News Hitachi-Maxell announces holographic storage

Although this medium has greater capacities, we still need the market to move from normal TVs to HDTVs, and even then, can't the BD and HD-DVD media already cope with the greater size of these HD movies? Once we move into the new era of SuperHD, resolutions of 2560 x 1900 or something, that's when HVD would be much more viable in my opinion. Viable as a movie distribution media that is. As backup and storage, it'll do perfectly well coming in by end of year

 

I don't see it in this article, but I've read that for now Holographic disks will be write-once media...so they can't yet be used as a harddrive replacement (so speed doesn't matter so much). I've also read that there's a 50 year storage life estimate (although DVD's are supposed to be 30 years...which seems plausible for a manufactured movie you watch maybe once a year...but I've seen too many disks with movie-ruining scratches after a few *not so careful* people get their hands on them. That doesn't even get into writable media naturally degrading over time....I wonder what tech is behind the holographic writing process and if it decays/migrates like the dyes in CD and DVD-R's.

These disks aren't yet aimed at hard drives, and flash drives aren't up to 300 GB yet (I've only seen 8 GB max...and those are a few hundred dollars, unless I'm missing something). The article didn't mention the price/disk, but I believe it is supposed to be better than the price/GB of DVD-R's -- so if you can get a 5GB DVD-R for about 25cents on sale...that's 5cents per gigabyte, and a 300GB holographic disk should run about $15. Maybe when it's new to market, they'll multiply that by 6...and you're still in line with the price for a 300GB hard drive, with a price that will probably drop faster than the price of hard drives. But keep in mind that's write-once, and store forever media.

For reference, 20MB/s is pretty fast for optical media...if you can burn a single layer DVD-R in 10 minutes, that's only about 8MB/s. In 5 minutes, and you'd be looking at 16 MB/s. 20MB/s for the first generation is pretty hot. Just let it burn over night (since this is "backup" type media anyway) and you'll have your 300 GB done in about 4 hours.

Agreed...interestingly, though, the "best" media of the day has historically been used by the entertainment industry first (I'm pretty sure). CD's, I think, were a music medium before they were a storage medium (though that was before I had a computer...so I can't be certain). DVD's were a movie medium before you could burn to them yourself. BluRay and HDDVD are marketted as HD movies first, and second as a way to store data. If holographic disks come out and are cheap, and determined/talented people at home can suddenly easily produce, say, home-movies of better quality than the compressed stuff on a Blu-Ray disk...it'll be a bit strange.

Imagine some rich-kid high school producing student films of better visual quality than the movie industry because they've got a nice HD or better camera and 300 GB disks to write to...and if just one of those kids turns out to be some sort of visionary (or if the movie industry keeps producing stuff like "Little Man") and his films are also better artistic quality than what's coming out of Hollywood, where does that put the movie industry? The movie industry is already complaining that not enough people go to theaters and buy their movies...if they let "guy at home" get ahead of them technologically, it could potentially amplify their problems.

High School films and Home Movies sound implausuble? Then pehaps imagine college film students producing their student films, and distributing copies or showing the film on campus with cheap 300GB media. Not too implausible that a generation of college students could be convinced of the inferiority of HDDVD and Blu-Ray.

Yah...only time will tell if the 50 year life expectancy of a holographic disk is accurate.

 

Werent CD/DVD supposed to last that long to but now we are finding out that they last about 5yrs under good conditions.

 

it depends if you put labels on them aswell, and the quality of the discs

if you label them there is evidence to show that somthing happens, and it actually ruins the disc, also the same thing can hapen if you write on them

however im no expect on this case

 

Our 300 gig tapes at work are only needed for a maximum of 12 months. So if these disks have a reliable 18 month shelf life then they would be fine. They would be such a space saver too and probbaly not cost £50 per disk unlicke the SDLT2 tapes we use. Also tapes have a mechanical mechanism and over the last year we have had around 10 tapes break and get stuck in the drive. Ive never had an optical storage device get stuck.

and if they get to 1TB pritty soon then I would imagine businesses would start to migrate to them quite fast.

 

Its not going the be the cheapest for a while but I cant wait to see how it performs when its out.

This will certianly replace blu-ray or HD by the time a winner is declared.

 

I remember reading a few weeks ago about someone who made some sort of cd with an organic coating or something like that, that could store upto 50 terabytes.... here it is http://in.tech.yahoo.com/060708/139/65pz8.html

 

Great googly moogly, This new format appears to make HD and Blu both Dinosaurs at a stroke.

No HD or Blu here then for Me.

 

Smells like GD-ROM and DVD all over again to me, just on a larger scale.

Nezuji

 

Enough with this mine is bigger then your nonsense... All I want is an affordable ($250) High speed (10,000rpm) High Performance (16mb) Monster (1TB) SATA drive!!

Come on Hitachi-Maxell we already have to MANY optical formats... Get on the Seagate bandwagon and crank out some monster HD!!

Also for all this talk about "the rapid advances in HD tech" Uhhh How come SCSI oh sorry SAS hasn't budged... Common if SATA can do 10k why can't SAS do 20k. How come we have 750gb lighting fast SATA HD, but the enterprise world tops out at 300. Holographic media is cool and all, but until they can get dell to sell it. The price will always be too high, and any new advances will be slow coming.

 

beacause the forces and materials used to spin disks at 10-20k are emense

making cheap, cool (those server HDD's arent cool either) drives isnt easy

the interface isnt the problem, its the disc itself

 

Enterprise drives have to be built to much higher tolerances. They can't push the boundries, with those factors in mind.

I'm sure anyone interested in industrial storage applications, would rather pay a bit more for their storage, than have a relatively-unreliable system.

Interesting vision, it may work out that way, but who knows. Seems a little far-fetched at the minute.

However, if it does happen like that -- halleuja.