Holographic storage. A Video. Check it out!.

[TrafficProducer]

Holographic storage. A Video. Check it out!. ZDNet Video.

The next big thing in storage? Three dimensional holographic images enable more information to be stored in a much smaller space, preventing information overflow.

Host: Bob Artner, VP business technology, TechRepublic
Length: 00:03:19

http://news.zdnet.com/2036-2_22-5604861.html

Holographic storage. A Video. Check it out!.

[Patrick]

That was very .....interesting. Yeah. Ok so we need some more Blu-ray news. This tech is way to far off to care about for now.

[thunderhawk]

Nice... Still 2 early for Holographic storage these days...
Watch, it took BD 4 years to complete it's specification, and it's still not complete/released on the market. BD has a BDA behind it concisting of hundreds of companies. How long will holographic storage take to get ready?
I don't expect this before 2010 in our homes.

[Blue]

I don't know if it's correct but apparently this disk is 13cm instead of 12cm. If this is the case that is large increase in surface area so no wonder they can get 300MB. Put Blu Ray on a 30cm laser disk and we could have a 200 TB frisbee tomorrow

[Shadowself]

Just as HD-DVD and BDA use the same technology (violet-blue laser emitting diodes and smaller bit size on disk than DVDs) yet are completely incompatible physical formats, there are two major formats for HVD that are incompatible (as I understand them) being promoted by Optware and InPhase. Right now neither has a significant lead in getting their product to market. Who's to say there won't be a "format war" between these two?

As mentioned above, it will take time for either of these to to gather the support they need for mass adoption as a consumer content distribution format (if they ever do). And, holographic has always been "coming soon". While they claim they will have consumer units shipping by the end of 2006, I would expect more likely by the end of 2007.

Additionally, IF (admittedly a HUGE IF) BDA actually does ship consumer versions of players that can read 200 GB on a single disk then this amount of space is plenty for the average consumer for some time. At less than 10 GB per hour for 1080p/60 then people can get an entire TV season of their most popular shows on a single disk in 1080p/60. What more space will people want for a while?

(I know. Eventually people will want higher resolution and such, but for the foreseeable future who will actually need more space in the consumer realm?

Also, I say a HUGE IF because I remember the days of the original announcements of the DVD promoters:
4.7 GB on a single layer, single sided;
8.5 GB on dual layers, single sided;
9.4 GB on single layers, double sided -- yet players will read both sides without having to manually flip them; and
17 GB on dual layers, double sided -- again, players will read both sides without having to manually flip them.
Anyone ever hear of a consumer, mass produced player for DVD that did 17 GB?)

[Shadowself]

Originally Posted by Blue

I don't know if it's correct but apparently this disk is 13cm instead of 12cm. If this is the case that is large increase in surface area so no wonder they can get 300MB. Put Blu Ray on a 30cm laser disk and we could have a 200 TB frisbee tomorrow

Actually it's not so large an increase: just over 17%. If BDA shipped 13cm disks the maximum would still only be 235 GB -- well short of HVD's 300 GB. And, a 30 cm BDA disk, if anyone could ever make one rigid enough and flat enough, would "only" hold 1.25 TB.

While there are many, many things holding me back from unwavering support for HVD the disk size (13 cm versus 12 cm) is not one of them. There are players that are capable of playing multiple size disks now (even odd shapes... most of us have seen the "business card CDs").

[James Morrow]

... of course, if Blu-Ray offered a twin head drive and a double-sided disc for high capacity applications that 200GB could be doubled to 400GB ...

[Shadowself]

Originally Posted by James Morrow

... of course, if Blu-Ray offered a twin head drive and a double-sided disc for high capacity applications that 200GB could be doubled to 400GB ...

Referring back to my earlier post above...

The original DVD spec included single and double layered double sided disks where the player would be able to read both sides of the disk without having to manually flip the disk.

Anyone ever see a consumer version of this? I sure didn't.

The likelihood of this happening for BDA and thus giving 400 GB disks is about as great as it was for the original DVDs.

[James Morrow]

... of course, consumers don't like "flippers" - but that doesn't stop the BDA from developing a double-sided, non-flip, twin-headed variant (like a double-sided floppy but of slightly higher capacity) for professional data archival purposes. Yes, the heads are expensive right now - but doubling the capacity (and potentially the read-write speed) could be an attractive professional proposition which could eventually have consumer applications ...

Also note that this option isn't available to HD-DVD, as both the three layer 45GB variant and the four layer 60GB version already use more than half the physical thickness of the disc ...

If you look at when DVD came out, and even now, 8.5GB was plenty of space for most applications, and when the first recorders arrived a large PC hard drive was around 20GB. Compare this to, say, 50GB BDs now. Enough for 4.5 hours of 24Mbps 1080p, but a large hard drive is now around 400GB or more, and consumers are finding more and more ways to use this capacity ...

[Shadowself]

Originally Posted by James Morrow

... of course, consumers don't like "flippers" - but that doesn't stop the BDA from developing a double-sided, non-flip, twin-headed variant (like a double-sided floppy but of slightly higher capacity) for professional data archival purposes.

That was exactly my point. People don't like "flippers". A non-flipping DVD was in the early specs for DVDs. Drives with two separate read heads (one for each side of the DVD) were in the early specs for DVDs. They never materialized outside of the labs.

