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Holographic Storage For The Masses 80

Posted by timothy from the huddled-bits-yearning-to-breathe-free dept.
jmoo writes: "Ars Technica has an article on startup company looking to produce holographic storage for commercial sale. The company, InPhase, supposedly is backed by Lucent and is predicting storage densities of 300 gigabits per square inch." "Backed by Lucent" certainly sounds a lot less sketchy than the repeated but never confirmed claims of extremely dense storage using multi-layer CD-ROMs.
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Holographic Storage For The Masses More

Holographic Storage For The Masses

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  • ahem (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    perhaps holographic solutions will become more attractive when current hard drive technologies run into a brick wall. they keep making hard drives smaller, faster, powerful. and sturdy. Head crash? never had one? power consumption? good enough for what I'm doing.
  • http://www.c-3d.net/tech_frameset.html

    This tech is ready to go, they just need the industry to embrace them. (or e-race* them)

    Any spelling errors are due to the Author being a Dislexic, any other errors are due to the Author being the Author.

    * E-race:when a lesser technolgy is defeated, in a adoption or public use sense, by an infirior tech. ex. "Bata was e-raced by VHS"
  • Would the be a valid method to store quantium bits where a surface could store a 0 and a 1 at the same time dependant upon the angle viewed?

    Ignore this if I don't know what I am talking about. Just a brainstorm.

    ---
  • oh come on... you are just jealous you didn't think of it first ya little troll muffins...
  • dude...
    that asskicking link [fred.net] is HILARIOUS!

    you rock, even though i could easily kick your ass any day of the week. i love you
    xoxo
    -freq


  • I have a friend who worked for TeraStor, sadly, they went out of business last year.
  • We're talking about the Lucent who owns Bell Labs [lucent.com]. You know...the place that came up with such handy inventions as the "transistor". :-)

    But yeah, your comment is still funny. Holographic storage has been vaporware enough without getting the "backing" of a company in so much trouble.

    Who's gonna win this race? Holographic storage or cold fusion?
  • Finally the 3d flightsimulator like file management system of HACKERS can be realized! That movie was so ahead of it's time...ahem.
  • About 10 years ago I worked with a guy who'd worked at Bell Labs who gave me an artical on a 3D optical storage device Bell Labs had created(the artical was photo-copied from some technical rag, I don't recall which, he had first hand knowledge of the project). It used plastic cubes about 1.5 inches square and lasers. According to the artical and my colleague, the unit worked but wasn't economically feasible. The unit was about the 14x9x5 inches and stored about 3 GB. That was quite a bit in `90. The cubes looked like they could easily evolve into the thick rectangular storage cards used by HAL in the 2001 movie.

    The artical mentioned that AT&T (the commercial side of Bell Labs) was looking to commercialize the unit and had targeted an 18 month time frame. I suspect that it has never made it to the commercial arena because hard drives have become so large (storage wise) and cheap. Of course this is assuming that the technical issues could be resolved.
  • No, we're not missing anything. They don't mention thicknesses, and there are only 8 bits to the byte.

    square inch != cubed inch.
    300Gb = 37.5GB



    ---
  • And netscape?
  • How does being backed by Lucent make something last sketchy? Last time I checked Lucent wasn't doing well at all, enough to lay off 16,000 people...
  • It said square inch, not cubic inch... seems kinda strange, but there you have it.
  • Try 16,000. As a Lucent employee, I can tell you that rumors fly pretty fast around here, and I haven't heard a thing about us "backing" anything like this yet.

    -Legion

  • Getting ever further from the topic...

    Lucent's "change in direction" should be a good thing for the company; the previous CEO (boo, hiss) thought that copper was the way to go, and optical wasn't going to be very big. Despite what everyone else in his own company knew, he decided to table optical switch development, which put Lucent about 2 years behind everyone else in switching. We have Bell Labs, though. :)

    Note that I'm not particularly a big fan of some of Lucent's management (especially our former (*ahem*) OAM), but I do hope the company takes off again. I have stock, after all.

