). Which solves tons of problems that ordinary drives have with look-ups and other time consuming operations.

Re:Price

[EdIII]

Who is to say that they will not license the technology? If they go out of business, somebody stepped into to buy the assets. Technology patented? Patents disappear in 20 years (or they should).

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.

Re:Finally!

[shmlco]

You've obviously never had a backup tape or an old Zip or Jaz drive fail to read because of differences in track calibrations or read heads.

Re:Finally!

[JoshHeitzman]

The reader is worthless without anything to read, so you are just as screwed if the separate media get trashed as you are if the HDD's get trashed. HDD's are cheap enough that you can just make make multiple copies of the backups and keep them at different physical locations, then in a few years copy them to bigger hard drives, rinse repeat until the data is no longer needed, or something more economical then hard drives comes along. If the HDDs are hot swappable then you can think of the HDDs as the media and the HDD bay enclosure as the reader if that makes you feel any better.

I call BS

[timeOday]

From the article "Holographic storage has a couple of neat properties... Data density is theoretically unlimited."

Nothing in this universe is unlimited.

Re:Price

[somersault]

It's 300 for the current read/write device. Theoretically, it's unlimited.

Re:Price

[wik]

If you want to learn more about this, I suggest Dr. Wilson's talk [cmu.edu] on InPhase's technology at CMU in November. It's a very accessible and interesting talk for someone who is not familiar with the field.

Oh, and their product page says it is WORM

[PrimeWaveZ]

Which means there is no going back once the disk is written.

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

[Antique Geekmeister]

It's really embarassingly bad. It makes 2 claims:

      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.

Re:Price

[LarsG]

A very important factor in CD/DVD longevity is the type of dye and reflective layer used. [archive.org] If you have a low quality disc it will have a limited shelf life even if you treat it like that reference kilogram sitting in a vault in France.