I don't believe we'll see dual sided Blu-ray Disks either -- with or without players with two heads to read both sides concurrently.

Originally Posted by James Morrow

Also note that this option isn't available to HD-DVD, as both the three layer 45GB variant and the four layer 60GB version already use more than half the physical thickness of the disc ...

I had not noticed that. Thanks for pointing this out, but as stated above I don't believe doulbe sided BDA disks will be a reality either.

I have not heard of a 60GB HD-DVD variant. Who announced this? I believe the only real reason that the 45GB variant was announced as "coming real soon" was an attempt to blunt BDA's advantage with 50GB disks coming out in the first wave. I would have thought I'd have heard about 60GB HD-DVD disks as being loudly proclaimed as having *more* space than anything BDA plans to ship this year, just as the HD-DVD group (including Microsoft and Intel) tried to convince people that HD-DVD's 30GB version would hold more than BDA's 25GB version as they tried to convince people that the 50GB BDA disk would not be available in the foreseeable future. (Pure FUD, but they tried it anyway.)

Maybe I'm not as aware of announcements in this arena as I thought. But... who announced this and when?

Originally Posted by James Morrow

If you look at when DVD came out, and even now, 8.5GB was plenty of space for most applications, and when the first recorders arrived a large PC hard drive was around 20GB. Compare this to, say, 50GB BDs now. Enough for 4.5 hours of 24Mbps 1080p, but a large hard drive is now around 400GB or more, and consumers are finding more and more ways to use this capacity ...

This is why I believe for serious (aka LARGE) backup systems HVD will possibly the the medium of choice. HVD will *start* at 300 GB and scale over the next few years to over 1 TB. Projections have it going to 1.6 TB and beyond in the next 5-10 years. Even *IF* BDA disks became double sided, they can't hope to match the data density of HVD.

HVD's propblem is they don't have wide consumer electronics OEM support. Absolutely none of the major studios are saying they will not use either of HD-DVD or BDA and will instead go with HVD. None of the major personal computer vendors are making this claim either. None of the major OS vendors are either. And so forth.

This is why BDA will most likely own the consumer and low to mid range PC market.

However, OEMs making drives for high end PCs, servers, etc. will make drivers for the major OSes for these drives. (The cost of a driver is trivial when you are shipping $5,000 drives for this market. Just look at the prices of Sony's Super Advanced Intelligent Tape drives [currently at 500GB uncompressed capacity] and the robotic libraries that go with them.) When HVD goes beyone 500 GB and companies with large server/RAID farms can do the entire day's incremental backup on a single HVD then HVD will catch on.

[James Morrow]

Fair points, SS.

Note that whilst the triple layer 45GB HD-DVD (using a modified DVD14 process) is designed to be read from one side, only two layers of the four layer 60GB one (using the DVD18 process) can be read from each side - so it's a flipper ...

Double-sided Blu-Ray certainly has the potential to go beyond 1TB, and related technologies further still - although HVD has the potential to go further again.

I agree that HVD is in the near future for moving media, with flash (currently doubling in density year by year) in the panorama, amongst other things. Yet HVD has been in the near future for quite a while and, like Blu-Ray, I look forward to product launches ...

[mlts22]

Holographic storage has been on the horizon since the early 90s, but its never seemed to have materialized something other than pretty pictures of multi-terabyte business-card sized prototypes.

This is my opinion, but in a year or two, I'm pretty sure that I'll be backing my system up to BD media while holographic storage continues to be hyped and still vaporware. Hopefully, I'm wrong about this.

[James Morrow]

Practical holographic storage has been on the horizon since the first (ruby) laser was successfully made in the 60s - but it's only recently that a number of the requisite technologies have started to come together to make it more commercially feasible ...

[AV_Integrated]

Apparently there are - or will be HVD commercial drives on the marketplace this year. Commercial meaning $$$.

Is the future holographic? I would think so. Holographic technology is far superior for it's ability to store massive data over current technologies. It was said that when the laser was invented that it was a solution without a problem. That is, as we move forward in time, we will find ways to use lasers in ways that were never dreamed of.

That is exactly what is going on now. We are touching on the ability to use lasers with holography to exponentially increase the storage space of media. Yet, it will take big $$$ to turn it into reality and if it is going to have an impact it likely will need a lot of major companies behind it. Hopefully no format wars, but a HVD consortium.

It needs to be considered as well that HVD, as cool as it is, may be overkill for video and may be tough to get a Sony behind. Apple, yes. But, it may end up being so much more a PC and data technology instead of a video and home A/V technology that it may struggle to get on its feet and out the door into the homes of consumers.

Look at the format war already brewing. With Blu-Ray showing about 66% more storage capacity than HD-DVD, people are going 'But who needs it?' and wondering what the hype is about 25GB vs. 15GB of space. Are they short sighted? Or is that really the mentality of the majority of users that may be paying for these finished products 7-10 years from now?

[lucidity]

There is alot of momentum headed toward the holographic technology. Here is an abundance of resources on this technology. I'm sure that if blu-ray were to start considering it that the technology would come to the for front. Specifically, IBM is already doing significant research on the subject.

http://www.holoforum.com/showthread.php?t=78

Here it is at IBM:
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/st/data_s...rt/holography/

[thunderhawk]

That are a lot of links in there... Downloading right away