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Science

New Holographic Storage Medium Doesn't Shrink 85

Posted by timothy from the friday-style-bellybutton-storage dept.
Wiesel Werkstätte writes "Nature has an article reporting a new photopolymer suitable for long term holographic storage. previous materials are "read once" and they shrink and distort during the storage process. this new material, a combination of glass and plastic, can also be applied in thicker films." Which means that three-dimensional holographic storage is a tiny bit closer.
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New Holographic Storage Medium Doesn't Shrink More

New Holographic Storage Medium Doesn't Shrink

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  • MMmmm (Score:4)

    by Aggrazel ( 13616 ) <aggrazel@gmail.com> on Wednesday March 14, 2001 @07:04AM (#363925) Journal
    All this talk about mediums and shrinks has confused me... I don't know if I need to see a Psychic or a Psycologist.

  • Designer Storage (Score:3)

    by ndrw ( 205863 ) on Wednesday March 14, 2001 @08:14AM (#363926)
    Do you all think this could be a good step towards "designer" storage systems? I'm thinking of esthetically pleasing shapes and colors for crystal structures, you could use as ornamentation. Will these holographic devices necessarily have to be cubicle? What about tetrahedrons? I wouldn't mind having a pyramid of around 100 TB... mount in a base with wireless, and you've got a portable crystal ball.

    Oh powerful and wise crystal tower, what is the average velocity of an unladen swallow?

  • Theoretically speaking, how long could data sit in one of these cubes before it degrades?

    -----

  • So by the time the technology has hit the market and the product has increased in usability to a certain level, expect stability. Sounds like a Microsoft business plan, to me. "Well, it's doesn't quite work 100% now, but by service pack 3 we'll have it nice and stable for you!"

    moan...

  • http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/03/14/162217 &mode=nested [slashdot.org]

    Sorry if this is off topic, but I thought I'd let y'all know.


    --
  • I remember ten years ago reading about a crystal a cm or so on a side that was being used to hold enormous amounts of data holographically. Probably the LiNb they were talking about.

    The problem of read-erase is easy to solve: use twice the amount of crystal and write one half with the bits you read from the other. It's still two orders of magnitude more bit-density than anything else. And it's not like there aren't a dozen other examples of dynamic RAM devices that needed some sort of refresh or constant cycling during access (bubble memory, bloch-line memory, mercury SAW memory, that thing the Canucks are doing storing data in the laser beams on their token ring...)

    The demurrer about how to read materials with a laser? Please. CD, DVD, etc., etc. Throw in a micromirror array and a spindle, and you can do anything and watch TV on your wall.

    Shrink, Schmink. If the reader system can't handle minor variations in process parameters, it was designed by monkeys. Or Ballmer. Same thing.

    Nature kills me...they post a story about using multiple lasers to twiddle the orbitals in a supermaterial, and help you understand by reminding you (really, telling most of you for the first time) that varnish turns brown! Ya gotta love those mooks.

    --Blair
    "Has anyone ever actually seen a molecule of dihydrogen monoxide?"

  • What about long time storage - is glass a liquid? (Score:4)

    by pinkNoise ( 191176 ) on Wednesday March 14, 2001 @08:29AM (#363931)

    The new blend, basically glass riddled with holes, can be made into thick films and does not shrink -- problems inherent in previous materials for holographic data storage.

    This is a very interesting technology, and it seems like some type of three dimensional optical storage would enable a storage capacity one or twe magnitudes larger than the ones used today.

    It is usually said that glass is a liquid, and flows slowly, as seen in old church windows that are thicker at the bottom edge.
    However, a bit of googling seems to suggest that glass flowing over time is an urban legend [ualberta.ca] (church windows apparently just had an imperfect manufacturing process, and were installed thick edge down). Whether to call glass a liquid or solid seems to be a toughter question [ucr.edu].

    But aside from flowing, is there something else about glass that could make it unsuitable for longtime information storage?

  • I can finally say, "My holo-matrix is unstable"... "Format my Holo-deck" (an array of Holo-drives) ... or how about "I've had a holo-dump".

    Boy I miss the term, "flopto-magnetic" there were lots of good lines there too.

    - // Zarf //
  • This stuff has been 5 years away since the early 90's... Its always 5 years away... "5 Years away" must be marketing speak for "We don't have a clue"
  • One of the problems with holographic storage is that layering hologram on top of hologram makes the entire storage medium increasingly opaque. Eventually you get to the point where you can't read data through all the other data (or it takes too much power, leading to overheating, or too much exposure/integration time, leading to really slow acccess). These problems have been detailed before, and I'm really disappointed that the article didn't mention how they are supposed to be licked by this new medium. If they aren't it's no breakthrough, just a curiosity.
    --
    spam spam spam spam spam spam
    No one expects the Spammish Repetition!
  • African, or European?
  • ...I seem to have cooled my drink with your copy of The Matrix.

