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back to article 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 …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Grenade

    Nice concept, utterly useless.

    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!

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    1. blackworx
      Reply Icon
      Thumb Up

      Lol

      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.

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    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      FAIL

      When will they give up...

      ..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.

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  2. Pete 2 Silver badge

    reaches for calculator ...

    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.

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    1. Ben Tasker
      Reply Icon
      Joke

      But the Internet fits in a small black box

      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

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      1. Paul 129
        Reply Icon
        Coat

        The internet is for PORN

        I could sell a few of those.

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  3. JeeBee
    WTF?

    DVD like speed?

    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.

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    1. Steven Raith
      Reply Icon
      Paris Hilton

      Access, or read speed?

      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.

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  4. Piro Silver badge

    I'll believe it when I see it

    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.

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    1. It'sa Mea... Mario
      Reply Icon

      indeed..

      Ever get the feeling that the optical media producers would rather sell you 250,000 dvds than one of these holographic disks?

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    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Especially when...

      There are 1TB hard drives now, and 3TB about to be released.

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  5. CrysXP
    Unhappy

    I'm sick of these kinda stories

    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.

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  6. Stubar
    Go

    Great Idea

    "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!!"

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  7. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    Obviously a fake...

    ... 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...

    1 0
  8. Annihilator
    Unhappy

    1PB - here's the obligatory complaint

    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??

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    1. Pablo
      Reply Icon
      Boffin

      Let's see...

      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!

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    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Before that, shirley

      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.

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  9. strangefish

    "productise?"

    Really?

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  10. Anonymous Coward
    Jobs Horns

    Damn - that is a lot of naked women...

    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.

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    1. J 3
      Reply Icon
      Joke

      @ Tool of Lucifer

      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!!!!!

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  11. J 3
    Coat

    Are these numbers plucked out of thin air?

    No, they are plucked out of somewhere a tad bit darker, methinks...

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  12. The Grump
    Paris Hilton

    It takes forever now...

    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.

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  13. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Joke

    Romania has *massive* storage problems

    Have you any idea how much Romanian p()rn there is to store?

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  14. shawnfromnh

    DVD speed

    If it reads as fast as a DVD then I wonder what the find speed would be on something like this?

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  15. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    History

    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)

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  16. Chris Mellor 1

    Comments from Eugen Pavel

    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.

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  17. Cunningly Linguistic
    Alert

    Well that looks like...

    ...yet another double-dip version of "Terminator 2", Possibly the 16k "Petabyte Edition"

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  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Petabyte?

    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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