    -Legion

  • InPhase won't be the only startup trying to turn HDS technology into commercial products. Rivals reportedly include Holoplex Technologies Inc. (Pasadena, Calif.), founded by Demetric Psaltis, a professor of electrical engineering at California Institute of Technology.

    So rest assured that when they finally figure it out, there will be at least two other companies to immediately release similar technology, say they did it first, and apply for a patent or two on the subject, which will be granted regardless of Lucent's patent (industrial spying is real! no pipe dream is safe!). The competition will be firce, but by then 300 gigabits per square inch (but aren't holograms 3D?) won't seem like much. We have pushed magnetic technology beyond its limits and it's still going smaller; by the time this is commercialized it probably won't be such a big deal. cya in 20xx -- I'll bet 2010.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Even if Florescent Multilayer Disks can be produced cheaply (and they can), or a way found to make terabytes of holographic storage affordable on a consumer level, the introduction of such technologies would devastate existing investments in all sorts of technologies.

    Hundreds of billions of dollars in market value of very large companies would be wiped out in months.

    It is not in the free market's best interest to change things too quickly. Think of light bulbs that last ten years, or the still expensive and hard to find nickle-metal-hydride consumer batteries.

    Cheap 'n easy holo storage probably could have been achieved long before now; I've read about such research for almost twenty years. But investment is in hard drive R&D and manufacture now, and it's doing well for everyone.

    Sometimes the market giveth, and sometime it holdeth back, not maliciously, but because it is in an industry's interest to keep things as they are. The tech will be rolled out on a schedule to suit the industry's bottom line. It can't really do it any other way. The market would demand terabyte cheap storage, but the impetus will be to keep current tech until at least depreciation on plant runs out for hard drive manufacturing.

  • Until it's sold the the masses be it business or end user it will always be vaperware. never get your hopes up on new tech.

  • There's always room for JELLO!!!
    I still prefer the idea of holding gigabytes on a roll of Scotch Tape [slashdot.org]
    Will we ever see this technology, no, probably not. The important thing to remember is that this is what is possible, and it might spark new ideas that will become possible. Ever thought about what it was like to be the first to propose the idea of personal computers? (Altair was the first to actually get one to the public, not sure who came up with the idea) PC's, what a weird concept eh?
  • I hope they take the time to fully devlop this, just think if after everyone came together and created Cd's if they had steped back and look at it and devloped multilayerd cd's at the same time, we would have gigs in a cd, don't rush it boys get it right the first time. B/c the first time is what becomes the standard

    Just like Betamax, eh?

    --
  • Holographic storage measured in bits per square inch?

    --
  • I guess this makes my 2gig drive obsolete now (like it wasn't already). Hell, if I bought a new drive tomorrow it would be obsolete yesterday. Let's just hope this holographic storage idea isn't just theoretical vapourware.

    -*-*-*-*-*-*-*
  • yoink [slashdot.org]

  • Doh!

    300,000,000 /8 = 37.5 Gigs per inch^3, a much more respectible number.

  • Put your face close to the hard drive, and stare straight ahead. Move the hard drive away from your head slowly, focusing beyond the drive. a 3 dimensional pattern of bits will emerge before your eyes...