    Asikaa
  • The interesting property of holagram is that if there is a small flaw in the coating, instead of making one bit unreadable, it will cause all bits to be slightly less readable, since the information for each bit is encoded in the whole cube! So accidental scratches will not cause errors, untill there is enough damage to cause the whole cube to fail. In one dimention, the data stored in the hologram, is basically the Fourier transform of data that you actually see, in three dimmentions, the equations are a bit more complicated, but same idea holds, damage results mostly in overall degradation, not loss of any particular spot.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Indeed, the glass was manufactured that way; I seem to recall finding out that it was done purposely, though, rather than accidentally. I don't remember what the reasoning was for doing that.

    Sometimes, it was installed thick-end up; that would definately help one to realise that glass is no more liquid than one expects it to be.

    FWIW, I'd call glass a solid. You have to heat it before it will take the shape of it's container; at comfortable temperatures, it will shatter before squeezing into a container. Once it shatters, no amount of waiting for it to flow will cause it to become one mass of glass again, it will stay in shards until it is heated hot enough to liquify. But, IANA glass physics expert...

  • Instead of "Not my fault, hard drive crashed", we will now hear "Our hologram shrunk, but they are working on it.." from our sysadmins.. :-)
  • IIRC, there was a brief segment on a NOVA episode talking about lasers and holographic storage. The commentator said that it was feasible to hold the entire contents of the library of congress on a single holographic cube the size of a sugar cube.

    DISCLAIMER: by "contents of the library of congress" the poster means to say all the volumes contained in the library of congress and digitized into ASCII text files. The poster does not imply that the people who are sometimes found inside the library of congess can be holographically stored in a sugar cube. That would be silly.


    -----------------

  • Granted, this is exciting and it is good to see these steps towards holographic storage, but seeing as how we have had all the vaporware promises for the past year and a half now, and still not even an alpha item, I am not going to hold my breath on this one.
  • Just try to get some methods of storage to last long term, not just the media. I need to get a 5.25" floppy drive for a new PC in a few months. Not many of those up, but I can probably scavenge and cobble one in.

    --

  • Hahahahaha, oh man thats the funniest thing I've ever seen!
  • Is it that bad? Random, high-speed might be a problem but sequential ought to be not that difficult. I'd imagine that the entire mechanism could be housed in something no larger than a typical housing used for external CDs.

    Given the storage capacity relative to the size, even a mechanism as large as a typical mid-tower PC case capable of storing several TB of data would be useful. Remember, there were people who wet their pants over early WORM drives that were slow as hell.

    I think the data "cube" conception is what gets people. IANA optical researcher, but why not a cylinder? I envision a cylinder spinning with two lasers mounted on the side at 90 deg angles to each other and another mounted something like a hard disk head on one end.
  • You shouldn't expect permanence from a technology that's still in it's infancy. Back in the early days of magnetic media there was also a problem with the data not lasting very long. By the time you can buy a 50TB hard drive using this technology, I'm sure they'll have the reliability issues worked out.
  • Will the storage unit "know" where its flaws are?

    The currently-envisioned solution would be to pair each unit with another unit, termed the "girlfriend". The unit will then only need reference the girlfriend to find out exactly what flaws it has and how bad they are...
  • Light has been used for storage for quite a long time. Don't believe me? I'm suprised.

    We have:
    Compact Discs. Although they aren't all that fast, they can be a great way to hold information.

    In-side of compact discs- CD-R(w). These little buggers hold my mp3 collection, all 3o gigs of it. not that impressive, but...

    We have DVD-ROM/RAM. This stuff is great. Although the media and drive are a little expensive for an averege user, they do work well, and a DVD-RAM disk holds a good 5.2 gigabytes of information. It would take signifagantly fewer of these to backup a large collection of files, and even their cost is offset by the time they would save burning some 50 CD-R's.

    Now, someone is likely to say- "Well this is something that is cheaper and better."
    I agree. It's just that this is nothing new, light is something that is great, and will continue to stay around for sometime. That is unless the sun flickers out and throws us into a vacuum of oblivion. Let's hope that doesn't happen.

    Karma...Police...
    Arrest this man...
    He speaks in numbers,
    He buzzes like a fridge..

