Holographic Storage Slated to Hit Market This Fall

prostoalex writes "The Guardian takes a look at the current developments in the world of holographic storage. Despite being available in research for over 40 years, the technology is getting commercialized only now, with InPhase Technologies launching its 600 GB write-once disk and a drive this fall. What avout the price? "The first holographic products are certainly not mass-market — a 600GB disc will cost around $180 (£90), and the drive costs about $18,000. Potential users include banks, libraries, government agencies and corporations.""

Good thinking

[niceone]

InPhase Technologies launching its 600 GB write-once disk and a drive this fall

Good thinking. I mean, if they were launching the disk without the drive (or even the other way round) it would be a lot less likely to succeed.

Re:

[drgonzo59]

With 1TB hard drives hitting the market, is it really worth spending $180 for 1 (!) optical disk and a $18k for the drive? For that money one can buy a lot of 1TB hard drives and build a RAID 0/1/5... array and have more capacity and reliability. Besides, I don't see museums or even companies running to get that drive, because if the standard goes the way of the Laserdisc [wikipedia.org] then they are stuck with some exotic technology experiment and when their drive breaks there they will not be able to easily get thei

Re:Good thinking

[dosquatch]

So says you.

Bleeding edge is always a ridiculous expense. The people who are willing to be there already know who they are. That you even raise this question means that you are not.

OTOH, neither am I, but that's not the point. The point is, this is the first commercial volley of a new technology, which means that a few years hence it will be cheaper with even higher data densities.

Meaning, potentially, something like the entire run of every season of every Star Trek series ever... on one disc.

Re:

[anandsr]

Laserdisk was the result of a technology, which resulted in CDs and later DVDs. So it will still be beneficial for the early market, one which really needs the storage capacities of the disk to try it out. Ofcourse they will have to be rich enough to be able to throw that money for trying it out.

Re:

[TrevorB]

Redundancy is not backup. If you had a fire, or a hacker deface and delete your website, no RAID is going to fix that.

The tape/HD size ratio is getting so ridiculous that at work we're seriously considering using Hard Drives as removable tape-like media for backup. Any other solution for backing up terabytes of data is too expensive.

Re:

[Thundersnatch]

The tape/HD size ratio is getting so ridiculous that at work we're seriously considering using Hard Drives as removable tape-like media for backup. Any other solution for backing up terabytes of data is too expensive.

We've been doing this for a few years actually, as a "roll your own" solution. We currently use removable drive carriers from DataStor, and 500 GB Seagate disks (first ATA, now SATA). We also use foam-padded locking carriers that are take off-site every day. We do ~1.2 TB of backups every nigh

Re:

[Izmunuti]

I think that comparing it to hard drives is not as accurate as a comparison with high-end tape drives. Such drives can cost $15,000 or more. The cost, capacity and speed are roughly comparable but the holodrive has random-access and its disks might be more durable than tape cartridges.

Re:

[Jessta]

You still need some backups of that Raid array.
DVDs and even Blue-Ray are still way too small.

You can't do backups to hard drives because they aren't very reliable, the whole moving part thing is a problem.
So this tech is going to allow for a good optical backup solution.

Re:

[Jugalator]

With 1TB hard drives hitting the market, is it really worth spending $180 for 1 (!) optical disk and a $18k for the drive?

No. But was the very early first generations of CD's and DVD's worth it? No.
This sort of pricing is typical for immature technology if you haven't noticed.

Re:

[Ant P.]

For price-to-capacity ratio, it sounds far better value than any Blu-Ray drive on the market.

Re:

[drgonzo59]

Toss an autoloading platter jukebox onto the front of this and you can start long term archival recording of business documents (mortgage documents > 30 years).

You obviously responded without reading my whole comment (tsk...tsk!).

Alright, so say you buy the $18,000 drive and 200 discs as $180 a piece. You spend a couple of months saving all your highly valuable data, put it in a vault and wait a 30 years. BUT, the next year, the company that created the $18,000 and their proprietary storage goes bell

Re:

[Tuoqui]

Yeah and at $18,000 for a drive these big companies don't have to worry about people losing discs anymore because they'll be the only ones who can afford the drives to read them!

