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InPhase Announces 300GB Holographic Discs 234

Posted by timothy from the hypthetical-chickens-taste-delicious dept.
turboflux writes "After rolling out prototype holographic drives last year, ExtremeTech reports that InPhase has announced they intend to ship drives to commercial customers in 2006. InPhase originally intended on shipping the 200GB version of their media this year. Another article on Engadget mentions that 1TB discs will be available in 2009."
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InPhase Announces 300GB Holographic Discs More

InPhase Announces 300GB Holographic Discs

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  • 300gb? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by thegoogler ( 792786 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @05:34AM (#12279799)
    i dont know about you.. but uhh.. that seems kind low, especially from previous estimates/articles.

    at least at this point, its looking like its actually worse than normal magnetic drives, i mean i expected intial drives to be at least 1.5tb

    • Re:300gb? (Score:4, Funny)

      by sniepre ( 517796 ) <sniepre@gmail.com> on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @05:37AM (#12279811) Homepage
      not to mention 1.0gb in 2009?? Who puts up with that kinda slow progress nowadays! In 2009 I'm expecting google's archive on a 2 disc set of (media) - none of this 1tb hosh-posh.

    • Re:300gb? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by LiquidCoooled ( 634315 )
      Digging into the article, I get this:

      Holography stores data by using multiple light beams to create chemical reactions.

      To me, this seems not so different to the normal cd/dvd burning process.
      Shine light until you leave a mark, move one.

      This does not seem to be holographic in the sense we are expecting.

      • Re:300gb? (Score:5, Informative)

        by AstrumPreliator ( 708436 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @05:46AM (#12279853)
        It's sort of the same, but then again not really. From InPhase's website:

        Light from a single laser beam is split into two beams, the signal beam (which carries the data) and the reference beam. The hologram is formed where these two beams intersect in the recording medium.

        The process for encoding data onto the signal beam is accomplished by a device called a spatial light modulator (SLM). The SLM translates the electronic data of 0's and 1's into an optical "checkerboard" pattern of light and dark pixels. The data is arranged in an array or page of around a million bits. The exact number of bits is determined by the pixel count of the SLM.

        At the point of intersection of the reference beam and the data carrying signal beam, the hologram is recorded in the light sensitive storage medium. A chemical reaction occurs in the medium when the bright elements of the signal beam intersect the reference beam, causing the hologram stored. By varying the reference beam angle, wavelength, or media position many different holograms can be recorded in the same volume of material.

      • Re:300gb? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @05:53AM (#12279884)
        "This does not seem to be holographic in the sense we are expecting."

        What sense were you expecting? A normal holographic image does precisely that, chemical reactions induced by light, it's the same basic principle as normal photography. The difference is that you use lasers (coherent phase background), and increase resolution to the point that you can store not just amplitude but relative phase information of the wavefront.

        The full wave front of light, including the relative phase is sufficient to recreate the entire wave, including all "3D information". This is known in physics as Huygen's Principle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens_principle

        • Re:300gb? (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Writer ( 746272 )

          I vaguely recall hearing years ago about how holographic storage was being developed in the form of cubes or something. I presume it meant being able to store information in three dimensions rather than on a two-dimensional flat surface somehow, without any moving parts. I can also recall that optical processors were being developed that used light rather than electricity, which allegedly would have made them much faster. I've always thought that technology was going to develop to the point that computers c

    • Re:300gb? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Stachel ( 718095 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @05:41AM (#12279830)
      that seems kind low

      That is because

      Second-generation rewriteable products are due in 2007 or 2008, Murphy said

      Releasing 1.5 TB disks would satisfy the storage market immediately. They first get people interested in the 'low density' variant, then those people will become greedy again for the higher density versions in 2007 or 2008.
      • They first get people interested in the 'low density' variant

        How would they do this, as capacities larger than 1 TB are the only interesting feature?

      • Re:300gb? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by poot_rootbeer ( 188613 )
        They first get people interested in the 'low density' variant

        But CAN they do that at the 300GB capacity point?

        I can go out TODAY and build a RAID of mirrored 300GB winchester disks for about $500. What incentive do I have to wait around until next year for a non-rewritable storage format that will undoubtedly cost more and be more susceptible to errors?