  • They said the same thing about the film projector when it was first invented.
  • I bet the MPAA and the RIAA will wet their pants with that technology... people can't copy something if they can't read it, no? :)
  • Yup... just like any regular girlfriends... hahaha
  • The expected storage density is around 10GBcm-, so it would be possible to pack aprox. 164GB of data in a cubic inch; Pretty good, tough current HD tecnology will probably reach that density before holo storage is ready for commercial use(of course, the 10GBcm- number will probably raise as research continues).
    The really good thing about it is its speed: Laser beams can move without inertia, using acoustoptical materials which change its refraction angle acording to vibrations; That makes posible access times to a random point in no more than 100 microseconds, and data transmission rates around 1-2GBs-, which are several orders of magnitude faster than any HD that is even projected.
  • Nature articles don't constitute press releases - and these are IBM and Bayer researchers being reported on. No marketing here.

    but thanks for trying. take any of the prizes from the second shelf...
  • Glass is a liquid, physically speaking. however, this information really won't help answer the question at hand.

    I'm guessing that the optical properties of the storage medium could be affected over time, but $hit happens, and entropy increases.

    All being said and done, considering the mean time to failure for current drives (what, 5yrs?), i can't imagine that slight distortion over hundreds of years will give anyone reason not so change over to mass storage with retrieval times comparable to RAM, and storage capacities orders of magnitudes higher than current drives.

    i guess i'm say, that even if distortion occurs, it's probably kinder than a head crash :)
  • 50 bucks says if it happens, it will be a Mac :)

  • Crystal Ball powered by Google :)

  • I don't know exactly how much storage will take this to happen, but if they manage to get the density on a hard drive (let's say a single platter) to 50 TB, wouldn't it be individual molecules (or possibly atoms) that are magnetized as bits? So if that is true, wouldn't the magnetic fields from the bits magnetise eachother?

    I think it was called Moore's law. It said the amount of transistors in a microchip would double every 18 months. He also said that miniturization would hit an end in about 2017 because individual atoms would be stacked between adjacent traces in a microchip. This means that the electromagnetic charges of each of the transistors would probably affect one another.

    Yes, this is with microchips, but the same thing applies to hard drives about the magnetic charges affecting eachother.

  • IANASCD (Small Cube Designer) but I would create a system whereby the cube is read by six lasers each pointing at a face of the cube, translating the geometry of the cube into 6 "pyramids" inverted with their tops all touching at the volumetric center of the cube, and the bottom becoming the face. Each laser would only have to read a relatively small area at the deepest point in the cube, increasing as it comes out.

    If that worked you could setup some kind of striping across the faces of the cube and have a 6x boost in thoroughput.

    mmmmmmm........20TB/S......agghhh

  • CD = 1 dimentional data - did that (along with tape, vinyl and wax) a long time ago.
    DVD = 2 dimentional data - a few years now.
    H-Cube(TM) = 3 dimentional data...could be soon, but will happen.

    ...discounting time as a dimention...
  • And you could have a different song playing for the rest of the estimate lifetime of our universe.
    --
  • Hopefully we'll see this without copy-protection.

  • We still need the optics.... (Score:5)

    by drin ( 83479 ) on Wednesday March 14, 2001 @06:37AM (#363963)
    Having the storage is one thing, but AFAIK no-one has solved the optics problem as of yet. Having referent laser beams penetrate the storage medium at the multiple angles and speeds involved for useful data retrieval in a package suitable for long-term comsumer use is still an unsolved problem, is it not? So the creation of non-shrinking media is a good step forwards, but we're still a long way from opening our 'tray of what look like small ice-cubes and dropping one into [our] hi-fi system to provide the evening's soundtrack'. A long way indeed.... -drin
  • Slashdot is broken again

    I prefer to think of Slashdot's latest behavior as a new security feature, you get logged out after every comment posted or every update.
  • ..a while ago, about cubes filled with proteins. Data would be stored on the proteins. Scientists had managed to store the data with relative ease, but couldn't retreive the data later on. This was 10GB per cubic cm. Holographic storage could mean that long awaited huge drop in hard drive prices and maybe even memory, depending on the read/write speed of it all. Imagine a rackmount file server storing terrabytes of data. mmmmmm... *drool* The perfect MP3 jukebox.
  • I really like the concept of data on a cube. It's been vaporware and scifi for too long now. Any word on how much data these holographic storage units can hold?
  • .. Untill sony gets a hold of it, manufactures it all into little sticks that only work in THERE products, and require you giving up your first born to purchase...... i hate sony
  • "Pretty cool, Jim"

    I've been waiting for the day when we'll carry around little solid colored tiles of information like on Star Trek TOS. Now if I could only get one of those three-faced monitors!