Re:

[jabuzz]

I remember the very first DVD writer which was from Pioneer. It only did 3.95GB disks, the laser was stuffed after writting 1000 drives and the cost was 21,000GBP or over 40,000USD. Give it a few years and they will be as cheap as chips.

Re:

[Eccles]

Heck, what about CD writers? In 1994 I worked for a company that often burned CD-Rs. The writer cost $8,000, the discs $16, and bad burns were common.

I have a better CD writer sitting in a box now, because it's not worth my time to put it in any of my machines.

Re:Good thinking

[Mr. Underbridge]

Good thinking. I mean, if they were launching the disk without the drive (or even the other way round) it would be a lot less likely to succeed.

Yeah, that would be like a game company shipping a console before any games are available for it. Err...wait...

Re:Good thinking

[dkf]

The benefits for write-once media are actually pretty clear. Suppose you've got to keep audit trails for a database containing financial data; writing it to write-once media is a pretty good way of doing it, since it's then easy to show that it wasn't tampered with. Rewritable media is useful for other things (e.g. live data).

Re:

[Eivind]

That is almost completely irrelevant.

First, you only prove that it's not been changed -after- it was written to the medium, which don't bring you much unless you verify the medium after writing it.

And you can do this with read-write media anyway, by writing a *tiny* bit of information on non-changeable media. Put an ad in the NY-time with the SHA-sum of your hard-disc, and you've got pretty good proof 5 years from now that it's been unchanged ever since.

Re:

[pegr]

Put an ad in the NY-time with the SHA-sum of your hard-disc, and you've got pretty good proof 5 years from now that it's been unchanged ever since.

I don't know about that... Five years is a long time to find a hash collision. So what happens to your strategy when a weakness is announced? Do you tell your auditors that it was good enough five years ago?

Let's put it another way... You give me a SHA1 hash and five years. If the money's right, I'll give you back a dataset that matches that hash wi

Re:

[bloobloo]

Hash the whole file. The chance of finding a collision that would be a valid excel file (just as an example) must be vanishingly smaller still than finding a collision among the whole set of all possible computer files.

Re:Good thinking

[rbanffy]

Make that 20 years and your chances of reading a valid Excel 2007 file in Excel 2027 are every bit as small as a hash collision.

"What is a 'file', granpa?"

Re:

[Smidge204]

(Point: a hash is a strong indication, but not a lock...)

Granted. However, what ar the odds that the dataset you produce will make sense in the given context?

For example, if you had 600GB of financial data "protected" by an SHA1 hash. You find another data set that had the same hash. Do you think you would be able to pass off your data set for the original? How likely is it that te program used to read the original will accept your data without complaint and not have obvious discrepencies from reality? Like

Re:

[pegr]

However, what ar the odds that the dataset you produce will make sense in the given context?

Very high, actually. Presuming I have the original data to provide context, I can fiddle with white space, unallocated disk blocks, executables (since they are not likely to be executed from backup nor examined closely), whatever. Without the original data, then all bets are off. You have to assume an attcker would have access to the data in question.

Cryptoanalysis of SHA1 [wikipedia.org] has already weakened it...

Re:

[Rob Kaper]

I can fiddle with white space, unallocated disk blocks, executables (since they are not likely to be executed from backup nor examined closely), whatever.

If you're truly lucky the source data is in XML, with its extensibility by definition. Almost makes me wonder if data tempering was the true force behind its development and adoption. :-)

Re:

[Smidge204]

So I will give you a database dump and an SHA1 digest for it. Produce a set of data that has the same SHA1 hash value while preserving the database structure and without introducing any "noise" that would readily suggest corruption of some kind.

Good luck.

We are not talking about fouling up somebody's torrent by passing out junk data blocks. We're talking about purpose-made backups of specific data types. If I make a backup of my credit history then I would expect, if I ever needed t restore from said backup

Re:

[pegr]

Let's rehash... (heehee!)

How many spaces are in this post? How about tabs? Yes, the stricter the data spec, the harder it is to alter without discovery. The orginal context was "disk"; the the data items I mentioned were certainly open to tampering. Now you want to redefine the data, that's fine. My observations still hold.

