300GB Holographic Discs are Coming

[bapenguin]

Sorry HD-DVD. Too bad Blu-Ray. 300 GB Discs (http://www.engadget.com/2005/04/18/inphase-announces-300gb-holographic-discs/) are here.

Colorado- based InPhase Technologies has its way, the next big advance in data storage will be holographic media. The company — which rolled out a prototype holographic drive earlier this year — announced today that it has produced a holographic disc that can hold 300GB on a single disc. InPhase says that the discs (which will be write-once media) and compatible drives should ship next year, with terabyte discs available by 2009. According to the company, its holographic technology records "through the full depth" of the storage media, and can record data a million bits at a time. We figure it should be able to hold our whole movie collection, with room left over for some lossless music as well.
So much space, so much pr0...promise.

[absolut taco]

Gotta love that caddy. It's like 1992 all over again.

[Chalex]

http://www.i4u.com/article4678.html


300GB is already more than 10x of Blu-ray or HD DVD capacity. The price for a 300GB holographic disc is supposed to be around $120. Only the Holographic disc reader device is currently an issue with a price of $15,000.



I'm sure Sony and Toshiba are terrified.

[Librum]

With prices like that, it probably just means the general consumer market won't be seeing much of a use for them until the prices drop. No reason to bust out that kind of cash when you can do the same over several discs for a lot less. Still, interesting development and all.

[drakkarim]

http://www.i4u.com/article4678.html


300GB is already more than 10x of Blu-ray or HD DVD capacity. The price for a 300GB holographic disc is supposed to be around $120. Only the Holographic disc reader device is currently an issue with a price of $15,000.

I'm sure Sony and Toshiba are terrified.

they should be, this will guarantee a short life for their new medias/technologies, i.e. they won't be able to milk idiot consumers with overpriced media for years and years.

it won't take long (relatively speaking) for these new drives/media to drop in prices.

in any case, i would love to be able to put all my daughter's videos on a only a couple BIG discs rather then dozens and dozens of dvd's.

[bapenguin]

http://www.i4u.com/article4678.html


300GB is already more than 10x of Blu-ray or HD DVD capacity. The price for a 300GB holographic disc is supposed to be around $120. Only the Holographic disc reader device is currently an issue with a price of $15,000.



I'm sure Sony and Toshiba are terrified.

If this gets adopted in the corporate sector for backup purposes and the price comes down pretty fast because of it Sony and Toshiba will be scared. The life cycle of their already inferior product will be even shorter

[Borys]

Have fun waiting, bap.

[Taco]

they should be, this will guarantee a short life for their new medias/technologies, i.e. they won't be able to milk idiot consumers with overpriced media for years and years.

it won't take long (relatively speaking) for these new drives/media to drop in prices.

in any case, i would love to be able to put all my daughter's videos on a only a couple BIG discs rather then dozens and dozens of dvd's.


Politics, not technology, drives this. Your reasoning only really applies to data discs on a PC.

[AniAko]

Actually, they're planning the release of a 1.5TB HVD next. From a systems standpoint, HVD would be a one stop backup solution (provided the technology is refined and reliable). Currently I have 3 DLT drives running 90GB compressed backups. That's 3 tapes at $40 pop and drives worth $1500. Even if I got a tape array, it would out grown in a few years. Those typically start around $20K. They also take about 8 hours to run. Now if my boss offered me the chance to upgrade, I'd take HVD in a heart beat (granted again it being reliable) I wouldn't sink more money into buying 3 new Blu-Ray disks per day/week/month/ and year, and new drives, only to be hampered by the same limitaions on new technology. HVD is the right step, and when it's ready, It will be sold at the right price.

[Taco]

When it comes to using these for enterprise backups I'd considered the reliability question to be a HUGE if. I wouldn't trust an optical disc for backups until they had been in use for years and shown to last.