    rr

  • Bio-neural gel packs? Just think, with some cloning...
  • A couple of quick links from a google search:
    A Byte Magazine article [byte.com] from 1996.
    An article [rockwell.com] that was published in Scientific American.
    The latter link says that storing "trillions of bytes" in the size of a sugar cube seems possible.
    It is a "3d type storage"- with layers of data that can be read by varying the angle at which a laser is used to read it. (See the first article)
  • I think part of the problem is that before coming out with a commercial product, they have to make sure the device will work in real world situations, not just in a vacuum chamber mounted on shocks, etc. HDs deliever probably almost perfect data accuracy (and I had a bad drive for a while, if you lose even a small amount of data to corruption, all hell breaks loose), so until these devices work 999999/1000000 times, we won't be seeing 'em.
  • http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20010129S0074
  • The market doesn't like new technology because it makes their technology obsolete. The beauty of C3D is that their first generations of FMD drives will be backwards compatible with existing cd and dvd drives. Even better for producers, existing inventories of cd/dvd drives can be upgraded to also read FMD. I would think that current market conditions would dictate the quick release of FMD/DVD/CD disk changers for home theater systems. That would be followed by computer drives that would only receive limited market penetration until drives supporting both WORM (write once, read many) FMD and CD-RW media are released. Another angle that could lead to the rapid availability of FMD is that the PC industry, already in a bad situation due to high inventory and waning consumer interest, could see this as a badly needed jump-start. Not to mention that it would be the perfect answer to Apple's decision to include DVD writers in high end systems. http://www.c-3d.net/
  • I think it was more like around 3-5 years ago, there were several articles regarding 1cm cubed holographic storage devices being developed at Kyoto University in Japan. Haven't heard anything since...
  • Anyone else notice the tech using WinAmp to show off the 'new' technology ???
  • Spell laming poltroon.-AnaLfacE
  • Thats a hell of a lot of pr0n per square inch.
  • ...will be: "Help me, Obi-Wan, you're my only hope!". Not that funny, but is that what anyone else thought when they first saw that? Geez, that princess wasted a lot of space... she could have made it 2-D and have a much better bitrate!
  • Actually, you can't do math. 300gb/sq.in x 15.315 sq.in = 4594.5 gb. Which, when divided by eight, to go from bits to bytes, comes out to 574 gigabytes. And the volume only matters in terms of layers. The cool thing about holograms is that it makes a flat surface appear to have 3 dimensions. The reason holographoic storage is so promising is that you can theoretically have data stored at every point on a disc at an infinite number of angles. Then, by changing the angle of the laser, you change the data coming out of a given point on the disc. So it's surface area that matters. Now, if you were going to do a multi layered disc, where each layer reflects a different frequency layer, you would sort of worry about volume, but even then, it would be a matter of counting layers, not really of calculating volume.
  • Stop being a henny penny dooms-day fear-monger. It's people like you hyping the recession talk that'll make it actually happen. Just sick in the fucking corner.
  • Be very careful when making sweeping generalizations, not everyone is in the midst of significant layoffs and re-structuring their future direction. (eg from memory I have heard neither layoffs nor change in direction from Cisco, though I must admit the market tanked even them)
  • Well, I assumed that it could hold 300 Gbits on all planes, but of course, it could be more dense on one plane than another. Assuming that the material has the same density on the horizontal and vertical planes, all you have to do is raise the figure to the ^3 power. I dont really know enough about this though, so I may be wrong.
  • That would actually be a terabit, or 1/8th of a terabyte. so in reality you would need arount 14-15 disks. Either way, you have to count the volume, not the area. This is holographic storage after all.
  • oops sorry, im a dumbass, you were right. i just saw gb, and assumed too much... oops... ill go to bed now...
  • How did you get that figure? According to my calculations, 300/8^3 is 1406.25 GB per cubic inch, assuming the material is as dense vertically as it is horizontally... anyway...

  • My math IS correct. 575.3125gb is correct. However, mia culpa on my inability to express the units clearly. My thought processes were temporarily compromised by the thought of all that MP3 space!


    "A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --

  • The comments so far indicate that people are pretty doubtful about the future of holographic data storage, and rightfully so. What's been holding people back is the right storage material, and THESE GUYS HAVE IT! I worked with the founders at Lucent, and I've seen this system run. I can't speak for the other efforts out there, but this is for real.

    As for the storage density, the numbers they quote are for platter-type media, something about the thickness of a CD, not a "data cube". Although holographic storage is a 3D process, absorption and scattering by the storage medium currently limit the technique to fairly flat samples.

    Finally, why should the fact that this comes out of Lucent be encouraging? Because it's not just from Lucent, it's from Bell Labs. You know, the people who brought you the dial tone, the transistor, the communications satellite, the optical fiber, the laser ...