The main point was you could make it difficult but you couldn't make it impossible. The second point was that there was no way to define how difficult you could make it, only "more"

Re:

[rbanffy]

There are several ways to decrease the risk of a hash collision. The most obvious one is to publish both the SHA and, say, an MD5 of the same data. This way, anyone who wants a collision, will have to make a collision that happens in both algorithm.

You can also run the hash in your hard disk backwards too, so, unless your HD holds the longest palindrome ever, the same collision will not work.

You could also sha1 both even and odd bytes separately. You could also hash them separately with multiple algorithms.

Re:

[ars]

I know this seems obvious, but it actually wrong.

SH1 and MD5 are both basically the same algorithm, with some changes, so it's quite possible to find something that matches both.

And: how do you think a MD5 hash works? It takes two unrelated hashes, and combines them, since after all, how likely is it that a change will properly affect both hashes? Well you know the answer to that since MD5 has been semi-broken.

So far no one has come up with an unbreakable hash, it apparently is very hard to do. All the exit

Re:

[pegr]

All hashes are broken by definition. You can't have a value, one in 2^63, represent any arbitrary file of arbitrary length. As large as 2^63 is, there are many more possible files. So it's not that a particular hash has more than one matching dataset. Every hash value has an infinite number of matching datasets. The value of the hash is entirely based on the difficulty in finding matching datasets, a job that gets progressively easier with each passing moment.

Short answer? Like all crypto, hashes buy

Re:

[Control Group]

It reminds me of discusions of infinity I vaguely remember. Can you have more or less infinity? If the entire real number set is infinity, would only positive reals be considered infinity/2? Of course not... But only positive reals is less than all reals, is it not?

Yes, you can. But not that way. There are as many positive rational numbers as there are all rational numbers; the cardinality of the sets is equivalent: they are both countable. The integers, natural numbers, rational numbers, prime numbers are

Re:

[Control Group]

AHEM

That last line was supposed to be:

The proof [mathacademy.com] for this is particularly neat.

Re:

[rbanffy]

As pegr pointed out, there cannot be an unbreakable hash and hashes may only buy you time.

However as someone else pointed out, if you divulge further information on your file, while it won't make it impossible to have a different file with the same hash, it will make far less likely that someone can bring out a file with the same hash that also has that same length, is a valid bzip2 stream and, after decompression, has the same internal structure (is a valid OOo document). There is a finite number of files

Re:

[ars]

No, unfortunately this is incorrect. bzip2 probably will ignore data after the end of the stream, plus it has future usage blocks that are likely ignored. OOo also has areas that are ignored by the editor. (I'm generalizing, I didn't check either program, but many - can I say most? - programs have such areas.)

Using those areas you can add whatever padding data you need to "fix" the hash after adding your fake data.

Recording the file length makes it harder, true. But if you are the one generating the hash yo

Re:Good thinking

[islanduniverse]

I think the 600Gb storage capacity is a dead giveaway...

Re:Good thinking

[fbjon]

Why is this better than CD-R media?

1) Longevity/reliability
2) Transfer speed
3) (600 gigabytes) / (600 megabytes) = 1 024 times better

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Longevity - reliably is still a To be determined

look at how long it took other media Manufactures to admit a finite and shorter life of their products.
Who would have ever though that magnetic media would ever last longer than optical media ?
but it's a fact today .

Re:Good thinking

[Ed Avis]

3) (600 gigabytes) / (600 megabytes) = 1 024 times better

You clearly haven't been reading Slashdot this morning [slashdot.org]. In fact it's only a lousy 1000 times better - clearly a rip-off by the optical disk makers to give you less capacity than you thought.

Re:

[undercanopy]

Nobody is saying that one of these should be an entire backup solution. But if i have a 3TB database that needs to archived, i'd much rather use 5 of these than 4616 CDs, 639 DVDs, or even 15 ultrium tapes.

Data is getting so (too?) big that we NEED things this size just to be able to physically manage it all in any sort of convenient way.

Re:

[Ant P.]

At this price, I'd rather spend the extra for 6 discs and RAID5 the backup. Better than the risk of having five very expensive coasters.

Re:

[blueskies]

Good post. Except that LTO3 can store 400GB and LTO4 can store 800GB.

