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Holographic Storage Overview at CNET 119

Posted by timothy from the smoosh-smoosh-smoosh dept.
encebollado writes: "CNET has an article about how holography is being used to create next generation storage devices. The researchers promise they'll beat out DVD by an order of magnitude." Actually, it's an overview with four separate articles -- no bets on when the technology covered will really be available though.
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Holographic Storage Overview at CNET More

Holographic Storage Overview at CNET

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  • Why we don't have this tech yet... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    A lot of people are probably asking why we don't have this technology yet.

    One possible answer is because of the sensitivity of holographic equipment to vibrations. A hologram encodes phase differences between laser beams. Errors in the phase encoding mean errors in the data retrieval - you get a blurry or disjoint hologram, or you lose your data.

    Light is in the hundreds of nanometers range of wavelength. This means a vibration in the equipment (a movement of one part relative to another) of only a tenth of a micron can completely throw the phase encoding out of alignment. Imagine a tape deck whose heads needed positioning to submicron precision.

    Making holographic images is therefore rather difficult if, say, a large lorry rolls past your window. A hard-drive [about.com] with the same problem would be absolutely useless.

    So until a suitably hard substrate can be found on which to engineer this equipment, it's only a pipedream. Maybe nanotechnology will create such a material ... I doubt it'll happen before then.

    • "On April 8, in a suite at the Venetian Hotel, the invited video pros got their first look at Tapestry."

      Due to the spectacular demo's that was displayed, and the description given of the technology,one can see it's robustness. It's a solid technology that works. Unfotuntely, because it's so fragile, some think tank has to figure out how to manufacture and distribute it.
    • You didn't read any of the articles, did you? You can admit it, otherwise you'd know that the reason you give isn't the ones given in the articles about why it's not out en masse.
  • I am SO SICK of hearing about this damn holographic storage. It has been polluting print media with wild-eyed hype since the days before Internet. I remember reading about this very thing back when Winchester was shipping 32MB 5.25" hard disks.
    "Two to five years away" my ass.

    Call me when it's in stock. Maybe Duke Nukem Forever can ship on Holographic crystals.
    • Look at the name of this site. "News for nerds...". If you want a review of what's out, go to Tom's Hardware [tomshardware.com] If you want to know what he might have on his site in 5-10 years, then you look here.
    • You think that's bad, at least twice a decade since the fifties there's been a big media whoop about how videophones are the next big thing.

      I'm in no hurry for videophones myself, just tired of the stories. As for this new storage technology, they'll sell the media as something awkward, unprotected and easily damaged, just like CDs and DVDs, so I yawn in their general direction.

      • I'd wager a reason videophone has never reached any kind of widespread acceptance is that getting decent video over a POTS line isn't happening.

        Which kind of makes me wonder why the phone company doesn't push ISDN for residential phone services more aggressively (like subsidizing basic ISDN-compatible phones).

        Widespread adoption of ISDN for phones *would* enable a pretty decent adoption of videophones as the bandwidth and latency to support reasonable video would be there.
    • ...Since I submitted this a couple of days ago:

      100+GB samples in 2003 [inphase-technologies.com] Apparently they have prototype hardware working today.

  • i dont see why this is a surprise to anyone. it is plainly obvious that there is only so much data that can be stored on a two-dimensional device. i, personally, think that if it weren't for the inhibitants of ancient (5-10 year old) technology, this form of storage would have manifested itself much sooner. i mean, think about it. the early forms of data storage were pretty one dimensional. your data could be a magnetic blip on a reel that was spinning in one direction. to get back to it, you had to spin all the way back to the real. next came floppy disks which added another dimensions. true, to get back to your data, you have to spin the disk completely around again, but at least you can use cylinders to add more storage space. three dimensions comes rather naturally along that pattern. what's next? obviously, time-coded storage - the fourth dimension.
    • time-coded storage - the fourth dimension.

