Holographic storage devices could be on sale within two years, according to US firm and Bell Labs spin-off InPhase Technologies which demonstrated a prototype holographic drive this week.
InPhase says this prototype will be the foundation of its forthcoming Tapestry range of holographic drives, which it plans to launch commercially before the end of next year, according to reports, with data capacities ranging from 200GB to 1.6TB on a single disk.
Tapestry has been under development for several years, and this isn't the first time that InPhase has claimed that it is close to commercial deployment. Back in 2002, it showed off a prototype holographic video recorder based on Tapestry which it said would ship in volume in 2004.
Although this hasn't happened, InPhase is still bullish about the future of its holographic kit.
"The InPhase prototype drive serves as the mile marker on the path to commercialisation of holographic storage," said Nelson Diaz, chief executive of InPhase Technologies, in a statement.
"This technology offers the highest density and performance of any optical system and will assume a prominent role in the storage landscape," Diaz added.
InPhase's holographic technology stores data in 3D holograms within a 1.5mm strip of photopolymeric material that sits within a disk or cartridge. This technique allows more data to be fitted onto a disk because it makes use of its full depth, rather than just recording onto its surface.
Over one million bits of data can be stored within a "3D page", which InPhase says can be read or written in a single flash of the drive's laser. This means its Tapestry range should offer very high-speed access as well as large capacity.
One of the principle hurdles encountered by researchers developing holographic storage techniques is creating a suitable storage medium. InPhase's product is based on research carried out at Bell Labs.
Talkback
Infinite Rewrtiable Atomic Holographic Optical Storage
is 3 years away.
http://colossalstorage.net
10 terabytes and up, direct replacement for hardrives.
All other holographic storage devices and optical drives are WORM devices.
oh wow, dont kow how it works but I want TB storage as soon as possible
Dataslide Ltd has been working for a number of years with a group of senior academics and international corporations on a fundamentally new design of storage technology and now has working mechanical proof of concept prototypes.
First generation product will be directed to the hard drive market, with second and third generations being directed to flash memory.
This technology has a number of implications for the storage industry and the general management of data.
Characteristics and implications of technology.
The technology uses piezo-electric actuators to give constant micro-oscillations in a single plane, instead of rotation; and an array of standard read and write detectors using LCD fabrication technology, on material with a ‘zero’ coefficient of expansion, with direct addressing to data in 512 byte page segments, on standard magnetic media in full contact, with taC (diamond) surface coatings.
Standard hard drive form factor and protocols will be used to ensure maximum interoperability with current hardware and software standards.
Capacity of the first generation product will be similar to common corporate SAN
areal densities.
Price
The price of the first generation product is expected to be similar to, or possibly competitive with, corporate SAN SCSI type hard drives at a Net of Sales of 3:1, and also to have an attractive price/performance ratio for gamers.
The estimated price for second and third generation product is expected to be much lower.
Speed
The current prototype has the mechanical equivalent of 72,000 rpm, with the potential using currently available materials and technologies, to reach the mechanical equivalent of 12,000,000 rpm.
A fundamental outcome of the architecture, means that any increases in areal density will concomitantly increase data transfer rates by the same factor.
Access
The total surface of the magnetic media is potentially accessed twice during each cycle giving direct addressing of data as well as providing the opportunity for massive parallelism.
The separation of read and write functions means that cache requirements are very considerably less than current hard drives.
Bandwidth
The potential bandwidth of the architecture is of the order of kilobit addressing, physical size is limited only by the development of LCD technology, and massive parallelism could provide opportunities for new supercomputer designs.
Energy requirements
The energy requirements of the product are 3.5% of current hard drives in use and an estimated 0.06% for lifetime cost of ownership.
Leverage of current assets
More CPU cycles, particularly Wait I/O will be available, so that purchase of more CPU power may be delayed for at least one upgrade cycle.
Also because of the reduced energy requirements, any current environmental installation is likely to be more than adequate for a substantial period of time, or may even be reduced.
Database design
Because the data recording surface is accessed in two dimensions, with formal logic mapping and relational calculus structures, the use of fully de-normalised file structures, and data and indices being directly parameterised, the design of historical data can provide performance benefits.
Architectural changes
Hard drive access speeds are the last major bottleneck in common current computer architectures, with up to six orders of magnitude difference between the CPU speeds and the data access response times, and regardless of caching and predictive data management of all kinds, eventually the data has to be obtained from a storage media which operates at millisecond response times, to CPUs operating at nanosecond cycle times.
Because of the change in dimensionality, information structures, surfaces, matrices, manifolds and networks could be directly mapped, and it may be effective to provide SQL primitives within firmware, using closer logical to physical mapping, with the potential fo