Re:

[norminator]

1) Longevity/reliability

I'm not convinced... What if this ends up being the next zip drive... only since it's optical, instead of getting a "Click of Death", we'll get the Flash of Death. It's an awful feeling, sitting at your desk, backing up 600 GB of hard work, when all of a sudden your $18,000 optical drive starts emitting bright flashes of light, and you know that both disk and drive are toast.

I can't wait.

Re:

[Jugalator]

When these are priced reasonbly, we'll probably have something like 10 TB drives so 600 GB isn't that much. Like 30 GB on a 500 GB drive of today.

Re:

[toQDuj]

Wasn't the trick behind holographics that a part of the pattern could be used to reconstruct the entire pattern? That would make restoring the data on a dropped (and shattered) holographic cube much more convenient..

Re:

[jimstapleton]

ever buy a CD-R? Not an -RW, just an -R.

Although, at that price, I admit, it seems exorbant, unless they expect thos things to have liftimes in the thousands of years range.

Re:

[Znork]

"unless they expect thos things to have liftimes in the thousands of years range."

Of course, as the drives are likely to be around for about five years and you'll be able to find a servicable used part for a decade after that, a thousand year life time might not serve much purpose.

The trouble with that kind of 'archival media' is that once you realize you need the archive you have nothing with which to read it anyway.

You're better off carrying the data live on some form of redundant array of inexpensive dev

Re:

[Znork]

"But RAID is not a backup solution."

It is if you have two inexpensive devices that you umount and power down. Or five. Or a second computer with the devices. The philosophy inherent in the concept Redundant Array of Inexpensive Devices, as opposed to the various forms of RAID, is to use lots of cheap hardware to replace expensive overengineered really (really, really, we promise!) reliable hardware.

Sure you can wipe one device with a misplaced rm. You can wipe a tape with a misplaced rewind (heck, I've seen

Re:

[morgan_greywolf]

ever buy a CD-R? Not an -RW, just an -R.

Yes. Do you think that CD-R and CD-RW technologies came out at the same time? CD-R technology was available several years before CD-RWs, so at that time it was CD-R or nothing.

Re:

[jimstapleton]

oh look, the read only of this tech has come out before the rw...

my point still stands.

Re:

[morgan_greywolf]

First off, CD-Rs are WORMs -- Write-Once, Read Many.

Secondly, if you read what I just posted, CD-Rs, the write-once tech, came out before CD-RWs. It's exactly the same case here.

So unless your point was to agree with poster you were replying to, which to me it didn't seem that way, then no, your point does not still stand.

Re:

[jimstapleton]

Synopsis:

the original poster complained there was no benefit that there was no benefit other than a new type of media, and it was write-once, which he couldn't see the purpose of.

I replied with my comment asking if he ever bought CD-Rs

The next person replied about CD-Rs and RWs not coming out at the same time, as if it were a counter to my original point.

I stated that I expect to see the same thing with this tech also.

You make your comment missing a huge part of the conversation somehow.

I write this post.

libraries?

[Anonymous Cowpat]

What kind of library has £9000 to spend on a single piece of computer hardware? It'd be substantially cheaper to buy a computer and four of those 1 TB hardisks that were mentioned yesterday, and they'd be rewritable!
Or they could spent the £9000 on, y'know, say... books.

Re:

[owlstead]

Dunno, a library of congress could store millions of these disks!

Re:

[KokorHekkus]

A library isn't always a public lending library. Another type of libarary that could actually might have use for this type of storage solutions (not necessarily exactly this one) is what I would call historical research libraries. Their function is to protect the material and at the same time make it more accessible to people. It's not unusual for these libraries to have a serious digitizing projects so that the originals don't have to be disturbed (especially if they are physically deteriorated). Just the

Re:

[PDAllen]

The type of library that is a copyright library (i.e. receives a copy of every published book) rather than a public library (which is what you are thinking of). Think about e.g. university libraries, the British Library, the Library of Congress, that sort of thing. Obviously a public lending library isn't going to want one of these things, but then you don't go to a public library when you want to find a bit of obscure data.

Re:

[infinite9]

What kind of library has £9000 to spend on a single piece of computer hardware?