    • No multiplexing other than spatial ? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Cochonou ( 576531 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @06:27AM (#12279994) Homepage
      If the capacity is kind of "low" by holographic memory standards, it might be because this medium doesn't use any other kind of multiplexing beside spatial multiplexing.
      Basically, what we have here is a disc with several "holographic bits", scattered across the disc just like a regular compact disc. The main difference here is that when you read an holographic bit with the reconstruction beam, you get a full page of data (here, a 1024x1024 image - hence 1 Mbit).
      What is interesting with holographic memory is that when you use thick layers of holographic materials you can also multiplex the data using the angle of the reconstruction beam, or its wavelength. That means that you can hit the same area on the disc with the reconstruction beam at a different angle, and get a different page of data. Or use a different laser beam, and get again another page of data.
      Of course, this process seriously complexifies the hardware that must be used to read an hoographic medium, but it is the key to reach tremendous densities with the holographic technique.

    • Re:300gb? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by samael ( 12612 ) <Andrew@Ducker.org.uk> on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @06:52AM (#12280090) Homepage
      That, sadly, is the way things tend to go with tech. You get the initial announcement that new technology X is a billion times better than old technology Y, and will be ready Real Soon Now.

      Closer examination shows that Real Soon Now is, in fact, in about 5 years, by which point old technology Y has nearly caught up with new technology X. In addition the new technology has turned out to not be able to go into production quickly at its theoretical limits, but has to start out an order of magnitude slower/smaller.

      There's frequently then a switchover, with the new technology having more space to improve than the old one, but there tends not to be a sudden huge leap from 5MB hard drives to 50GB hard drives - there's almost always lots of little steps in between.
      • It's real, but it's not sad!
        Of course, that giant leap is often associated to various tech improvements, and as they become available, some of them are adopted in the "lower tech", so it catches up until it's more economical to switch to "higher tech".

        But anyway, there are some giant leaps.
        You can watch 3d accel cards, awesome raw computing power, and now you can use it for general purpose!
      • there tends not to be a sudden huge leap from 5MB hard drives to 50GB hard drives I recall a jump from 1.44 MB floppies to 650 MB CD-Rs... an order of magnitude less than your example, but still a massive improvement
        • Good point.

          Although CD-RWs didn't hit the market for over 10 years after CD-ROMs did (1985-1997)- and even then you can't use either of those like you do a floppy. For something with the same uses as a floppy you're looking at an Iomega Zip-disk, which was 100MB in size and came out in 1995.

          I still remember installing Office from a foot-high stack of floppies...

    • Re:300gb? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rxmd ( 205533 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @07:01AM (#12280125) Homepage
      at least at this point, its looking like its actually worse than normal magnetic drives
      Two words: removable media.

      This is not a hard drive replacement. Instead, it's for all those of you who don't know how to do backups from their 160GB harddrives without a DLT streamer or similar stuff.

    • Re:300gb? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by springbox ( 853816 )
      You should probably consider other aspects of this type of storage like.. Is it more reliable than current hard drives? Is it faster? Capacity should come after those two in my opinion. It probably won't take them very long to increase the size of this device after they release their first version anyway.
    • The purpose of this media is to make money. Obviously they can make much more money by making a simplified version at first that has more space than all but the largest hard discs, and then space the release of larger versions. This model is used to make more money... which is the purpose of any commercial venture.
    • "But uhh" nothing. What the fuck were you expecting anyway? 300GB is huge in terms of removable storage. What do we have today a 35 GB Iomega REV? 19GB using double sided double layer DVD isn't so hot either when you stack it up to 300GB. Plus its PROTOTYPE technology; so initial capacity is going to be low then work its way up to match the estimates.

      I must admit I was a little excited watching the 2 videos on the main page. They give you a better look inside the thing. The prototype drive is huge and migh
    • This gadget appears to be a removable-media WORM drive so it's fairer to compare it to a CD-R/DVD-R/BluRay-R than to a hard drive.

      Compared to those sorts of devices, 300 GB is pretty good, per disk. Dual Layer DVD-R is 8.5 GB. I'm not sure what recordable BluRay or HDDVD will be, probably tens of gigs not hundreds. So if it ships at 10X the capacity of BD-R, which may or may not be shipping around the same time, that's not too shabby.