[Chalex]

If this gets adopted in the corporate sector for backup purposes and the price comes down pretty fast because of it Sony and Toshiba will be scared. The life cycle of their already inferior product will be even shorter
The Blu-ray and HD-DVD formats are both similar enough to DVD that it will be very inexpensive to produce writable media for either, meanwhile HVD is something completely new and very, very different in construction with no current production lines and a very prohibitive entry cost.

Both the HD disk associations claim that they can produce their disk is roughly the same price as a regular DVD, do you really expect and company to invest $15,000+ in a media writer and $120+ on the media when they could buy a HD-DVD/Blu-ray drive for $500-$1000 and a probably get a 50 pack spindle (That would be 750GB/1.25TB per spindle respectivly assuming single layer) for the same ammount as one HVD disk?

Any intelligent company would recognize that the tech is way too new and wait on it until the prices come way down.

[Chalex]

When it comes to using these for enterprise backups I'd considered the reliability question to be a HUGE if. I wouldn't trust an optical disc for backups until they had been in use for years and shown to last.This is the other thing that concerns me about HVD, I have not seen a single comment about what happens to a disk if it is scratched damaged, being that HVD has two layers for its data it seems that its twice as fragile as any other traditional optical media.

I would have to hope that they use a technology similar to the hardcoat on Blu-ray disks, but that probably would have been metioned somewhere in one of the tech-sheets or write ups on all the sites that keep posting about it.

[AniAko]

When it comes to using these for enterprise backups I'd considered the reliability question to be a HUGE if. I wouldn't trust an optical disc for backups until they had been in use for years and shown to last.

DLT backups have a 4% - 11% failure rate yearly, their drives also fail and need to be cleaned quite often. They're a pain in the ass. However, I'm sure Optical disks as a whole have a thinner failure rate than DLT. The hardware for the optical drive will most likely determine that.

[SuperKRad]

Wow, just imagine how many less times I will have to change disks!

[Taco]

DLT backups have a 4% - 11% failure rate yearly, their drives also fail and need to be cleaned quite often. They're a pain in the ass. However, I'm sure Optical disks as a whole have a thinner failure rate than DLT. The hardware for the optical drive will most likely determine that.

Well it's not so much the drives I'm worried about, you can replace those. Possible degradation with the discs concerns me as well as ease and effects of scratching. We'll fine the answer to the latter much sooner than the former though.

[Heretic Machine]

Consider this: HD-DVD and Blu-ray WILL NOT be adopted by the average consumer for at least another three years. By that time, Holographic disks will have dropped in price significantly, so when the customers actually start looking for a new format, this will be the new kid on the block with huge advantages over Blu-ray and HD-DVD.

Like I said, those two formats are laser discs, they are there to cash-in on early adopters while the oppurtunity is still there.

[bapenguin]

Have fun waiting, bap.

Have fun blowing money on a dieing product.

[Taco]

Consider this: HD-DVD and Blu-ray WILL NOT be adopted by the average consumer for at least another three years. By that time, Holographic disks will have dropped in price significantly, so when the customers actually start looking for a new format, this will be the new kid on the block with huge advantages over Blu-ray and HD-DVD.

Like I said, those two formats are laser discs, they are there to cash-in on early adopters while the oppurtunity is still there.

Like I said. For computers, maybe. For the music and movie industry, no.

[mrbandersnatch]

Ive been following this technology for a while now and this is actually a slippage...they were intending to have the 300GB disks out this summer!!

But yes, Blu-ray and HD DVD are representative of technologies at the end of their lifespan (!) whereas HVD and similar are the cusp of the next wave. If the disks turn out to be resilient and and ahve a reasonable lifespan (@10 years) I may well be buying a few of these next year.

[Taco]

What is on the horizon, other than data, that demands 300gb discs? The politics behind the format wars will never allow InPhase a piece of the pie when there is no major benefit that consumers may push for. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD will give us high definition movies, finally. What would this technology?