The Library of Congress? They need to figure out how many times they can copy themselves to one disk.

And for that matter, the VW Club of America will need one to see how many VW Beetles they can cram into the drive.

I'll pass

[cowscows]

If the storage medium is anything other than a small, transparent, and slightly iridescent cube; then I'm not interested. Discs are so 90's.

Re:

[suv4x4]

If the storage medium is anything other than a small, transparent, and slightly iridescent cube; then I'm not interested. Discs are so 90's.

How about a little wooden ball with your name on it?

It is all about data transfer speed...

[ZombieEngineer]

From the article: Holographic storage offers extremely fast data transfer rates - currently up to 160Mbit/sec, though there are plans to increase this. When you have a multi-Terabyte system to backup AND verify within a short window (say 4 hours), speed trumps price just about every time. What is the cost of NOT having a backup? ZombieEngineer

Next time I'll hit the preview button.

[ZombieEngineer]

From the article:

Holographic storage offers extremely fast data transfer rates - currently up to 160Mbit/sec, though there are plans to increase this.

When you have a multi-Terabyte system to backup AND verify within a short window (say 4 hours), speed trumps price just about every time.

What is the cost of NOT having a backup?

ZombieEngineer

Re:

[AltGrendel]

Personally, I like the first one better.

Re:

[Znork]

"speed trumps price just about every time."

Of course, you can build a multiterabyte disk-to-disk backup system with gigabit transferrates out of common of the shelf hardware for less than $1000.

The cost of having backups can certainly be made a lot less than $18000.

Re:

[simm1701]

Yes but you do not build mission critical hardware out of off the shelf components.

You buy high availability systems, usually with redundancy and a rated uptime in the region of 4, 5 or even 6 9's

Take a fairly low end box in this space, a Clariion CX300 - got a small one for testing a couple of years ago for 25k (GBP) with 300Gb of storage (scsi 15k rpm) and thats before putting raid onto them.

Oh and if you want the remote copy software license not only do you need another box at the same price but you'll p

Re:

[Znork]

With ten years experience working with enterprise class mission critical systems, I've seen those arguments (and those systems) many times. And yet in my experience, the 'rated uptimes' seem to be some definition of 'when the system is up and working the uptime will be 6 9's', because between everything from bugs through randomly incompatible hardware through firmware upgrades through operator (yes, the vendors own certified technicians) error, the actual on-line time for that kind of system usually isnt ev

Re:It is all about data transfer speed...

[fireboy1919]

Holographic storage offers extremely fast data transfer rates - currently up to 160Mbit/sec, though there are plans to increase this...speed trumps price just about every time.

I could be wrong, but are you implying that people will use this because it's got 160Mbit/sec write time? Keep in mind that this is 20MB/sec. That's a little low for the standard harddrive, and you can increase it by adding more drives in a sequential raid.
If that's the speed, then it absolutely isn't a good reason to use this.

The only advantage this actually has is information density. One 600GB disc is going to be pretty tiny compared to an array of harddrives designed to get the speed up.

Is that worth it for a library or bank? My inclination would be no. A couple hundred harddrives in a SAN is probably a better idea.

The market will be those individuals that absolutely, positively need the discs to be tiny, and nothing else matters. Because this tech isn't going to do anything else better than what we've already got.

Re:

[springbox]

Yes, but having a bunch of cheap hard drives really isn't as portable and would probably use much more energy overall.

Re:

[owlstead]

160 Mbit/sec? That's about 33% of the speed of current hard drives, maximum. Remember, transfer speeds are normally measured in MB/sec (or, more accurately, MiB/sec) not Mbit/sec. And for hard drives there are RAID solutions readily available. The things that might be interesting for customers are reliability, power consumption and (kind of) storage space needed. It might be that these things beat hard drives in these sections. Storage capacity, speed and price of hard drives are definately not yet within r

Re:

[DragonWriter]

160 Mbit/sec? That's about 33% of the speed of current hard drives, maximum.

And 600GB on a CD-sized disk is a lot higher data denisty than current hard drives, and its probably more resistant to shock, etc. With a write-once disk, you aren't looking to replace hard drives in regular day-to-day use, its a archival, backup, and perhaps high-volume distribution medium (where you fill several of them with data, jump in a car, and drive to where you want your data to end up). Now, admittedly, I don't have the ki

But why?