      Iz
    • The important thing is that it's juuuust big enough for Longhorn. :-}

  • Finally (Score:4, Funny)

    by ShieldW0lf ( 601553 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @05:38AM (#12279815) Journal
    Something that I can fit my music collection on!

    Where do i buy an mp3 player that can read these?
    • ...that there are persistant rumors in the Mac/Apple community that there the existing line of iPods is about to be enhanced with a new addition, the: iPod 'Brick'. The new iPod will weigh in at a hefty 1,6 Kg but marketing research has indicated that it will nevertheless be popular as an antithesis to the diminutive iPod 'Mini'.

      PS. Dont tell anybody else we might get sued.
    • Yawn, who collects MP3's anymore? After 200gb I got bored. Now that would make a nice dent in my DVD collection storage space though. :D

      Besides if it has a burn rate of less than 1gps one would grow old and be denied social security long before one of these discs was complete.

      I don't have much faith in yet another optical format, after being jerked around by the last 23 or (in just the last two years). I'll stick with flash memory and harddrives for my portable needs.

  • HDTV / UHDV (Score:5, Insightful)

    by valkoinen ( 81260 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @05:39AM (#12279818)
    This could be the storage media for delivering HDTV content with extreme bitrates. Maybe not quite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_High_Definition _Video [wikipedia.org]UHDV quality but hell of a lot better than even the largest blu-ray discs.

    Maybe digital movie theaters could use this to transfer and/or store the movies?
    • Not only movie theaters could take advantage of removable terabyte disc storage. Films are being transferred to digital format for archival purposes in 4K resolution -- 4000 lines vertical. New films like Sin City are originally recorded in hi-def digital formats, and more will come.

      Movie maniacs could have super-ultra-lastword-that's it-no-more 4K video for home use, if terabyte media isn't a problem. As for screens that could display such resolutions, they'll come when we need them.

  • Reply to previous poster (Score:5, Informative)

    by Rupan ( 723469 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @05:41AM (#12279826) Homepage
    Maybe you didn't read the article properly? The linked article states that "the recording material is 1.5 mm thick and is sandwiched between two 130 mm diameter transmissive plastic substrates". So from my take on this, it seems that they have a plate-like object (possibly see-thru... I can imagine GREAT case-modding...) that is VERY THIN. I could even imagine that perhaps several of these could eventually be sandwiched together into a sort of cube to create massive amounts of storage. You would have several thin read/write "heads" that would read the "plates" on each side of them. They say the timeframe for R/W media is 2-3 years. Exciting!

    • Re:Reply to previous poster (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The linked article states that "the recording material is 1.5 mm thick and is sandwiched between two 130 mm diameter transmissive plastic substrates". So from my take on this, it seems that they have a plate-like object (possibly see-thru... I can imagine GREAT case-modding...) that is VERY THIN.

      Dude.... you pretty much just described a CD. (1.2mm thick, 120mm diameter.)
    • 130mm isn't very thin, that's 13cm, so the whole thing is 261.5mm or just over 26cm which is roughly 10.24 inches thick, that's not "very thin".

  • Murphy said... (Score:5, Funny)

    by jdegre ( 531681 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @05:48AM (#12279864) Homepage Journal
    You, guys, are not going to trust your vital data to someone called Murphy, are you? :)

  • More technical info (Score:5, Informative)

    by the_pooh_experience ( 596177 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @05:50AM (#12279868)
    As per an optics and photonics news [osa-opn.org] article [osa-opn.org] I just read:
    "Three-dimensional volume holographic data storage is used in photopolymer media to potentially achieve storage densities of 1 Tb/in^2 with transfer rates greater than 200 MB/s. Such densities are enabled by a novel two photopolymer chemistry approach, in addition to special techniques for making exceptionally flat (lambda/10) surfaces that provide high storage densities in cubic pho6tololymer media with volumes of tens of mm^3."

  • Optware system looks more practical/interesting... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I don't know what methods this uses, but my money is on the colinear Optware system. It is very simple in theory, and will
    provide very high bandwidth. (since it writes 52 bits at a time...) The 20MB/s transfer rate that Inphase lists is very unimpressive when considering discs 1TB in size.

    See http://www.optware.co.jp/english/top.htm [optware.co.jp] for more info.