[bean19]

Really interesting stuff. . . but I guess it's too soon for some questions to be answered like:

1. What is the data transfer rate? (Are they slow and thus just backup or fast and able to replace DVDs as the gaming drive)

2. Are the disks expensive to make? Thus, will price drops eventually make disks low cost enough to be affordable as media that things are sold on or are they simply going to replace hard-drives.

3. Production time-scale? Cost reduction time scale (When can we expect the items to become mass-market by falling down to $50 to $100/drive?)

4. Reliability? Reliability vs. interference? Security? Etc.

[The Letter 3]

The music and movie industries will be playing it safe for a while. DVD will stick around and for a good reason: It's going to be harder to convince consumers to move from one optical device to another. When the switch was made from VHS to DVD that was made easier partially because DVDs looked more high tech. A problem with HD-DVD, Blue-ray, and HVD is that all three look the same (to the untrained eye) as a DVD. Thus, consumers will say, for a while at least, why switch to this if it is the same thing as what I have? Call me an idiot if you will, but think of Joe Consumer, out there looking at new products.

[Taco]

I'm assuming the new formats will end up offering High Defintion playback. DVD's can't without swapping half a dozen times during a movie.

I know my father has been waiting years for a new format that supports HiDef.

[AniAko]

Really interesting stuff. . . but I guess it's too soon for some questions to be answered like:

1. What is the data transfer rate? (Are they slow and thus just backup or fast and able to replace DVDs as the gaming drive)

2. Are the disks expensive to make? Thus, will price drops eventually make disks low cost enough to be affordable as media that things are sold on or are they simply going to replace hard-drives.

3. Production time-scale? Cost reduction time scale (When can we expect the items to become mass-market by falling down to $50 to $100/drive?)

4. Reliability? Reliability vs. interference? Security? Etc.

1. HVD is presseing GB/s transfer speeds
2. Yes, but the process will be refined and cheapened. HVD will be used primarily in backup solutions, but they're trying to open into other markets as well.
3. Probably not in the near future, but once it is accepted as the next standard, the prices will drop.
4. Don't know. It's an optical drive so it faces the same hurdles CDs and DVDs did. Up to engineers. 7, Aphrodisiac, 211ml, and Who is Aaron Burr?

[bean19]

I'm assuming the new formats will end up offering High Defintion playback. DVD's can't without swapping half a dozen times during a movie.

More like 2 or 3 times. . . (DVDs aren't that much smaller than HD-DVD or Blu-Ray) but yeah, there is no reason to move to 300GB.

Plus, it looks like this is going to be super expensive and will start as just a way for offices to do backups, then progress to be the hard-drives of the future.

[AniAko]

I guess the real issue is are HVD meant to be consumer items? I think not. They're pioneering a technology, it won't end up in consumer's hands unless consumers accept it. (Minidisks anyone? AWESOME technology, never well accepted) That goes for Blu-Ray as well.

HVD will be used in business though, unless some old sysadmin has a hard-on for DLT drives........

[if76]

I heard Bethesda was able to fit Oblivion on only TWO of these.

[SMES]

I heard Bethesda was able to fit Oblivion on only TWO of these.

You raise an interesting point. Oblivion is supposedly a HUGE game, graphics, audio, etc. If it can fit (comfortably, even?) on a single DVD disc, doesn't that indicate that- for games at least- HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are a bit unnecessary?

Is it possible that two generations can successively function on DVD discs? How much free space is left on the Oblivion disc will be a good starting point to think about that.

[Phanto]

Anyway how much is going to cost the readers for the Bluray & HD-DVD ? :rolleyes:

I almost forgot the only GOOD THING i can see if that create popularity and people start "buying it" :p is the fact the makers or should i said brands of hardrives are going to have some competition, and we maybe see more hardrive cheaper than right now ;) .

For example look at this HD: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148065

*We have to remember here that because someone come up with a more sophisticated thing or invention that doesn't mean its going to win the war.
In that "war" the side with more powerful and most brands wins, what i mean??? that if that holographic drive of 300GB doesn't have the support of the giants (like Microsoft, or Intel) its not going to far thats all i can said.