[samael]

When 1TB hard drives are now making an appearance, why would you spend $18000 on a drive that stores data on expensive 600GB disks?

Re:But why?

[yakumo.unr]

Because magnetic media fails, badly, often, and at any time.
It is in NO way a long term backup solution.

Re:

[Benosaurus]

Because magnetic media fails, badly, often, and at any time.
It is in NO way a long term backup solution.

And you don't expect the first generation of this system to fail?! Heh.

Magnetic doesn't fail as much as you make it sound. We have 100s of TB backed up on 400 GB Tivoli tapes and rarely lose a tape. If we do, its not the media itself... a pin from a tape will get stuck in the drive (from the tape being mishandled -- someone dropped it a few times.) The media itself is still usable.

BTW...

Re:

[Znork]

Magnetic media fails if it's constantly used. Turn a TB disk off and store it on the shelf, and I doubt it will fail any faster than your average optical storage.

Either way, if you want to be sure about your archived data, forget 'backup' and 'archive' paradigms and keep multiple copies online on live storage where you'll actually note, and can recover from, backing media failures. Live storage is as cheap as media based backups and archives for most dataset sizes and purposes these days, and will only get

Re:

[yakumo.unr]

There was a recent google report that suggested otherwise, though this obviously isn't the same as just sticking them on a shelf.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/ 18/0420247 [slashdot.org]

(from the PDF)
"Overall, we expected to notice a very strong and con-
sistent correlation between high utilization and higher
failure rates. However our results appear to paint a more
complex picture. First, only very young and very old
age groups appear to show the expected behavior. Af-
ter the first year, the AFR of high ut

There is a need...

[msauve]

for a high density archival format, but I can't see where this even comes close.

The manufacturer rates it at 50 year archival life, with no specifics about how that number was derived (is that an average? guaranteed for every piece of media? until an error rate of "x" is encountered? under what storage conditions?).

It's a proprietary solution, from a single startup company - what are the odds that a reader is going to exist in 50 years? Note that the manufacturer specifically warns of a lack of backward compatibility when they state "Drive is backward read compatible for three generations; 18-24 months between generations." Having an archive of data which is inaccessible doesn't get you much.

Re:

[mal0rd]

Thanks for finding the information I was just going to lookup on their website. 50 years may not be optimal, but it's a lot better then the only competitors, hard drives or burned DVDs, which usually fail under 10 years. The fact that it's write-once is another plus, since even software bugs can't damage the data.

Your other point is valid, but secondary. If your DVDs or HDDs have degraded beyond readability, they're useless no matter how many readers you have. And if the life-span of the reader is longe

What makes you think...

[msauve]

that their "50 year" life is any more accurate than the "100 year" life [verbatim-europe.com] given for recordable DVDs? You just claimed that DVD lifetime is overstated by 10x.

Write once does not imply that the content cannot be damaged, or even that the media can't be written to further, only that it cannot be written with useful information (e.g. it may be possible to change bits from 0 to 1, but not the reverse).

Why do you think storing a few $18K readers would have better results in a obtaining a working device 50 years l

Re:

[suv4x4]

Evidence 1:
The manufacturer rates it at 50 year archival life, with no specifics about how that number was derived

Evidence 2:
Despite being available in research for over 40 years, it is only commercialised now

It's obvious: they just wrote few discs and waited to see what happens.

Re:

[suv4x4]

It's a proprietary solution, from a single startup company - what are the odds that a reader is going to exist in 50 years?

Just to clarify, CD/DVD/HD-DVD/BluRay - they are all proprietary solutions in the full meaning of the word.

Your second point has more merit, since this would look better if theys truck few partnership deals to create those drives/media, versus produce everything themselves.

But since it's pretty much a tight niche market yet, I suppose the big players were not interested (yet).

Pedantic...

