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!"

This will be quite amazing if...

[kickmyassman]

The data retention time is, in fact, 50 years. If the data turns out to be usable through the years than this will turn out to be invaluable. The film industry currently has a crisis on their hands where more and more "garbage" video of sets when no filming is going on and alternate scenes, interviews and all the things we see on the "extra features" sections on those fancy new blu-ray and DVD discs. They need some way to safely and easily store that media for many, MANY years before the common media supports it, and it the discs last 50+ years? This will be a boon. Especially if damaged discs turn out to be as easily recovered as is theoretically possible. The only x-factor will be whether the discs from the first generation of reader/writers is compatible with future generations. If they are? This is a winner.

Re:Price

[samkass]

A scratch loses you data, period. Whether it's holographic or not, you're either trading capacity for recoverability or you're vulnerable to a scratch. There's no magic here. Even with Blu-Ray you could store the data using forward error correction in such a way that complete obliteration of 1/4 of the disc still yields 100% of your data-- you'll just reduce the storage capacity somewhat.

Presumably, however, holographic storage has so much dang storage available that it's not a problem to give some of it up to have enough redundancy to survive typical wear and tear. (And all optical media gets wear and tear just from being spun up and down in non-cleanroom environments.)

And if you're worried about the longevity of CDs and DVDs, scratches aren't really what you're worried about anyway. Most scratches are on the clear plastic and can be repaired. However, some discs were manufactured with chemicals that oxidizes the layers, some with defects in the seal, etc. So your typical "stamped" disc will last decades if free of defect, but less than a decade if it has one-- and there's almost no way of knowing ahead of time. I don't know what substrate the holographic image is being stored on, but we'll have to see if it's completely free of degradation over decades. I certainly wouldn't want to immediately dump important data into this format and throw away the originals yet.

So for now it just remains an expensive unproven alternative... we'll have to see where it goes, though.

Target Market?

[sat1308]

From TFA:
Which gets us to InPhase's target market: archiving. That's why they were showing at NAB.

I don't get it. No matter how valuable your content, why would you pay $18,000 for a burner and $180 for for a 300GB disc? Just for the price of the media, you can mirror your data across three different brand-new hard disks. Surely the odds of 3 hard disks failing at the same time are lower than that of an untested, brand-new technology with no redundancy?

Maybe I'm too thick, but why would anyone buy this at this price? (Other than the coolness/my dick is bigger than yours factor, of course.)

Re:Price

[davolfman]

Not exactly. As I understand it holographic media works fundamentally different from an optical disk and no bit is dependent on a single location on the disk. Instead of a scratch taking out several bits from different tracks that the CRC codes make up for a scratch makes a large number of bits loose definition uncritically. In this fashion a holographic disk would take quite a few scratches with no data lost until it started reaching a threshold where all of the bits started to read unreliably all at once. That said I'm coming from Wikipedia so who knows how biased and inaccurate that information is for this particular technology.

Lest it slip by

[DynaSoar]

- We were also told CD and DVD storage was long lived. While 30 years can be expected of a few of the highest grade disks http://club.cdfreaks.com/f33/taiyo-yuden-faq-178622/ [cdfreaks.com] 3 years is what most of them manage. Theoretical limits typically don't make it past manufacturers.

- It may indeed last 50 years, but will the equipment it's to be connected to? I've got the first 100MB drive to hit the market. It has lots of stuff on it I want to retrieve. It's a good thing I've kept the 18 year old Apple IIgs it's inside of operating.

Better implemented on solid state holographic storage, but still possible on disk, is the reverse processing of image to beams. (There's a SciAm article from 1995 or so on holographic storage, particularly solid state, that covers this).

Store lots of images on the disk. Illuminate it with a hologram of a target image. Out of each image comes copies of the original reference beams, at a strength proportional to the similarity of the stored image to the target image. Nearly instantaneous, simultaneous retrieval with correlation score built into the signal strength. Lost is the different angles that'd be had in a solid state device, so scanning the disk for reading all the beams and finding those of interest might take a bit longer. The entire US government fingerprint files could fit on one disk and the whole thing searched in seconds, as is often seen on TV. Using it for movie storage makes marketing sense, especially with the initial price tag of $18,000 and disks being $180. But leaving it at that would be a damn shame.