  • This is absolutely true. I used to work for Lucent Canada. We shared a building with Bell Labs and I got to know a few of the guys there. They showed me all kinds of crazy wacky stuff, including holographic storage. This has been a working technology for many years, but only in the last few has it been able to compete with standard technologies in performance and storage space.
  • What will be really cool is when the holographic projector can display your pr0n (or goatse) right in front of you!
  • Oh, what the hell happened here.... math please. just math.
  • we have 300 Gb/in^2, if we take this to a volume we get ~5200 Gb^(3/2)/in^3. so thats about 650 gigs. of course we use fractional 3/2 dimensional bits here. yours sincerely -- no thanks.
  • For those of us not interested in the meta-article, click here [eetimes.com].

    Of course, this would enable my dog to eat my p0rn collection and my copy of QIII at the same time.
    No doubt pissing me off and making one less dog in the world. Brant
    Brant
  • A post about a post about an EETimes story. . .no, I'm sorry, what did you call it? An "article"?
  • I would be interested in if this company plans to go public. That could be quite the stock.
  • not sure if anyone's been to this site, but holographic storage is a reality, albeit not necessarily in a form you were imagining. it's an interesting article worth a read. basicly, they can fit over a terabyte on a single dvd using up to a hundred layers. currently, each layer holds 4.7 gigs, so discs of 25-140 gigs are currently possible. a clip from the article:
    Research has shown that media containing up to a hundred layers are currently feasible, thereby increasing the potential capacity of a single card or disk to hundreds of Gigabytes. Use of blue lasers would increase the capacities to over 1 Terabyte.


    Increased Disc Capacity DVD data density (4.7 GB) on each layer of data carriers up to 100 layers. Initially, the FMD disc will hold anywhere from 25- 140 GB of data depending on market need. Eventually a terabyte of data on a single disc will be achievable.

    Quick Parallel Access and Retrieval of Information Reading from several layers at a time and multiple tracks at a time - nearly impossible using the reflective technology of a CD/DVD - is easily achieved in FMD. This will allow for retrieval speeds of up to 1 gigabit/second.
    http://www.c-3d.net/technology.html [c-3d.net] a white paper is available there also.
  • lots of you people have the wrong idea. holograms may look 3d, but they're stored on 2 dimensional media. hence, the storage capacity is in square inches, not cubic inches. makes sense.
  • I'm pretty sure this was on /. before, and NYT had a bit about it last week, but some company realized that the average roll of scotch tape that you can store about 300megs (or more?) of data in a holographic format, with the bonus that you only need to move the laser to read/write as opposed to having to spin the tape roll. And the way it's set up is such that you can simply use off-the-shelf rolls for this, no need for specially made tape.

  • What happened to Terastore, and their "near field recording"? Their web site seems to be kaput. When they first announced that they were developing products using this technology, it sounded impressive, but conventional magnetic storage seems to have improved more than most people expected. But still, they were supposed to have 10G on a cheap removable media, and IIRC they'd actually demonstrated a preproduction system.
  • yeah, but everyone is laying off... The recession is a real thing. People are scared for one reason or another.

    I was thinking about this though. Seems like awfully good timing to announce such a "breakthrough". I am VERY wary of anything that isn't concrete and I don't see in front of me. Hell, Transmeta even came out w/a concrete product and I am not impressed. We shall see.
  • TesaROM is cool. burn DVD on tape. include DeCSS. Get brick. wrap well in brown paper. use DVD tape to tape it all closed. send to RIAA. btw.. although off-the-shelf tape was used, it does need to be good quality tape: the glue layer needs to be clear, and both the tape part and the glue layer need to be very even in thickness. Basically, get good quality tape. Bad tape don't work. Tesa (who experimented with this) confirmed the story when I asked them about it. I think I have the docs around here somewhere...

    //rdj
  • I think the first time I held in my hands a colored glossy brochure on a holographic storage device was in 1978. It was going to be a credit card sized medium that held megabytes of data.

    I don't recall the name of the company, but I don't think it was a big company.

  • Actually, I'm more sure now that it was about ten years ago. I remember it was the same year as Desert Storm. :)

    Also, it wasn't Kyoto University, it was definitely in the USA. In fact I think it was Stanford University. I distinctly remember a picture of a white guy (i.e. NOT a Japanese guy) above the story with an American name holding a little plastic cube. Shrug. He could have been a white guy at Kyoto University I suppose :)
  • From the article:

    Diaz said he believes the technology will enable "point-of-sale kiosks" where consumers would purchase movies stored on very cheap media, or be incorporated into information systems for data archiving and retrieval.