      I can see it now... "I wonder why I can't find the files on my new temporal disk?"
      runs diagnostic program
      "Lets see, sector 7, track 9, layer 8, tuesday"
      checks watch
      "well shoot, it's only monday, guess I'll have to wait until tommorrow to watch Episode II"



    • But once get past this third dimension data storage and try to move into fourth dimension, time, data storage, then we will need time machines to access that data. You know that word document you saved that you were supposed to send to your boss but didn't? Well now, in order to get it back before you are fired, you have to travel back in time. Fourth dimensional storage is extremely far off, that is if time travel even is possible.

  • Professor Moriarty (Score:3, Funny)

    by dfn5 ( 524972 ) on Thursday June 20, 2002 @03:05PM (#3738087) Journal
    Every hologram storage unit will come with a demo Professor Moriarty simulation that will commandeer your computer until you discover a way to beam him out.
  • "The theory of holographic data storage is nearly 40 years old. Major companies--IBM, Rockwell, Lucent, Polaroid, and Samsung--have spent millions studying it, not to mention research subsidized in the '90s by the American taxpayers through the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. "

    IBM sold much of their magnetic HDD to Hitachi. Maybe they made a breakthrough in holographic storage that makes it cheap enough to become mainstream.

  • Id rather have holographic WOMEN than holographic STORAGE.

  • "an overview with four separate articles" (Score:4, Funny)

    by jeffehobbs ( 419930 ) on Thursday June 20, 2002 @03:09PM (#3738114) Homepage

    Actually, it's an overview with four separate articles...

    It's interesting to note that articles about holography can be broken/cut into multiple pieces, and each piece will retain a full and exact copy of the original article.

    ~jeff
  • How do we know if its really there?

  • my eggs are in the IBM basket (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fons ( 190526 ) on Thursday June 20, 2002 @03:10PM (#3738128) Homepage

    interresting timeline

    - IBM has lot's of hard-disk related technologies patented
    - IBM has a relativly flourishing HD business
    - IBM sells said HD activities (except R&D)
    - IBM breaks storage records in lab with new technology

    => I'm betting IBM will come out with a new kick-ass storage technologie shitin the next 5 years
  • Will already beat DVD media by an order of magnitude approximately.

    Holographic 3d optical storage has been being promised as a future tech for a decade at least.

    For now, what i'd rather is a new optical format that stored 50-100GB on a polycarbonate disc, writeable in 1-2 hours or less. The technology is there already, just got to get standards people to agree to the little details.

  • It's not about how many bits you can store (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Erotomek ( 584106 ) on Thursday June 20, 2002 @03:14PM (#3738152) Homepage

    "CNET has an article about how holography is being used to create next generation storage devices. The researchers promise they'll beat out DVD by an order of magnitude."

    Holographic memory is not a simple metter of more bits per cm^2 or whatever. It's a different kind of memory, where every part stores the whole picture, i.e. when you break such memory into two halfs, every part still has the entire content, only with lower quality. Also, there are no fixed limits on how much information you can store on hologram — you can always store something more, which will lower the quality of the rest of stored information, but you won't hit any fixed maximum number of bits, like with standard types of memory. Saying that it "[beats] out DVD by an order of magnitude" is totally ignoring the most fundamental features of holographic memory.

    • If you've got lower quality bits, then do you have bits at all?

      Visual holograms can be broken in half and you can see the image through a smaller window, but half the actual information is lost per piece. There is a limit, like anything else we have so far.

    • You do have a hard limit. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Christopher Thomas ( 11717 ) on Thursday June 20, 2002 @03:46PM (#3738390)
      Also, there are no fixed limits on how much information you can store on hologram - you can always store something more, which will lower the quality of the rest of stored information, but you won't hit any fixed maximum number of bits, like with standard types of memory. Saying that it "[beats] out DVD by an order of magnitude" is totally ignoring the most fundamental features of holographic memory.

      The problem is, if I don't care about the quality of the data retrieved, I could use /dev/null to store data and /dev/random to retrieve it and claim as much space as I want.

      If you need to get your data back intact - i.e. with enough fidelity for you to rebuild the original data without loss - there turns out to be a hard limit to how much you can store with a holographic storage medium. The exact limit varies based on the geometry of the setup and of the holographic medium, but can be calculated. You can also measure it directly for any real system, which is presumably what the company involved did when citing storage densities for its prototype.

