Holographic Storage On Track For December Ship Date

[thunderhawk]

Holographic Storage On Track For December Ship Date

The first holographic storage media will begin shipping by Christmas, executives at media maker Hitachi Maxell have indicated.

In an interview, Rich D'Ambrise, director of technical marketing at Maxell, said that 300-Gbyte holographic disks will begin shipping either in November or December, as InPhase Technologies, the developer of the holographic technology, said last year (http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...785630,00.asp).

However, D'Ambrise also indicated that the company will move to a second-generation, 800-Gbyte disc in 2008, and has targeted a 1.6-Tbyte removable cartridge by 2010.

Holographic storage uses a patented two-chemistry Tapestry photopolymer write-once material. The recording material is 1.5 mm thick and is sandwiched between two 130 mm diameter transmissive plastic substrates. Last year, InPhase indicated that the first incarnation of the InPhase technology would be used for archival purposes, and D'Ambrise indicated that that will still be the case: media will be roughly $120 to $180 apiece, and drives will cost about $15,000.

"We're happy so far that we haven't hit any obstacles with the drive or the media, and that we're on schedule to deliver to the market," D'Ambrise said.

Two alpha sites have deployed the technology, at Pappas Broadcasting in Reno, and at entertainment giant Turner Broadcasting, he said.

While the company is focusing on the lucrative enterprise storage market, Hitachi Maxell is also exploring more conventional storage options. The storage capacity of the technology is governed by the spot size of the laser, and a 100-Gbyte or 75-Gbyte consumer version could theoretically be created in the size of a postage stamp, D'Ambrise said.

"We're absolutely looking a prototypes of credit-card media [sizes]," D'Ambrise said.

D'Ambrise also confirmed that Maxell is developing a stacked volumetric optical disc (SVOD), essentially a jukebox-in-a-cartridge of ten stacked 9.4-GByte DVDs, for a total of 940 Gbytes. Each disc is 92 micrometers thick, about one-thirteenth the thickness of a DVD, he said.

Source: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...1997498,00.asp

That's pretty fast, if you consider how long the BDA did over it to roll BD out...

[zombie]

Sounds like a cool format but in reality does it stand a chance? The studios are slow to support Blu-ray and HD DVD. I doubt they'll have any interest in Holographic discs. I suppose they could become a hit on the recordable aspect but at $15,000 for a drive it's going to take a lot of time for someone other than Bill Gates to afford one of those puppies.

[JTK]

Wow, only 15 G's to start getting on board?!?!

Awesome stuff, but wake me up in a decade when it comes to Earth...

[Shadowself]

I expect that none of these drives over the next 3-5 years are planned for personal use.

High end tape drives often cost $5,000 or more just for the drive and they currently top out at a native recording (not compressed) of less than a terabyte. They'll be well over a terabyte, native in the next year or so. I expect the price of these drives to come in line those high end tape drives within the next couple of years.

There are only two advantages these disks will have over tape:
1) if their shelf life is REALLY the expected 30-50 years then this will be better than tape. While tape typically can have a shelf life of 15+ years this is only with proper care and re-running (re-tensioning) the tape every couple years. Often tapes have to be re-written (even if it's onto the same tape) every 5+ years or so. Thus a REAL 30-50 year shelf life with absolutely no require interaction will be much better for archives.
2) Random access. Tapes must be accessed linearly. To get to something near the end of the tape you must fast forward to the end of the tape. This not only takes time, it incurrs unnecessary wear and tear on both the tape and the tape drive. With HVD (or virtually any disk for that matter) random access of any data on the drive is possible.

When will we see HVD as drives and media for the consumer? I'd guess not before 2015, but definitely not before 2010 unless there is a HUGE technology breakthrough.

[JTK]

Sure I can get it...
...

Maybe if I keep telling myself that, it'll come true.

[thunderhawk]

Originally Posted by Shadowself

I'd guess not before 2015, but definitely not before 2010 unless there is a HUGE technology breakthrough.