  • Belgian chips... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by spectrokid ( 660550 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @06:30AM (#12279999) Homepage
    InPhase technology uses a camera chip designed by FillFactory, a Belgian chip maker.
    Now if you are British, you are probably thinking of this [belgianfries.com].

    • Re:Belgian chips... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Cochonou ( 576531 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @06:51AM (#12280084) Homepage
      What is interesting here is that FillFactory designs CMOS-APS detectors instead of the more traditional CCD imagers.
      APS stands for Active Pixel Sensor: basically the main difference with CCD's is that you get the line and row selection transistors, and an amplification transistor built in every pixel. That means you don't have to transfer the charge from pixel to pixel over the whole matrix as in CCDs: you can directly address the detector matrix as you would do on RAM.
      The main drawback is that these selection and amplification units take room on the silicium, and therefore prevent the whole surface of a pixel to be sensitive to light. This is what is called the fill factor : the amount of a pixel which is effectively capturing light.
      FillFactory (now owned by Cypress Semiconductors) have promising patents related to increasing the fill factor - hence their name.
    • I see that somebody has found a replacement for goatse.cz. The yellow stuff looks like the stuff that they put on convenience store nachos.
    • That's how we design cameras in Belgium. We call it a "Belgian Chip".

  • As usual (Score:4, Insightful)

    by michaelmalak ( 91262 ) <michael@michaelmalak.com> on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @06:42AM (#12280052) Homepage
    Optical storage capacities have always lagged hard drive capacities and have always had, of course, much slower access times. This relegates optical to niche applications that absolutely need the removeability aspect for storage for either archival (especially of space-hungry data such as lossless imaging) or security purposes. Examples include periodic ultrasound imaging of nuclear reactor components and, of course, medical applications. This announcement just continues the trend.

    • Re:As usual (Score:5, Insightful)

      by AvitarX ( 172628 ) <me AT brandywinehundred DOT org> on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @07:40AM (#12280321) Journal
      Really?

      I seem to remember early CD-ROMS being bigger then the HDs that came with the computers.

      I know I had Grollier encyclopedia on my computer with a 500MB hard drive, and I was not first to get a CD-ROM either.

      At school I think our Amiga with a CD-ROM had a smaller drive then the CDs.

      I don't know I just have a very different memmory of CDs early on, this sense of wow, thats a lot of space. Part of it might have been they were 400 times larger then the floppies they replaced for program distribution though. A jump like that would be equivelent to 3.6 TB (9GB DVD), which they are not even talking about.

      These things would have to be real cheap to be worht it, with 500 GB exernal drives offering better performance and being available now.

      • No it's not just you. Optical storage had the largest capacities of their time. They were also VERY expensive and VERY slow (that is, for R/W media) and most of them came in cartridges.
        Because they were so slow, these disks were only convenient for archiving.

      • Not rewritable (Score:3, Interesting)

        by michaelmalak ( 91262 )
        Your CD-ROM was not rewritable or even recordable. Recall the NeXT's rewritable drive was just 256MB. But even assuming that Sony's 600MB magento-optical happened to be available at the time of your 500MB Grollier experience, you're quibbling over 20%?

        See, the problem with optical is that because it is removeable media, the format is stuck in time. First, there is the vaporware period where an optical drive is announced. Favorable comparisons are made to hard drives available during the vaporware period

    • Optical storage capacities have always lagged hard drive capacities you apparently weren't around in 1970's when the first prototype optical recorder recorded an hour worth of video in digital bytes UNCOMPRESSED. Yes, it was a prototype, Yes it cost a million dollars (in 1970's) dollars to build... But there wasn't even a hard drive capable of storing more than a handful of megabytes at the time. Early Reasearch for optical storage was always in the 'hundreds' of gigabytes range. the smaller sizes they
      • I loaded it but hadn't read it. This media device Is planning on using optics as opposed to physical movement. It's currently targted at removable storage, because it's currently write once. However, the technology this device uses could pave the way for optical hard drive replacements, theoretically with capacities in the hundreds of terrabytes..