[Heretic Machine]

then progress to be the hard-drives of the future.

They can only be written to one time.

As for the formats... I'm thinking more and more that digital downloads will become much more common, just as it has in the music industry. I think maybe I'll just buy a media center PC once downloading movies/shows legally becomes more solid, as it inevitably will with Apple backing it.

[bobbler]

Consider this: HD-DVD and Blu-ray WILL NOT be adopted by the average consumer for at least another three years. By that time, Holographic disks will have dropped in price significantly, so when the customers actually start looking for a new format, this will be the new kid on the block with huge advantages over Blu-ray and HD-DVD.

Like I said, those two formats are laser discs, they are there to cash-in on early adopters while the oppurtunity is still there.


Does nobody realize how this industry works?

HVD has no support from content companies. Content companies have vested interest in BR and HD-DVD. HVD is the laserdisc, and I'd be willing to bet a house on it (bookmark this post for 2008!). HVD has no support and probably won't even reach market for consumers until a major consortium deems it necessary (meaning if Sony/Toshiba/Samsung/Dell/HP/TDK/Thomson/etc/etc/etc/etc/etc started backing it, then it might have a shot).

I'd love to know who is going to be making the drives, besides Optoware or whoever the company is. And who else is actually supporting it?

If you guys are waiting for HVD as a movie format you're going to be wasting your time. Also, it will it not offer anything that HD-DVD and BR won't. 1080p at 24-30fps in h.264 with a ton of extra content and snazzy sound isn't even going to fill a BR disc -- so what, pray tell, is an HVD movie going to offer the consumer? In addition, HVD has to convince all those content companies and CE companies that it is a viable product and if its already this late into the game and nobody is jumping behind it, its DOA.

It's called business. It's politics; and often the consumer doesn't really much of a choice... our choices here are HD-DVD and BR. Whether consumers adopt it or we go to an inevitably lousy quality streamed version instead is another story (see MP3/MP4/etc vs CDs). HVD is not a choice for movies or content unless you buy a disc and put it on there yourself.

[dead]

As well as finding a customer willing to buy a spindle of $150 disks and a $15 000 disk burner, how many people have use for 300gb of storage, that is unless the disk is rewritable (which it isn't).

It does however interest me on what type of games will emerge in 10-20 years.

[Mason]

The Blu-ray and HD-DVD formats are both similar enough to DVD that it will be very inexpensive to produce writable media for either, meanwhile HVD is something completely new and very, very different in construction with no current production lines and a very prohibitive entry cost.

Of the 3 optical formats mentioned, only HD-DVD can use existing DVD production lines. Blu-Ray needed all new production facilities, and its supporters have merely claimed that it'll be down to DVD costs eventually, in spite of the large up-front costs. Yet no one has dismissed Blu-Ray out of hand because of these things, so it makes little sense to do so to HVD.

[Taco]

HVD doesn't have Sony.

[Pigeon]

What is on the horizon, other than data, that demands 300gb discs?

And why would computers need more than 64 k of memory? Obviously nothing in the future will go beyond that! ;)

[Phades]

http://www.i4u.com/article4678.html


300GB is already more than 10x of Blu-ray or HD DVD capacity. The price for a 300GB holographic disc is supposed to be around $120. Only the Holographic disc reader device is currently an issue with a price of $15,000.



I'm sure Sony and Toshiba are terrified.

They should be. No company likes to see a VASTLY superior technology come into the light before they've even released their own product.

Bear in mind that prototypes by nature are insanely expensive. Mass productions does wonders for price.

[bobbler]

I, honestly, doubt Sony and Toshiba even care, as HVD really isn't a competitor to BR/HD-DVD.

[bboy]

DLT backups have a 4% - 11% failure rate yearly, their drives also fail and need to be cleaned quite often. They're a pain in the ass.

That's why you need to drop DLT and move to LTO :) 400GB compress per tape and very infrequent cleaning required. Low failure rates on media and hardware.