    Huh? I can already buy movies stored on very cheap media - DVDs. The discs themselves aren't expensive - it's just that the MPAA (& assorted companies) charge through the nose for them.

  • 300 Gb = 293MB per inch^3.

    Therefore a 40gig drive would require 137 cubed inches - something that won't likely fit inside an open drive bay.
    (About the size of 4.5 VHS tapes)

    ---

    May the sacred call of the dogcow guide you down the path towards nerdvana.

  • I hope they take the time to fully devlop this, just think if after everyone came together and created Cd's if they had steped back and look at it and devloped multilayerd cd's at the same time, we would have gigs in a cd, don't rush it boys get it right the first time. B/c the first time is what becomes the standard


    ________

  • The article didn't mention cubic inches, it mentioned sqare inches. It didn't mention at what thickness the substrate could hold the 300Gb of data.


    Enigma

  • I don't know about 10 years ago, but I do recall seeing a lot of coverage of Tamarack Storage Devices developing holographic storage in 1993. Here's a link: http://www.manhattsci.com/technology/holographic_s torage/index.htm [manhattsci.com] for a brief summary and history of the company as well as a link to a page with an explanation of how the technology works. Tamarack Storage Devices was later acquired by Manhattan Scientifics, Inc. [manhattsci.com]

    For a wider overview of holographic storage, take a look at: http://www.enteleky.com/holography/ [enteleky.com] (Note: The site's title is "Holoquest.com" even though that is not the name of the actual web site.)

    Anyway, Yes, this technology has been talked about for seemingly forever. I'll believe it when I can buy one for my PC. My hope is they get it working soon enough that it isn't outstripped by "conventional" storage technology advances (remember bubble memory?). Back in 1993, a "HUGE" 1 GB drive cost $1000! Not only do they have to get the technology working reliably, but it must be able to compete economically in the marketplace.

  • is holographic storage and how does it compare to our current media. From the word holographic I assumed some sort of three dimensional storage instead of 2D disks, but the 100 gigabits/square inch threw that guess in the recycle bin. Could someone enlighten me?

    ---

  • Don't knock multilayer discs too quickly. Constellation 3D [c-3d.net] announced a fortnight ago that they have made a partnership [c-3d.net] to produce their flourescent multilayer discs.

    According to the article we can expect 100Gb discs and 10Gb credit cards on the market by mid-2002. C3D claims a limit of 1Tb (on a disc) that they will be able to reach in a few years. This is as promising as other holographic media, if not more so.

  • When CD technology was invented that the standards were finalized the only content control was the fact that a CD was 650 MB wide. Of course no one in the entertainment industry thought that computer hardware could *possibly* one day match and exceed their technology.

    It did, and because of that, there was a rather weak encryption placed on DVD's. They entertainment industry couldn't beleive that there was a *possibility* of anyone cracking CSS.

    Someone did.

    If you think that any new media type available in the next decade will be free of industry-mandated content controls, you're sorely mistaken. I'm not saying they won't be broken, they'll just be better than CSS.

  • That Lucent have invested in them doesn't say much. Lucent are investing in, and/or signing partnerships with lots of bleeding edge technology companies which may or may not pay out, but where the payoff if the manage to reach the storage goals set will be too large to be ignored.

  • Another one? (Score:3)

    by Dirtside ( 91468 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @07:28PM (#468355) Journal
    I found two other stories on Slashdot from the past year about holographic storage. Spiffy a technology as it sounds, it would be really nice if someone would just freakin' come to market with a product already.

    I remember reading about, hmm, it must have been almost ten years ago now, in the New York Times, and article about holographic storage under development at some university. They had prototypes that could do some huge amount of data (probably a gig or something, at the time that would have been huge) in a polymer cube one centimeter on a side.

    It would be SO nice if this would stop being a pipe dream and become reality. Disk access is by far the thing that slows me down the most when computing. Superfast, super-high density permanent storage keeps sounding almost too good to be true...