  • Transfer Speeds (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Locarius ( 798304 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @07:01AM (#12280127)
    Am I the only one who thinks that perhaps instead of pushing for greater capacity it is time to develop FASTER storage solutions? Yes, its nice to have a ton of storage, and there is (somewhat expensive) solutions already for those who need it, but if you want a FAST storage system you are pretty much stuck. Just as an afterthought, if (for some reason) I had a fast optical connection to a site I could theoretically transfer files to my PC faster than I could write to my disk.
  • We've been reading about holographic storage systems that are due out any time now for the last 15 years... gives us a call when (at very least) a respected review organization has gotten its hands on a prototype. Then at least we can have a wee bit of validation.

    Until then, blow your stock/VC-pumping hype out of your asses.

  • Removable storage is lagging. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GiMP ( 10923 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @07:13AM (#12280193)
    I remember these things called CD-ROMS from the early 90's. They had a whooping 650 megabytes compared to the 256-500 megabyte harddrives at the time. Can you imagine it? Harddrives being *smaller* than the removable media? Sure, it wasn't writable by end-users, but it was at least available in read-only form.

    In the late 90's all the harddisk manufacturers scrambled to build the biggest and fastest disks. Unfortunately, our removable media has fallen behind. I'm sorry, but the maximum DVD size is what? 15.9 gb -- if we use both sides of the medium. This just isn't enough when there are portable music players sporting 80gb harddrives.

    • Re:Removable storage is lagging. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Mant ( 578427 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @07:31AM (#12280279) Homepage

      In some ways it is easy to make a bigger hard drive, or at least once you have made it, get people to use it. They just install and off they go.

      Removable media suffers from the problem it isn't much use unless a lot of people use it. People aren't going to switch to slightly better media, requiring buying new recorders/players, suffering from the stuff you record not being compatible with most people's players for a while and so on. Removable storage will always lag because of this.

      So while we can make removable media much better than current DVDs, they aren't better enough yet to get people to switch. Floppy disks to CDs to DVDs were all big jumps in storage, and now DVDs are big enough for most people, most of the time.

    • I also remember seeing a preview of early DVD's (playing the governator's eraser IIRC) when the average hard disc you could buy was around 2GB. Which would put them in the same category as early CD-ROM's. 300GB is now around the current hard disc maximum... I sense a pattern emerging...

    • Harddrives being *smaller* than the removable media?

      That has lead to the crazy situation we have now where removable IDE drives are the most affordable back-up media that will actually be used. Although they have none of the archival properties desired for a backup, it's STILL cheaper to make two copies of the backup onto two IDEs than it is to mess with a DVD jukebox. While manually swapping DVDs would be cheaper still, and might improve archival characteristics, the odds are that a procedure involving

  • Constellation 3D and Flourescing Media (Score:4, Interesting)

    by BenJeremy ( 181303 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @07:18AM (#12280227)
    Actually, I watched this technology for some time... 8 years ago, a Russian company claimed to have the same thing, labelled FM-ROM.

    Waited and waited... dunno if it was all just a scam, or perhaps this company is the new incarnation. C3D's stock went into OTC/Penny-stock status and changed symbols countless times.
  • ...Microsoft announced today that it's next major release of Windows will require 290G of disk space to be installed.
  • IIRC, holographic media has long been heralded as the future of storage, not for space reasons so much as the fact that holograms degrade gracefully. That is, if you take a holographic plate and scratch it, you don't eliminate information (the image) where the scratch is, you degrade the quality of the information across the whole image in proportion to the area of the scratch over the area of the entire hologram (which should be very small).

    This makes sense because if you take a hologram (play with a ke

  • Scratches? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Spy der Mann ( 805235 ) <spydermann.slash ... minus physicist> on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @11:24AM (#12282674) Homepage Journal
    I'm curious - how sensitive are these discs to scratches that could corrupt their information? In other words, what's their reliability? (No I didn't RTFA, sorry)

  • 2.7h write time (Score:3, Informative)

    by phorm ( 591458 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @04:35PM (#12286338) Journal
    Could take a long time to write one of these suckers to capacity though:

    The HDS-200R, would ship this year with a 20-Mbyte transfer rate

    OK, so 200GB=200,000MB.
    200,000MB / 20MB/sec = 10000 sec 10000 sec / 3600sec/hour = 2.8h (2h48m approx).

    Not a bad speed considering that my first DVD-writer took about 15 minutes to write a disc... but still a long time if you're making a live backup, etc.

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