Holographic Storage Solution! Look to the future! (About a Year)

doondoon

doondoon

Well-known member
This is about a year off... perhaps a bit more for those of us who may not want to drop the $$$, but it's incredibly promising.

I just had a conversation with someone who works for a company called "InPhase".

InPhase leads the way for holographic storage which is a technique that's been in development since 1994. Very BASICALLY explained (in case you don't already know), they split a laser beam in two; One of the beams stores the information and the other references the information.

Information is stored to (or read from) the beam via a device called a spatial light modulator (SLM) which takes whatever digital signal "0's & 1's" and converts them (the digital information) into light and dark pixels. Hey- What was that thing in "Back to the Future"... you know in the crazy doctors souped up Delorean. The Flex Capacitor?? Are the "SLM" and the "Flex Capacitor" brothers or what?? Things are getting weird.
http://www.dvxuser.com/V3/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=45#

Apparently the first machine will hit the market within about a year. It will write 300GB onto a disk made by Maxell via this new technique @ 16Mbps per second. That's 300 minutes of DVCPROHD storage/archiving! That's 5 hours of DVCPROHD! Jeeez I hope my math is right?

By 2008 they plan on having the storage capacities up to 800GB and by 2010 1.6Terabytes @ 960Mbps per second.

The first unit is expensive (15K). The 300GB media is $120 a piece, which actually doesn't seem all that bad considering it will store 5 HOURS of DVCPROHD. However these prices will drop dramatically with in a short time I'm sure as is true with all new technology.

I know that this is a ways off.... But just think of your HVX-200 in a year from now. P2 card prices will have dropped, P2 storage capacities will have GROWN, and the workflow will have been WORKED. In unison with this holographic storage you've got a practical HD solution with solid archiving for tens of thousands less than what has ever been available. http://www.dvxuser.com/V3/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=45#Holographic Storage Solution! Look to the future! (About a Year)
 
Sorry- those two "links" above were actually supposed to be smiley faces that I inserted with in the text.... but I did something wrong and it didn't work. They're not information links or anything like that.
 
doondoon said:
Apparently the first machine will hit the market within about a year. It will write 300GB onto a disk made by Maxell via this new technique @ 16Mbps per second.
Click to expand...

Do you mean 16Mbps? Mbits? 'Cause that's too slow initially for a workable solution - even for archiving.

I look forward to 960Mbits 'tho!
 
not only old news, but very suspect too, as we are waiting for more than 10 years on a similar technology for recording onto the sticky TESA-tape..... and i remember when in the ninties they were talking about "working prototypes" and they had numbers of estimated capacities too as they do have for holographic storage in this case. But both of them is old news and both of them get refreshened about once in 3 years..... So happy anniversary, old news!

Until any of these storage techniques are presented with fully working prototypes on the world's biggest electronic fairs, they are just laboratory-stuff for me and news are made to keep holding the budget for development.
 
Well, yes it's not the first time that I heard of holographic storage... they've been working on the technology since 94' . So yes it is old news.

But it looks like it's actually happening, in fact I've got an image of the actual drive, a general release date in 2006 and a fairly firm price. Furthermore they're putting a certain number of working prototypes out in the field for testing NOW.
 
Sorry- I meant 160 Mbps.

So, if my math is right... if you're filling a 300GB disc with DVCPROHD @ 1GB per minute at a rate of 160Mbps per second it will take about 4 hours and 15 minutes to complete. That's 5 hours of HD written to a disc faster than real time... and, according to InPhase this will be ready at the end of 2006. I think that's something to look forward to (and a year or less isn't that far off).
 
I could see this being a very short lived storage solution. I only say that because once those flash drives come down in price I would rather have that over the Holographic Storage any day. I'm sure both will have advantages. But I would rather go with something like flash drives. Now if its going to be something as simple looking and user friendly as a DVD then that would be cool.
 
yes, holograms are very cool. there's the statistic that you could fit all of the data in the national archives into two sugar cube sized holograms.

It's relatively easy to write holographic data... it's an issue to retrieve it.

this is ultimately what will kill blu ray and HDDVD
 
Holographic has been talked for a while, yes, but it really does sound like it's becoming a reality. Toshiba just pumped a whole bunch of money into InPhase, so obviously they saw something they liked there...
 
I've seen a demonstration of this workflow on the telly last week. It's supposed to actually take over current principles of storage, well, that's what they said. Scientists are already working with it and should hit the professional market next year. Basically see the I-O data in different angles on a flat surface. So it writes just like a regular dvd burner would do, but reads and writes in different angles, what they showed looked really cool! and ready!
 
Actually, in a very lose term a CD and DVD and all optical based technology could be classified as holographic storage devices (the difference being, a holographic data storage records data in 3 dimensions as oppossed to just 2 dimension eg the suface of the CD/DVD).


Time will tell.
 
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