  • Exactly which Lucent are we talking about? (Score:3)

    by QuokkaNetGuru ( 234249 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @07:39PM (#468356) Homepage
    The Lucent which recently announced [cnet.com] 10,000 (yes, ten THOUSAND) layoffs?
    Or the Lucent whose stock has taken a dive [cnet.com] along with everyone else?

    And this "backing by Lucent" is supposed to inspire confidence?

  • The real deal (Score:4)

    by yetisalmon ( 70744 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @07:29PM (#468357) Homepage Journal
    Here's a direct link to the actual article [eetimes.com].

  • It exists (Score:4)

    by johnos ( 109351 ) on Wednesday January 31, 2001 @12:23AM (#468358)
    At a repletech conference three years ago,I saw a guy from Lucent give a talk about this. At that point, they had built a system from off the shelf components that worked. They had acheived something like 40gb on a 5.25" platter. He was predicting that they would be to market in three or four years with a 150 gb system. His goal was 250gb plus on a 5.25" disk.

    This was a real system. Based on the talk, my company at the time initiated some discussions with Lucent. My company was a Japanese giant that was into many kinds of data storage media. They took it seriously.

  • Movies of this stuff (Score:4)

    by Alien54 ( 180860 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @09:06PM (#468359) Journal
    I guess it wasn't interesting enough yesterday:

    2001-01-30 17:11:54 Holographic Data Storage (articles,tech) (rejected)

    I supply (again) the links to the Lucent [lucent.com] site, complete with the original press release [lucent.com] of 30 Jan 2000 with all the links including the movies [lucent.com], and everything else [inphase-technologies.com]

    Next time I'll remember to use smaller words in the submission.

    sometimes people don't get it even if you supply pictures.

  • Hmmm, According to MY calculations.. (Score:4)

    by GeneralEmergency ( 240687 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @08:51PM (#468360) Journal

    A standard CD has 15.315 square inches of active area on its surface.

    At 300gb/sq.in. a standard CD could hold 575.3gb. Thus it would only take two disks to finally get to my magical holy grail of owning my own

    !!!!****T-E-R-A-B-Y-T-E*****!!!!.

    I'll take two please.


    "A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --

  • IBM was working on this... (Score:4)

    by Wheel Of Fish ( 305792 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @07:29PM (#468361) Homepage
    I remember seeing an article on IBM's R&D site a few years about developing holographic storage. I never really heard much after that... This is what I managed to dig up on their current site... it's a nice little overview: http://www.can.ibm.com/he/multiversity/Sum98/holog raph.html -Gabe

  • Endless storage space (Score:5)

    by bluelip ( 123578 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @07:24PM (#468362) Homepage Journal
    Great, now when I find myself searchig for more spaces for my mp3/pron collection, I can just cook up a batch of jello. I can probably get a greater bit density by using different colors from the different flavors.

    Would I be able to store more info in blue-rasberry as opposed to cherry due to the wavelength difference?

    I guess this brings a new meaning to home-brewed system.

  • File This One With The Rest (Score:5)

    by istartedi ( 132515 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @07:25PM (#468363) Journal

    Another product for the "I'll care about it when I can input my credit card and order it" file.

  • Re:People need to realise that holographic... (Score:5)

    by deglr6328 ( 150198 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @07:58PM (#468364)
    storage does not merely mean layered storage, as in the scotch tape and multi layer DVD examples.

    In holographic storage a photosensitive medium is exposed to the interference pattern that is generated when an object laser beam, with the data encoded in it, is intersected by a second, coherent laser beam. The photosensitive medium will then replicate these interference fringes as a change in optical absorption. Data is retrieved from the medium by exposing it to light from one laser beam.

    In the scotch tape laser burning and multi layer DVD examples, the laser merely burns holes on a 2D surface in many stacked surfaces. To read back you just focus the diode lasers' objective lens on whichever surface you want to read. This is considered inferior to the data densities possible with holography.

    For a better explanation of how it works go here [tweak3d.net].


  • Sure it's 300 gbits per square inch... (Score:5)

    by tswinzig ( 210999 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @07:51PM (#468365) Journal
    But it's 500 feet tall!

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