News InPhase launches holographic storage

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/04/28/inphase-launches-holographic-storage/1

InPhase Technologies has finally launched a product based on holographic storage - a technology the company has been promising for the past eight years.

 

Sounds cool. The ability to accumumlate data had outstripped the ability to effectively archive it and so i think a lot of people are like me, sitting on hundreds of GB or data with no good way to back it up. Even dual layer DVD-Rs are only 8.5 GB and there is an inverse relationship between how much work it takes to back up my drive and how likley it is to happen!

 

last I heard of these, they were supposed to be launched in september 06 or 07 and be the size of a 3.5" floppy. after nothing happened, I figured it was just another promised revolutionary tech than never got around to being released.
hopefully this isn't going to be another duke nukem forever.

 

The main problem with holographic storage is that theoretically you can store billions of bits in a single flash of light, however there isn't the back end to support that transfer of data. When Quantum computing improves we'll be able to take it further and faster.

 

I despise the reliability (or lack of) our magnetic AIT tapes at work, I cant help but feel the best solution is just some form of hot-plug hard drive for off-site backups.

 

It does raise a good question, though - how is the home user supposed to back up his terabytes of data?

I know that I'm probably not alone, having 15 HDD's in the house, with just under 2TB of data on.
Obviously the most essential data is on DVD-R also, but what about the rest of it? It would be a pain if a couple of drives went down, definitely!

 

I think we will start to see raid nas come down in price for storage of our data.

AIT tapes arent the best really, LTO is the better technology.

Id rather trust my data to a tape backup than an external hdd

 

LTO4 is available and has an 800GB native capacity

There is also 500GB Storagetek T10000, 700GB IBM 1120 amongst others, I can't see where their market is tbh.
By the time their 1.6TB disk comes out, tape media will have outgrown it by a fair margin.

Nice to see holographic storage finally making an appearance at any rate

 

i wonder how the future games will be like.... if they come on this form of media.

 

BUt with 1TB drives going below £100 now, why is a 300GB £90 storage better?

 

robustness.

i think....

 

i don't really see the point in the "longevity" argument

Tapes are used for backups (as far as i know) - but the longevity argument applies more to archiving
I expect your rolling backup tape will be overwritten within a year or 2 (if not month(s))

 

oops, sorry accidentally pressed the post comment, couldnt find an edit button, anyway, i really like this line

 

Well this is certainly promising, I remember watching a educational program where they were talking about future tech and this kind in particular, and it looked very interesting and longer data retention is a must.

 

erm my understanding was that quantum computers would theoreticly be able to take a problem like checking if a number as a factor of another number and in the time taken to try one number try every posible number because they (depending on interpritation) made use of the paralism of universes and did the same computation in an infinite number of universes a single time. I fail to see how quantum computers will help transfer data more efectivly. The write time seems to be more of the minimum exposure time to imprint a bit in the holographic medium rather than a "back end problem". After all sata is capable of 300Gb/s theoretical maximum and other interfaces like hypertransport are capable of even more.

In other words WTF man????

 

Quantum computing is actual down to string theory where you can replicate a particles movement without it moving or transferring energy. This reduces the time and space required to transfer data so you can allocate the data faster. Think about how fast a flash of light is, compared to one second

 

Just to be a raging pedant, the discs aren't actually 12cm (and whilst we're on the subject, it should be given in millimetres!) They are in-fact, 130mm in diameter.