Romanian boffin touts 1PB holographic disk tech
Another holographic hopeful has emerged, Storex Technologies, which claims its Hyper CD technology can produce a 1PB optical disk. It was only a couple of years ago that Call/Recall was proposing a 1TB drive and GE was suggesting it could produce a 500GB unit last year. InPhase had to be rescued after its long-lived attempt to …
Hmmm, a petabyte at DVD speeds. That'll take a while.
Lets say 1000 million megabytes at 10MByte/sec just for round numbers. That's a little over 3 years of continuous writing. Although there are some obvious uses for such a device, it would be a reet boogger to copy or back up one of these disks. However, it might, just, make it practical to sell people a standalone copy of the internet.
with a single red LED on top (No wires required!)
Why waste years burning to Optical Medium, when there's simple instructions to quickly replicate the Internet here;
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-make-The-Internet-from-The-IT-Crowd/
Cos its friday
So that's 2 years to burn a disc...4 years with verification, and then that's going to be just lovely when it fails to finalise at the end of a burn!
It'll take more than throwing it in the nearest bin to cure *that* coaster rage.
Given, say, a ten minute burn time for today's 4.7GB discs and, say, a ten second rage time whenever one gets coastered, that means over twelve days of tantrum when this thing fucks up, probably a month if you're the short-fused type.
..with these mechanical disk-based systems?
There is no way on earth we will be able to push these disk-based systems at any practical level in the future for these kinds of storage. The read/write bandwidth is, as you say, just silly.
Static optically interfaced or solid state devices are the future and no mistake.
I'd worry about the DVD-like speed. That's around 1MB per second. We could be generous and assume he meant a 20x DVD drive for 20MB per second.
For a petabyte of data, it would take 578 days to read the entire disc.
I can quite believe DVD-like access times, but given the data density, I'd expect read/write speeds to be much, much higher.
Had a quick shufty on the Storex site and couldn't see any hard figures - so presumably they are talking theoretically - that is, they have made this on a 10mm^2 sheet, and have scaled it up to the size of CD shaped disc.
Steven R
Paris, as we don't know enough, arf.
I can't count the number of times we've heard about holographic optical discs storing a ton of data, I'm pretty sure back in 2005 it was said we'd have 5TB discs in 5 years.
It just doesn't excite me anymore.
Ever get the feeling that the optical media producers would rather sell you 250,000 dvds than one of these holographic disks?
There are 1TB hard drives now, and 3TB about to be released.
"We have an idea to make money"
"Yes, but how can we get the money without actually spending any"
"Ahh! You mean be disingenuous, apply obfuscation, confound our would be backers?"
"Yes, but we need to be cunning"
"I have an idea that is as cunning as a fox who has just been elected Head of the Crafty and Shrewd Dept of Cunning University! ..... We'll call it " ta da "Marketing!!"
Some scientists do something in a lab environment on a microscopic scale and then kick out a bunch of pie-in-the-sky hocus pokus essentially amounting to 'If this was scaled up to the size of a CD it could hold a bazzilion jiggabytes'
Woopdi fuckin doo, call me when you have an actual product ready for production.
... it doesn't mention "sugar cube" sized storage anywhere. Everyone knows that we'll have a petabyte sugar cube sized holographic storage device any day now.
http://www.seminarprojects.com/Thread-holographic-data-storage-full-report
http://www.scribd.com/doc/19211430/Holographic-Memory
http://sunsite.uakom.sk/sunworldonline/swol-02-1996/swol-02-storage.html
http://www.sciencebase.com/apr01_iss.html
http://slashdot.org/articles/01/04/26/1253237.shtml
etcetera ad nauseam...
Wow, just think how much we'll lose off this one in rounding errors!
I am wondering when this started. Literally looked today at an old 4.32GB HD, which is marked as such and was marketed as a 4GiB/GB drive and shows up in Windows as 4.0GB. That was 1999. Where did we go wrong??
Looks like you lose out on one hundred twenty-five trillion, eight hundred ninety-nine billion, nine hundred six million, eight hundred forty-two thousand, six hundred twenty-four (125,899,906,842,624) bytes!
Witness the not-so-floppy 3.5" floppy disk, capacity thereof: 2880 sectors of 512 bytes each.
That's what, 1440kB, divided by 1024 again comes out as 1.40625MB. Yet that's not how most of us call the thing.
I have similar nitpicks about terms like ``2k3'' (what, that's 2300 guv?), proving once again that there does indeed exist software that makes people stupid. And not just because it contradicts prior practice in, for example, ee circles.
Any time you take something out of techies' hands and give it to marketeers to sell to the other lusers you go wrong, if history is any teacher.
Naaa not really.
I rejoice in the cynicysm (where is my dictionary) expressed here...
Yes the Mega-Booster Hyper, Hyper quantum Mechanic multi-dimensional drive.
It can store a trillion, billion gigapetamegaterrabytes of data.... by storing 8 bits of data in trillion, billion gigapetamegaterrabytes simultaneous universes at the same time - which gives an infinitely instant read write rate.
Yeahhhh Fuck Off - when it's in the corner discount store for $10 a disk and $50 for a read writer - then I will buy it - the story AND the device that is.
Until then my miserable space age jaded mind will just grumble at the inconvenience of the sonic boom as "Discount Intergalactic" Star Ship comes boiling from deep space through the atmosphere - on the hour, every hour, as the regular Mars commuter service.
But may I call you Tool? :-P
Hey, you should start a company! That sounds like it could attract a gajillion $$ in gullible money, I mean, venture capital! Five exclamation points for that!!!!!
No, they are plucked out of somewhere a tad bit darker, methinks...
Can you imagine how long it would take McAfee or Norton to virus scan that disk ? Paris, because she knows the value of storing large ... hmm ... objects.
Have you any idea how much Romanian p()rn there is to store?
If it reads as fast as a DVD then I wonder what the find speed would be on something like this?
Eugen Pavel invention is from 1991 (before DVDs).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_Pavel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD
For various reasons he was unable to industrialize his invention.
Others succeeded:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Samachisa
Search youtube for "a world without romania" (beer comercial)
Some comments from Storex founder and CEO Eugen Pavel:-
Why was the Storex paper at the at the Optical Data Storage 2010 event cancelled?
"There is [due to] an internal problem of ODS2010 organizers."
The Storex "1PB optical disc is a multilayer data storage medium and [doesn't] use holographic methods. "
What does Storex need to enter production? 'Funds and reasonable time to prepare production.'
What is your view of the prospects of GE and Call/Recall in terms of getting their holographic storage technologies into production?
"There are two observations:
1) GE uses microholography and Call/Recall multilayer technologies.
2) they have wonderful products and I hope to see them ASAP
into the data storage market."
The article stated: "This is probably theoretically true but there is no product, no demonstrated and proven drive and no demonstrated and proven media, so you can consider this claim marketing hyperbole for now."
Eugen Pavel responded:-
"-This is experimentally true
-There is demonstrated and proven media
-There is demonstrated and proven dynamic tester
(experimental drive)"
Chris.
...yet another double-dip version of "Terminator 2", Possibly the 16k "Petabyte Edition"
If you look through the Greek/Scientific number system, 1000 Giga~ might be 1 Tera~, but 1000 Tera~ is 1 Exo~ (in this case Exobyte) and 1000 Exo~ = 1 Peta~. Are they going to fix the terms in time? Probably not, but it'll confuse every scientist if they don't...
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