      So, while the accessing method is very different, the storage limit for holograms scales in the same way as storage limits for other types of device (in this case, with the volume of the holographic film IIRC).

    • Yes it is.

      Holograms don't store the whole picture in each part. You've been reading too much Dorling Kindersley.

      What makes a hologram is that the picture changes with the viewing angle, so that each eye gets a different image. The difference between a true hologram and those lenticular postcards (usually of statues of the Virgin Mary in my experience) is that the picture changes proportionally with the angle, wheras the postcards have only two pictures, and you need to ensure each eye is within the correct viewing space for the appropriate image.

      If you cut a hologram in half, and then look right at an angle through the glass, you can often just about make out the objects which appear (when viewed head on) in the part you removed. Information (bits) have (has) been removed however, as the information about what that object looked like head on is no longer present in the remainder of the hologram -- only the information about what it looks like from that extreme angle. The additional information is stored in diffraction patterns in the depth of the photographic emulsion used for this type of gift-shop hologram, as well as across the height and breadth as in typical photographs.

      Thus the illusion that "each part of the hologram contains all the information" is due to the fact that with typical holographic subjects most of the information is redundant, as it consists of images of the same object from slightly different angles. In commercial storage, it is not likely that the bits will be used soley to provide redundancy in this way -- the point definitely is about getting more bits on.

      • When the aliens come, they will look like us, talk like us and think like us. We'd better have some big guns waiting.

        If we assume your premise is correct, wouldn't the proper response be to make sure we DON'T have big guns waiting? That way the aliens wont have them either.

        -
  • The problem with the technology as it 'exists' right now is that you can't create master originals, and create thousands of copies from a master. From the article "This means that they can't be used for mass distribution of consumer content"

    With this limitation, an important consideration becomes how do I get my data onto the medium? For example, assuming you have 500 gigabytes of data (pr0n,mp3s...) , how long will it take to put on these disks? The speed bottleneck becomes the computers ability to process the data, not the storage device itself.
  • Like a recurring infection, the "holographic storage" demo gets trotted out to the media every three to five years. Every time, the press breathlessly regurgitates claims of unbelievably storage capacities. Every time, IBM claims that it's "a few years away from shipping" the technology. And every last time, it never happens.

    I first remember seeing IBM say that they were "a few years" away from a working implementation in Byte magazine...in 1983.

    This isn't so much a vaporware story as it is the vaporware story of our generation. Expect Xanadu, Duke Nukem Forever and Debian/Hurd to ship decades before you ever see functional holographic storage in the consumer market.

  • OK OK (Score:3, Funny)

    by qslack ( 239825 ) <qslack@@@pobox...com> on Thursday June 20, 2002 @03:24PM (#3738232) Homepage Journal
    This is all well and good, but how many Libraries of Congress can this new technology hold? What is its bandwidth in LOC/s?
  • So, we're one step closer to those cool data crystals in B5. I sure would love to carry around everything in a rockin my pocket...
  • Actually, I -believe- that a number of years back, IBM's R&D portion of their HDD company (now being sold off), did research into a sort of HDD that was a 3D cube. They would shoot a set of lasers into the gelatin-like cube, (yeah, yeah..a gelatinous cube), and where the two lasers met, they would leave a point of data.

    A 1-inch by 1-inch by 1-inch cube could hold 4 Tb. The biggest problem, of course, was that the gelatinous cube they were using was just a write-once sort of thing. They didn't have a medium they could re-write on.
  • ...when all these technologies hit the consumer. Just think what will be available on ftp/web/file servers, for the agerage user! Imagine logging onto gnutella servers and seeing that the average host has a terabyte of media shared? The possibilities are absolutely astounding... but admittedly they're being announced far too often. Why lure the consumer into their pipe dream and get their hopes up? I know that these technologies are in fact real, but come on! How long will it actually take before Dell starts shipping these storage devices instead of IDE/SCSI drives? 2 years? 3years? 4 or more?

    I'm all for this foray into the what-if scenario's, but there has to be a limit! Please someone wake me up when they are available at Future Shop [futureshop.com]!
    • Imagine logging onto gnutella servers and seeing that the average host has a terabyte of media shared?