[msauve]

I obviously meant "proprietary" in the practical sense. CD/DVD, etc. are well documented and have a high level of compatibility across a large selection of manufacturers, both for media and recorders/readers.
Haven't the early patents on CDs (which were introduced to the market in the early 1980's) expired? CD-R was introduced in 1988, so even those patents may have expired (or will shortly), at which point the format will no longer be proprietary, even in the pedantic sense.

In any case, CD and DVD technolo

Uses?

[CriminalNerd]

Personally, I think the only uses for a 600GB write-only-once drive are backups, a DYI Nuclear Weapons for Rising Countries Kit (or similar content), taking "snapshots" of the Internet, and storing the known digits of pi, largest prime numbers, and other interesting numbers.

Then again, there's also the thought about using them for file-servers, and server logs, but seriously, one-writes are not really that attractive given the price tags. Hopefully, the re-writable media/technology will be available within

Re:

[sd_diamond]

Personally, I think the only uses for a 600GB write-only-once drive are backups, a DYI Nuclear Weapons for Rising Countries Kit (or similar content), taking "snapshots" of the Internet, and storing the known digits of pi, largest prime numbers, and other interesting numbers.

But what do you do when Pi changes? Then you're hosed.

A real product?

[Random BedHead Ed]

Wow, a real product. Every time I read about holographic storage, particularly on Slashdot, it's in the same sort of context in which you'd read about quantum computing or Star Trek-style teleportation. Like this: "Scientists at (fill in name of university) have managed to get (name of particle) to (some verb), a first step toward what could one day be practical (quantum computing, space elevators, carbon nanotube frisbees, or whatever). They used a (system you'd never be able to afford) to (do something even your grandkids won't be able to do), and predict that the process will be commercially viable in (about the same amount of time it will take us all to get cold fusion reactors installed in our cars)." Nice to see something like this actually come to market!

Re:

[squizzar]

I agree with the parent on this. At least it's not vapourware.

Always the same debate with new technologies, especially storage - too expensive, something else is better etc. etc. Goes all the way back to floppy disks vs. ethernet. The first hard drives were around 20Mb, and cost a lot more than the 15 or so floppies they replaced.

What would be great is if someone knowledgeable had a look at the technology and made an educated guess as to whether it will be cheap in mass production. I'm pretty sure the f

Re:

[Robotbeat]

"A far more useful analysis would be whether this technology could be made cheap when mass produced."

Well, I did holographic research at my University, and the holographic plates we used were about $5-$10, if I remember correctly. That's a lot less than the $180 dollars, and those $180 disks are made of plastic, not glass like the plates were. Granted, the plates I used were for red light (same price for green light ones, though), not for blue light, but I doubt that if you can produce a million of these di

Re:

[osgeek]

We need go no further than Slashdot's search engine to nail these bozos: Same guys last year [slashdot.org] making claims that they were shipping that year. Here they are [slashdot.org] the year before along with some other crooks making claims. And earlier in 2005 [slashdot.org]... why do they get so much play for vapor?

Ooh, here's a good one on some guy trying sucker people with funding for his spintronics [slashdot.org] drive that will bring miraculous storage to the masses. He already has pricing worked out!

While I'm sure that sooner or later one of thes

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[osgeek]

What on earth are you talking about? Of course it's not a real product. It's vapor. Here's an article on Slashdot [slashdot.org] that's not about vapor. See the difference? One is a product that an actual reviewer was able to buy and get his hands on... the other one is just fanciful speculation.

I skimmed through the article looking for a reference to a real product that someone had gotten his hands on... nothing. Just more speculation on how so much gee-whizz-plenty storage will be used to make all our lives so w

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[kabocox]

Wow, a real product. Every time I read about holographic storage, particularly on Slashdot, it's in the same sort of context in which you'd read about quantum computing or Star Trek-style teleportation

I'm not even sure to treat this as legit till it's been in use for 6 months to a year. Holographic storage has seemed more of a funding black hole than fusion or Duke Nukem Forever. I'd love to see real fusion or holographic storage being sold and used, but I'm not holding my breath.

Help me...

[Yonder Way]

...Obi-Wan Kenobi; you're my only hope!

Ultra high definition media

[Koookiemonster]

One potential use I can think of is selling/renting really high definition movies, TV series or collections of movies. For example, 10 seasons of "Friends" in ultra high definition would surely take up a lot of space. For that use a single disc with a huge capacity is perfect.