The thing about HVD and other high capacity optical systems is that they appear not to be rewritable (not initially anyway). This means that enterprise backups will be a one shot deal. If multisession is not possible and the backup fails part way through....guess what, grab another disc!

Also, have fun storing all the backup disc's in your vault! Even more fun will be destroying them all when it comes time for disposal of old backups...ugh.

[net7runner]

For the average consumer, the current cost of an HVD disk ($150) will buy you a 300 GB drive and an external enclosure...so until prices plummet this won't be a good market (and probably never will be, see above comments on lack of industry support).

Holographic storage is the future, but I don't think that HVD is going to be part of it. The advantage of HS is that you can use the entire 3-dimensional structure of the medium to store data, not just the surface ala DVD/Blu-Ray, etc.

At a theoretical limit of 4 gigabits per cubic mm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_memory), a 1-inch cube will probably be able to store about 711 GB of space. Nifty, space-age data cubes, here we come...

[dead]

At a theoretical limit of 4 gigabits per cubic mm, a 1-inch cube will probably be able to store about 711 GB of space. Nifty, space-age data cubes, here we come...

Interesting point. I wonder how powerful a block the size of a building would be...

[TrackZero]

Does nobody realize how this industry works?

HVD has no support from content companies. Content companies have vested interest in BR and HD-DVD. HVD is the laserdisc, and I'd be willing to bet a house on it (bookmark this post for 2008!). HVD has no support and probably won't even reach market for consumers until a major consortium deems it necessary (meaning if Sony/Toshiba/Samsung/Dell/HP/TDK/Thomson/etc/etc/etc/etc/etc started backing it, then it might have a shot).

I'd love to know who is going to be making the drives, besides Optoware or whoever the company is. And who else is actually supporting it?

If you guys are waiting for HVD as a movie format you're going to be wasting your time. Also, it will it not offer anything that HD-DVD and BR won't. 1080p at 24-30fps in h.264 with a ton of extra content and snazzy sound isn't even going to fill a BR disc -- so what, pray tell, is an HVD movie going to offer the consumer? In addition, HVD has to convince all those content companies and CE companies that it is a viable product and if its already this late into the game and nobody is jumping behind it, its DOA.

It's called business. It's politics; and often the consumer doesn't really much of a choice... our choices here are HD-DVD and BR. Whether consumers adopt it or we go to an inevitably lousy quality streamed version instead is another story (see MP3/MP4/etc vs CDs). HVD is not a choice for movies or content unless you buy a disc and put it on there yourself.

Agreed. I wouldn't put HVD in the movie industry or as a harddrive replacement. Really it's going to have to find it's niche for data backup (which, assuming it can perform without any issues, should easily beat out tape backup). If it ever can become re-writeable, then it can move into possibly being a replacement for your harddrive.

Edit: Not to obviously mention that content providers make money off selling you one product at a time on cheap-expendable-media. HVD definitely doesn't fit that mold.

[TrackZero]

Interesting point. I wonder how powerful a block the size of a building would be...

Well, let's see. The taking empire state buildings dimensions...

Height: 17,448 inches
x
Area: 951,456 sq inches

Equals: 16601004288 inches cubed
x
Storage: 711 Gigabytes

Equals: 11803314048768 Gigabytes
or

11526673875.750000 terabytes
11256517.4567871 petabytes
10992.69282889 exabytes

Sweet fucking Christ. That's more data than I can conceive.

[da.Guvna]

I did my uni dissertaion on this technology a year ago. Let me clarify a few things:

1. Engineers are confident that they can push the max storage size as far as 10Tb on a single disk.

2. HVD has a potential storage life of 50 years in the right conditions (FAR superior to DLT, as it doesn't suffer from the effects of blood-through, magnetic fields, etc.)

3. From a ‘physical’ storage point of view, the dimensional footprint and weight of a CD-sized disk is much smaller than that of a tape or hard drive, making physical storage and shipping of back-up disks to offsite locations cheaper.