      This proves the theory that technological advancement is driven solely by the desire for porn and pirated software.

    • Oh yeah -- that will be astounding all right... Who really wants to grab a terabyte over their dial-up connection? That would only take 11 years or so.... What about 512k DSL? Only 6 months to grab that terabyte... 1.5Mb cable modems? A mere 2 months! The amount of storage that is CURRENTLY AVAILABLE already exceeds our capacity to retrieve it... Do you really think anyone who shares files is truly limited by storage, especially in these days when a 100 GB hard drive can be purchased for a few hundred bucks? No, of course not. They're limited by content -- i.e. finding enough content to actually fill up the space they've already got. Start thinking about the terabyte storage when we have faster internet connections...
      • i've left ftk-gnutella running for over two months before constantly seraching every 5 mins for the same keywords, and downloaded all files which match my criteria. this was done at work over fiber, and yes, I didn't monitor it at all and filled up a 60 GB HDD.

        internet connections will become faster.
        • So your experiment proves what? That it took an entire two months to find 60 GB of content that simply matched a keyword? How much of that content is actually useful to you? I seriously doubt that ALL of it is worthwhile....

          Even at your rate, you'd need 3 years to find enough content to fill up a terabyte...

          Would a faster internet connection help you? I doubt it. Would a terabyte hard drive help you? Only if you wanted to keep EVERYTHING you found, and didn't want to upgrade your storage for 3 entire years...

          You have also left out part of the equation: filtering the content that you've downloaded. Where will you find the time to actually REVIEW that 60 GB of data to see if it is worth keeping, to see if it is really what you want, and to decide if it is worthwhile sharing with others? It will take a while - even for 60 GB.

          How long will it take you to validate a whole terabyte???

          The problem isn't storage, and it isn't bandwidth; it's finding/creating/consuming useful content...
  • Blu-Ray [matsushita.co.jp] already beats out DVD by over half an order of magnitude.

    --Blair
    "Tomorrow: we already have flying cars, we just don't know where the 'Deploy Control Surfaces' button is."
  • From one of the four articles..

    "Existing storage technologies are starting to reach the point where they can no longer advance," says Skip Kilsdonk, the InPhase vice president of business development.

    They were saying the same thing 10 years ago about SISC chips and probably IDE hard drives. I think blanket statements like this are dangerous. Never underestimate the power of innovation (or luck)!

  • The researchers promise they'll beat out DVD by an order of magnitude.

    An order of magnitude in a binary system? hexa? octa? unary?

  • "write-only media" DOH! (Score:3, Funny)

    by RockyJSquirel ( 412960 ) on Thursday June 20, 2002 @03:49PM (#3738413)
    The "InPhase plan" page says
    Likewise, the company says its research shows that the media can be used in a rewritable format but won't discuss specifics for anything but its write-only product.

    They must have meant "write once" or "read only". A disk you can write to but not read from would be less useful, eh?

    Rocky J. Squirrel

  • Karma Whoring (Score:2, Interesting)

    by MrSkunk ( 544767 )
    There is a pretty nice article over at How Stuff Works [howstuffworks.com] with a breif explanation of the history and workings of Holographic Storage Devices [howstuffworks.com]

  • Cube storage on Silica 48E (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 20, 2002 @03:51PM (#3738435)
    I work for Tilc heavy industries and whatever I say here is not endosed by our corporation.

    We have been researching into holographic storage since way back in 94. Dr. Erwin Gupta, our senior researcher is known for his work on such storage (AFAIK he was one of the main proponats of DivX (hehehe)).

    We are using Silica 48E in crystalline format to form a 3D latics that can store and information. Now for the nice part, our sturcute XI can (3 cm - 2 cm - 2 cm ) can store informations in the magniature of 78TB. Information retrival is only hapmpered by speed of axuliary pheripherials. But our test machines are now running with optical conntections to the cube, and thus storage and retrival is trivial.