And imho it won't happen, according to Collosal Storage Corp. I read somewhere that they weren't surprised about HVD and it wouldn't deliver as much as their proposed technology would, because they lacked some technical aspects who were patented by Collosal Storage.

[Blue]

Originally Posted by thunderhawk

[color=blue][size=5]That's pretty fast, if you consider how long the BDA did over it to roll BD out...

Not really as the standard was made up between a few companies. The BD standard was quite ammusing watching it develop. it was game of what you can do, I can do better between HD DVD and BDA (both as bad as each other) If you really want to stop something form a committee, everyone would be wanting the standard to include things that would benifit them. I think the hollographic disc is even a different physical size to a CD.

Getting it accepted in the market maybe another thing. As for life expectancy irrelevent. Companies are really good at storing media, but a shame about, the drives to recover the media, and if that no supporting hardware or software able to read the data. With rare exceptions I think any archived data over 5 years old is at risk.

[Shadowself]

Originally Posted by Blue

As for life expectancy irrelevent. Companies are really good at storing media, but a shame about, the drives to recover the media, and if that no supporting hardware or software able to read the data. With rare exceptions I think any archived data over 5 years old is at risk.

For some organizations life expectancy is paramount.

Take for example the commercial, satellite based, remote sensing industry: By law and by U.S. government agency decree each of these companies must maintain every bit of information that comes down from their satellites forever -- or at least until they are willing to give it away to the U.S. Government and make it 100% public domain -- for free. Some imagery is valuable and may never be put into the public domain. The raw data sets of this imagery is rather voluminous (they transmit down from the satellite at up to 800 Mbps in order to get the imagery down). Archiving that imagery becomes expensive.

Then there are organizations like the Eros Data Center which has the responsibility of maintaining the aircraft based and satellite based imagery for the U.S. Government (and where the commercial imagery goes when it is turned over to the U.S. Government). This Center has the charter to preserve 100% of the imagery it gets (film or digital) for as long as humanly possible.

Rewriting tapes to maintain archives for either the commercial organizations or organizations such as the Eros Data Center is a huge expense. Retensioning tapes every couple years and rewriting them even every five years is a daunting task. Why keep a team employed doing nothing but maintianing the viability of your archive if you don't have to?

Take another example... I'm currently putting together a design for a data processing and archiving system for a remote sensing organizations which will ingest over 21 Terabytes per day starting in late 2009 or 2010 (depending upon funding). When the full constellation of satellites and other sensors is in place the archive will be increasing by 120 Terabytes or more per day -- that's over 43 Petabytes per year, and is extimated to be over 300 Petabytes over the course of the project. Just maintaining that archive with tapes is a multi-million dollar per year concern. IF (a very, very huge IF at this point) HVD does have a 30-50 year shelf life then the archive maintenance costs and personnel requirements of this project can be cut by a factor of five or more.

These examples don't take into account the recently expanded (some would say HUGELY expanded) requirements for large corporations due to Sarbanes-Oxley (spelling? -- I just usually call it SOX). This is a huge, long term archival requirement on many corporations.

These examples also don't take into account the huge, long term archival requirements of the U.S. intelligence community (think of it like this... one of the imagery managment organizations has the legal requirement to maintain a running metadata record of all interactions with the imagery. Someone touches the picture for any reason it has to get logged into the metadata stream for that image -- and has to become part of the permanent archive. Even for tens of megabyte size images sometimes the metadata archive becomes larger than the image itself). Or the archival requirements of the Department of Energy's nuclear test data archive (since they aren't doing testing anymore the old test data is absolutely NOT replaceable).

Most people seem to think the U.S. Library of congress is a huge archive. By most standards it is. However, it is only on the order of a few Petabytes. It pales in comparison with many, many other archives out there. (Just to give some people a point of reference.)

Sure, all these organizations *can* pay to maintain their archives, but if a new medium becomes available a with REAL, unattended shelf life of 30-50 years *and* has a reasonably large capacity then it will greatly positively affect many, many archives across the countrly