The disc in question is much more elegant and cool than a stack of bulky, noisy hard disks. Elegant and cool may sound petty, but they sell for certain kinds of people with too much money. They even sell RCA cables for more than $18,000.

Re:

[Atzanteol]

I already have a location to store all the high-def "friends" episodes I could ever want. /dev/null...

Forget the capacity...

[macraig]

... holographic storage will be soooo much better for saving pr0n.

Good looking technology.

[mlts]

I hope InPhase can net some capital on their end so they can work on lowering the price.

I can see installing an autochanger using Inphase Tapestry based technology as a dedicated solution in large corporations to permanently archive large amounts of data. This would be installed side-by-side with existing technologies such as DLT 600 tape which would be used for rewritability.

I'm just glad to see something on the market after the decades of idle promises on holographic storage.

Their site

[suv4x4]

Is amusing. It's got the pointless wave abstract graphics I usually see on sites with nothing to say (now, of course, I'm not claiming this, these guys seem serious in general).

Their slogan is "data at the speed of light". Because, they use lasers and holographic technology, do you get it? It's a very smart slogan.

But the reason I'm writing this post is this site reminded me of the International Association of Virtual Reality Technologies (IAVRT) which was supposed to bring Neuronet upon us, and they wamnted to fund this by selling "neuronet domains". They have shut down for a "few weeks" until they hit some major partnerships. Quite some months have passed since.

Check their domain page still with the same message (and notice the uncanny similarities in design with InPhase Technologies):

Wavy green lines header [iavrt.org]

Bottom line is, wavy green lines aren't very convincing, we need high res demos of icy cubes storing TB of data, come on!

We need a new HTML/XML tag for currency values

[Yvan256]

[...] a 600GB disc will cost around $180 (£90) [...]

How about some kind of tag with the amount, the currency and the date? That way, the browser could show us the value in our own currency, checked against the exchange rate for that day?

Re:

[Yusaku Godai]

Because that would violate separation of content and presentation, and would require an ever-present internet connection to have any meaning whatsoever?

It's not a bad idea as maybe a feature in a web browser, but it doesn't make any sense an HTML tag.

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[Yvan256]

The tag would already contain the amount value and the currency. Without an internet connection it would display as usual but could at least display the currency of the amount. The "$" sign is used by the USA, Canada and Australia (and maybe others, I don't know). Of course you can assume it's in US dollars, but assuming does a lot of damage in a lot of types of informations: currency, lengths/weights, dates, etc.

As for violating the separation of content and presentation, I beg to differ. If the content is

This is STILL just worthless, and vapor...

[sirwired]

This product has been "Coming Soon" for a couple of years now. I think this is the third or fourth time this no-product startup has gotten an article posted on Slashdot. It is slow (180Mb/s is in no way "fast), under-capacity (600GB is a waste of time), overpriced, and unproven. If you want near-line storage, use SATA, if you want archival, use tape. I don't see much of a market for this thing.

SirWired

Puts me in mind of SNL

[u-bend]

At that price, it reminds me of a classic Fallon line, to the effect of:
"Yeah, I've got an idea for a car that runs on bald eagle heads and Faberge eggs."

Re:

[Angelwrath]

Its a brand new technology, which means that the initial models have to absorb or get allocated a lot of the development costs, and therefore the price restricts the models for only those who can afford it and have a genuine need for it.

Re:

[swilver]

I assume you mean 200 DVD's -- the exact reason why I just use hard drives for backup :)

Re:

[Doc Ruby]

At the nanoscale, you'll be surprised how interchangeable are electronics, magnetics, and photonics - all EM phenomena. And how everything useable is a "crystal", however aperiodic.

Re:

[Easy2RememberNick]

That's what I think too, why use discs? Sure the disc is a common form these days but something better must exist such as a cube or cylinder or maybe interlocking puzzle shapes that could be easily stacked for storage or the actual physical media. Credit card size is not too bad either (Constellation3D had FMD credit card shaped storage). Just design it so the same amount of information could be written to it as a disc, or more.

Who says bigger is better anyway? Maybe Holographic storage on small ty