    The only problem we have is, how to format such huge quantities of information. By format I mean, how to place it in a viable layout. I feel this is one area where we have constantly lacked. In the past we've been using standard methods of storage (Unix filesystem type layout and b-tree, cMax cube), but this lead to storage being shrunk down by a magnitude of 15. For information that is stored in bulk (eg: Large archives that are interlaced raw, this is not an issue).

    Our partner, IBM has also been very interested in the Silica 48E strucute, they are also going into research with us and I felt this was one of the reason for the closure of their HD shops (since they've felt the limit of HD's being reached and thus they are moving to better media).

    Silica 48E can be mass produced cheaply, the storage opens to almost limitless quantities (Oopes.. Sorry If I'm doing a Gates 64k again). Currently we are stress testing the crystals and we have put the entire library of congress (Storage A-F (Pre 94)) in 2 crystals with an induced Cmax filesystem. Retrival is an issue here, cause such a large archive needs better tools (ours is only hardware).

    I dont see crystals going into consumer use in the near future, give it 5-8 years and you'd probably seem them at the high end. Given that, it's cheaper to produce on Silica 48E cube than make 3 DVD's :> The military,government and archives are our first customers, we also have strong interest from world libraries and other such entities. IBM might go into production of Silica 48E at their Phillipines plant staring Q3 04.

  • Sorry for not getting all the details right, but my copy is at home...The june issue of IEEE Computer magazine has a short article about a company that has developed a Holographic DVD storage unit that I found to be quite interesting.

    It stores about 100 GB worth of data, so in that regards it puts the standard DVD to shame, but at the same time its access time is 1.5 or so times as fast as standard DVD due to the parallelism inherent in the storage mechanism.
  • They ought to be talking to George Lucas today," Miller said, for no apparent reason whatsoever.
  • The real problem with holographic technology is that it is the next generation of storage medium.

    As such it will constantly be just over the horizion.

    Stick some project managers on the press releases, have them assign milestones and targeted deadlines.

    That way we can claim that it's only 3 years overdue.
  • Hmmmmmm, seems to me we arent really thinking in the dimentions available. Cant they come up with something NEW!
  • Between Blue Laser and Holographic technology, one thing is definitely going to be part of any new storage technologies is DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT UP THE YING-YANG. This new storage system will have so many copy locks you are going to want to get out the bagels and cream cheese. The RIAA and the MPAA will not let this new technology out the door until and unless it is 100% locked down.

    You will NOT be able to store your Warez collection in these new formats. You will not be able to create an MP3 collection to die for. You will prolly be able to store your pr0n provided it doesn't have digital watermarks all over it identifying that it's property of Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler, Screw or whatever.

    This is going to be the huge carrot the MPAA and the RIAA dangle over our heads to make us accept their draconian content control measures. "Want this spiffy new storage format? You're gonna have to accept Big Brother along for the ride too."

    It's tragic...I would be excited about all this. Blue Laser technology in particular is a great step forward. But we will pay dearly for this step forward in loss of freedom to use content as we see fit. [sigh]
  • "no bets on when the technology covered will really be available though"

    Didn't you know? Its five years away, of course.

    Just like everything else...
  • After more than 30 years of research and development, a desktop holographic storage system (HDSS) is close at hand. There is still some fine tuning that must be done before such a high-density storage device can be marketed, but IBM researchers have suggested that they will have a small HDSS device ready as early as 2003. These early holographic data storage devices will have capacities of 125 GB and transfer rates of about 40 MB per second.

    From http://www.howstuffworks.com/holographic-memory2.h tm

    I think I have more chance of being fellated by Madonna, the Queen, or your wife...

  • Im holding out for what Opticom will come out with. They have been developing this for the last 6-7 years and is close to a product that can be released. With Intel involved into this - who can say what its going to end up as...

    A quote from their page:
    The equivalent of 400,000 CDs, or 60,000 DVDs, or 126 years of MPG music may be stored on a polymer memory chip the size of a credit card.

    Thats a completely organic, non-volatile, fast, solid-state, scaleable and CHEAP memory. If that amount can fit on a credit-card, its not a long leap to imagine haveing your own personal mirror of the entire internet in a cigatette-size box!

    http://www.thinfilm.se/html/technology.htm [thinfilm.se]

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