Holographic Storage a Reality in 2006?

vitaly.friedman writes "What do you do when you're getting close to the limits of 2-dimensional optical technology? Well, how many dimensions do we have to work with?" From the Ars Technica article: "How much greater data density? In the Hitachi Maxell device, a single disc about 1 cm larger in diameter than a CD will buy you 300GB. By way of contrast, HD-DVD currently offers a maximum of 30GB on a 2-layer disc, and Blu-ray tops out at 50GB. Although upgrades are in the works that promise to increase the capacity of both of those formats, even the most pie-in-the-sky predictions fall short of what is planned for merely the first commercial generation of holographic storage. Future plans for that medium include boosting the capacity to 800GB in two years, and 1.6TB per disc by 2010."

Don't hold your breath.

[Anonymous Coward]

From the look of it, there won't be affordable writers for home use. So what's left? Another huge storage medium which could hold a lossless movie? But uh oh, MPAA must be spinning at the thought of this. At most we will see $LAME_MOVIE_SERIES all on one disc so you can be milked for cash once again.

Re:I don't want a disc 1cm larger than a CD!!!

[joshetc]

I agree.

Maybe not even 1CM.. 2-3CM would be just fine. An important question is why the hell does all of our media have to be huge? Something the size of a flash card or slightly larger would be MUCH better. I'd take a 2.5CM disc with 30GB storage over a 8-9CM disk with 400GB storage any day.

Imagine your whole 300+ movie collection weighing less than 5 lbs and taking a cubic foot of shelf space including the case!

DIsc?

[JanneM]

I don't want a disc. I want something small we're able to use in smaller portable devices, something where the medium doesn't need to move.

I want a cube. I want a cube about 1cm^3 in size. If that's too thick, a 2x1x0.5cm sliver is OK. Preferably translucent moss green, but other colors are of course also acceptable as long as they've appeared for futuristic storage in at least one reputable sci-fi movie.

To be slightly serious, there's non-aesthetic reasons for this as well. With optical storage it's much faster to move the beam around than the media, and with rotating media your seek and read times alike are limited by the rotation speed.

But mostly I just want a translucent green block because it's cool. Bonus points if there's a small LED inside making it glow.

Check out millipede

[Maury Markowitz]

1Tb / 1 in. This holographi stoage is nowhere near as good as millipede.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Millipede [wikipedia.org]

Better late than never...

[frostilicus2]

Its interesting how some tech predictions can be so wildly wrong. I read some advice in a magazine about 9 or 10 years ago which read something like this - "Don't buy a DVD-R drive, within a year or so they'll be replaced by holographic storage". I waited, but it just never came. Holographic storage has been just on the horizon for so long and never materialized, so its really great that a workable solution has been developed for technology with such promise. A little late, but better than not at all.

Not for mass market...

[LordVader717]

As I understand it, these discs are meant almost exclusively for backup and storage purposes. The thing about HDDVDs and BVDs are that you can press them in a production line for a few cents, while these things are a little more complicated.

Still Disc

[Doc Ruby]

Why do these discs have to rotate? How about rotating just the spindle, inside the hub, directing the read/write laser? The reference laser for interference can shine from a fiber around the circumference, or from one side or the other. Rotating the disc is a waste of energy and time.

Re:1 CM larger?

[julesh]

Not to mention the fact that one of the reasons CDs/DVDs are the size they are (12cm) because it's the widest that can fit in a standard 5 1/4" drive bay (about 14.5cm) with enough space left at the sides for a tray open/close mechanism. These new disks are the same size as a 5 1/4" disk (13cm), which leaves just enough space at the side for guide mechanisms. So we're going to have to push these disks in like floppies. Hope they're not susceptible to scratching.

Re:A backup solution

[Lord_Dweomer]

Actually I think storage IS still a problem today. Not necessarily the space for storage, but the durability of it.

For example, my main concern with this new storage is that it will hold a ton, but will still only have the couple year shelf-life that DVD-Rs and CD-Rs have.

As storage space increases but shelf-life lags behind, it becomes increasingly riskier to actually use that full amount of space because you're basically putting more of your chickens in one basket.

Does anybody know of any current developments that are working to solve this issue? Is having a home server the best way to reliably store all those old CD-Rs?

Yea I won't lose that...

[djtachyon]

I have a hard enough time keeping track of my cd's ... as if I won't lose something the size of a quarter.

Re:DIsc?

[Finn61]

Maybe this IBM Millipede [ibm.com] thing would float your boat. It uses nanotechnology to push indentations into a plastic card.

I think they're working on the translucent green part now.

Don't make them too small, dammit.

[WWWWolf]

I have a belt bag for my Nintendo DS. I keep six GBA games on the side pocket. GBA games are small enough, yet not too small, easy enough to handle. But currently, I'm keeping one Nintendo DS game in the console itself and keeping the others in my bag in the retail packages. DS games are much smaller than GBA games. I keep worried that I might lose them. I'm trying to come up with a decent, safe enough solution. (Let's see if I can find my old wallet that had all those pockets, that ought to do the trick...) I always get the same sort of worries with memory cards, SIM cards, etc...

The point is, the smaller the storage media comes, the easier it is to lose.

I'm all for 1 cm disks, as long as they come with a caddy that is half the size of a 3.5" floppy.

Re:1 CM larger?

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason CDs are 120 mm is because that size holds 74 minutes of 16-bit stereo audio. The original specification presented by Philips was 115 mm with 14-bit audio and 60 minutes of storage. However, Sony wanted the extra storage and audio quality (I presume they had a reason behind this -- perhaps the longest LP ever made was 74 minutes long?)

Re:1 CM larger?

[maxwell demon]

I've heared that the reason was Herbert von Karajan complaining that Beethoven's 9th symphony, when played correctly, would not fit onto the disk as originally specified.

1 GB on a fingernail.

[RonTheHurler]

Hmm. 50 GB on a CD seems like a no-brainer considering what I just bought today.

I got one of those new "chocolate" cell phones. Cool. It takes a Micro-SD memory card, so I went to my local computer superstore to get one.

A one GB micro-SD memory card cost me $74.00. I'd never seen one before, and when I opened the package I was afraid the wind would blow it away. It's litterally smaller than my little fingernail and about as thick as a potato chip. A 7x7 grid of these cards would be 49 GB, and easily fit within the bounds of an ancient 1.44 MB floppy disk case. Hell, you could fit three or four layers of 7x7 grids of these things in that case.

Ok, so $3626 might be a bit pricey for a movie disk, but the technology is there. It's just a matter of price. Remember, all the features in this $149 cell phone would have cost well over $Ten Grand thirty years ago and would have required a suitcase full of hardware too.

I predict than in 20 years or less, we'll have terrabytes on disks the size of a quarter.

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