Re:Price

[Ruie]

Solid State Hard drives are better off than spinning ones for sure, but still suffer from the same problems with an EM field AFAIK.

This is not quite correct. Sure, if you zap them with a large enough static charge it will burn out the chips - but this is more likely to apply to the interface chips rather than the flash that carries data. Flash is also susceptible to radiation. Otherwise it is pretty robust.

Holographic storage however, likely relies on some sort of photo-sensitive dye or phase change material - which will have big problems if you leave it inside a car during a hot summer day.

Wow! This is the coolest thing since the White LED

[Fantastic Lad]

Holographic technology turned into a functioning read/write data system? --Just the idea is SO totally cool! The linear storage we've seen to date has been like the Formula One race track of development, and people have come up with some very clever techniques to squeeze every scrap of use out of it, but really, we've been locked in two dimensions for all this time. Adding a third dimension is watershed stuff. Talk about blasting Moore's Law out of orbit!

Think about those early 10 megabyte hard drives. Take that form factor and blow it up over the same length of time and you get some crazy-huge numbers. A third dimension to play with? That's like going from DC to AC in terms of complexity and possibility. Interestingly enough, the establishment resisted AC as well. I half suspect that the math simply demanded more brain power than the old school engineers were willing or able to invest.

I remember the day when a roommate took the indoor cat out to the roof. The cat saw the sky for the first time and wet itself, flattened right to the ground and was basically reduced to a form of catatonia. After living in a one-floor apartment, (two-dimensional), being presented with a whole lot of up and down created a great deal of irritation.

-FL

Re:Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that's a good rule, but I like how this media can be read basically infinite amount of times because there is no contact made.

It would make sense if you used this storage to not put it into cold-storage, but put it into some kind of server-room that provides ro access to the data in a secure and safe fashion.

This would allow studios to work with their raw data without risking the loss or damage of the actual physical medium.

Also, you should of course store additional backups offsite.

For the price it's not bad, no hard drive is guaranteed 50 years. I'm lucky to get 5 years nowadays, I have 6 dead hd's over 80gb sitting next to me.

Reminds me of the Pinnacle Apex drive...

[PrimeWaveZ]

I remember hearing about the 4.6GB of storage back in the mid-90s, and it was quite underwhelming when it came out. MO never really took off, long-term. This, I think, may be different.

If the technology in this stuff pans out and can be developed economically and scale well over time (MO didn't), I think it has some real opportunities to take off in certain sectors. It's not for everyone, but neither are rackmounted RAIDs, iSCSI and tape loaders.

For naysayers: do any of you think that this company WANTS to release a boat anchor device like it seems to be going by their pictures? If what the company says is true, and this is not vaporware, the physical size of the drive may be a worthwhile trade-off in terms of capacity and reliability. As technology is developed, processes shrink, things get cheaper, and storage capacity gets bigger. I remember old MO drives being big, and as some pointed, out, a single CD-R costing $40.

I'm not going to buy this thing, but I'll certainly be watching its development in the marketplace. It's interesting to watch, just like I did the Apex back in the day.

Re:Finally!

[matt21811]

I've studied the price improvement trends for flash memory and, unfortunately, it isnt quite the 4 fold yearly improvement you are suggesting. For the last 5 years it averages something about 2.6 fold.
Supprisisngly it doesnt make much difference to your numbers over a relatively short period like 3 1/2 years:
today $100 for about 26 Gig (using your starting point of $30 for 8 GB)
1 year from now - 68 Gig
2 years from now - 175 Gig
3 year - 450 Gig
4 years - 1.2 Tera

I have also studied hard drives in the same way and they will "only" be about a $50 for a Terabyte in 4 years if trends of the last 5 years continue.

http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/harddrives.html [mattscomputertrends.com]
http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/flashmemory.html [mattscomputertrends.com]