4. As at the time of my research, data transfer rates were at about 130 mega BYTES per sec. (Faster transfer speeds are a real asset in applications such as data mining, where data retrieval is responsible for as much as 70-80% of the time taken to process the data.)

5. Yes, re-writeable media is on the cards.

Just think about the lifecycle CDs and DVDs went through....it's practically the same here. Starts off as an enterprise backup technology, far beyond the price point of consurmers, but as data storage requirements in the public sector start to increase (which they ARE, at an exponential rate) this technology (or some kind of spin-off) WILL become mainstream. Don't be so short-sighted.

As someone has already said in this thread, remember when Bill Gates said "No one will need more than 637 kb of memory for a personal computer.” ?

[Murmillo]

More like 2 or 3 times. . . (DVDs aren't that much smaller than HD-DVD or Blu-Ray) but yeah, there is no reason to move to 300GB.

Plus, it looks like this is going to be super expensive and will start as just a way for offices to do backups, then progress to be the hard-drives of the future.
No need? Depends on your field. When I was working as a communications specialist in the Army attached to a Military Intelligence unit, we would get and review (40-50 soliders) over 50GB of High-res satellite data a day. A lot of it was useless and had no intel to it, but about 20% or 10GB on average, a day was keep for future review. We had for storage 40 Raid-2 50Gb Harddrives with 4 DLP tape back ups which had to be replaced,tagged and put into storage once a month. 2-3 of the DLP tapes per month would be filled, but every so often the 4th one would be filled up.

Point being, we easily moved, stored and reviewd 300GB worth of data easily.

[mulligan]

You raise an interesting point. Oblivion is supposedly a HUGE game, graphics, audio, etc. If it can fit (comfortably, even?) on a single DVD disc, doesn't that indicate that- for games at least- HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are a bit unnecessary?

Is it possible that two generations can successively function on DVD discs? How much free space is left on the Oblivion disc will be a good starting point to think about that.


Oblivion its a different case than your regular game when it comes to level design, the levels if I am not mistaken are seed generated, I can't remember exactly what method they used.. anyone here wanna clear this up?

[1FSTCAT]

Definitely a lot of short-sidedness here. When we got CD's, they blew the heck out of floppies for a storage medium. Several years later (like floppies) we were up to 6-8 CD's per game. Now, you can get DVD's that are pretty much already full.

Look at me -- I have a collection of data that exceeds 100 DVD's. This is all stuff I've downloaded and written to DVD. I would LOVE blu-ray or HDDVD. Heck, with a hundred DVD's, I could even fairly-well utilize HVDVD's.

Trust me, there's plenty of need for this technology. We just need the price to come down a bit, so guys like myself can afford it.

--Ed

[Taco]

It took nearly 10 years for DVD's and they still aren't as widely used as CDs. Also, the comparisons being drawn are mostly for industry standards, not a minority of computer end users.

[bean19]

No need? Depends on your field. When I was working as a communications specialist in the Army attached to a Military Intelligence unit, we would get and review (40-50 soliders) over 50GB of High-res satellite data a day. A lot of it was useless and had no intel to it, but about 20% or 10GB on average, a day was keep for future review. We had for storage 40 Raid-2 50Gb Harddrives with 4 DLP tape back ups which had to be replaced,tagged and put into storage once a month. 2-3 of the DLP tapes per month would be filled, but every so often the 4th one would be filled up.

Point being, we easily moved, stored and reviewd 300GB worth of data easily.

I was replying to someone who stated that you would need like 6 DVDs for an HD movie. Really you would only need 2. . . 3 for really big movies. There was a context to the comment. :)

[Setzer_83]

HVD doesn't have Sony.

your right, they might still stand a chance.

[phantomhitman]

my intellectual post=woot woot
thanks
I would back this before hd or blu ray, and as ALWAYS the price will come down to the expensive range for the first 1-2 years, then it will fall down to normal consumer level. Same thing happens with each new technology.