    --Jim
  • But the old stuff was better! When you were done with it, you could color a nice picture on it and bake it. Just like shrinky-dinks!
  • Does anyone know what would happen if there was a flaw in this polymer. i mean... surely there will be small flaws in it that would render areas unusable. Will the storage unit "know" where its flaws are?

  • A place to put all of my holographic National Geographic covers!

    ----

  • I remember waiting for this in 1994. What's your dream hard drive?

    Mine's the size of a Sony memory stick, holding 80 gigs of storage, and a firewire jack. Oh yeah, and I can boot of of it.

    --Never trust a tech who tattoes his IP to his arm, especially if DHCP
  • you might want to post this as AC next time, ryan.
  • "Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope."
  • ... I don't know if I need to see a Psychic or a Psycologist.

    Ah, what is a Psycologist? Is that someone who psychoanalyses your lower intestinal tract?

    Going on means going far
    Going far means returning
  • And the bigger question... if they couldn't retrieve it, how did they know they successfully stored it?
  • Re: Micromirror arrays and a spindle.

    CDs and DVDs don't enter the discussion - they read in a single plane, albeit at different depths. This technology requires that the incident angle of the referant laser beam change many thousands (millions?) of times each second in order to access the data stored in the various planes. I have yet to hear of such a micromirror/spindle combination that's designed for MTBF approaching consumer grade devices.

    -drin

  • Cool (Score:1)

    by law090 ( 327307 )
    Really cool if this could come in production and be used for archiving purpose, goodbye Seagate!
  • theoretically in a perfect environment no degradatoin of data would occur so they could store data from now till the end of the next forever. untill the medium is perfected however the best storage time is about 0.5 of a year. personnaly i believe this will soon be greatly improved upon untill it reaches about the 50 year mark and then go up to infinite storage time in one big jump.
  • Actually, CD's, DVD's, etc. aren't optical storage (technically). Although they do use lasers to store/retreive the data, the data itself is physical. The bits just different forms of surface on a disk. Either the bits are a surface that reflects the laser back (0) or they are a surface that doesn't reflect the laser back (1).

  • George Lucas and James Cameron will have a new storage medium to boycott and then re-release their movies on!
  • Hmm, these remind me of the "data crystals" in the Babylon 5 series. Maybe those Hollywood Science Fiction FX people should read a little more into current technology when they try "designing" stuff a few hundred years into the future, just like all those nice analog control surfaces on the original Star Trek. Speaking of that, anyone else wondering that the new prequel series is gonna look more high tech then the original? :)

  • Glass is an amorphous solid.

    See: Glass: Liquid or Solid -- Science vs. an Urban Legend [ualberta.ca]

  • Nonsense, Slashdot can't be broken. It's open source, and we all know that open source software is tremendously reliable and that any bugs that creep in are fixed instantly by the army of waiting eyeballs. Why, most open source projects are so reliable that they don't even have a bug database!

    Tim


  • Cynic Mode:

    Of course, with the way fair use and copyright laws are evolving, there won't be that much legal data accessible to anyone. Library of Congress? We'll be lucky if we can legally store a couple gigs of files in this thing without breaking some kind of law!
  • If the increasing opaqueness of the material is a hangup, I imagine that they will work with layers of the stuff, not thick pieces.

    A "small cube" worth of material in a different form (smart card sized?) would still be pretty nifty.

    Of course if you spread out the material, you introduce other problems, but they may be easier to solve.

  • Even if it was too hard to make this a removable media system at first, it would still be valuable. Imagine a box that you plug into your gigabit ethernet that stores some *ungodly* amount of data and costs about $1000. Or some other figure, which would still be a lot less than a huge array of hard drives.

    This would be maximally useful if new computer standards allowed you to boot off it, so all your boxen could tap the data source. And if all your home entertainment gear could talk to it too...

    Of course that kind of interconnectivity is not looking good right now, so it's kind of a moot point. But I'd still like a ziggabyte of storage. :)
  • It's nice that a substance now exists for holo-disks(?), but at last check the drives that use the disks/cubes/thingies were huge and expensive.

    Any news on the drive scene?
  • It isn't glass, but this 70-yr old experiment at UQ in Australia shows pitch isn't all that solid...
    http://www.physics.uq.edu.au/pitchdrop/pitchdrop.s html [uq.edu.au]

  • Re:I'm sure I saw something similar.... (Score:5)

    by infinite9 ( 319274 ) on Wednesday March 14, 2001 @06:41AM (#363990)

    Scientists had managed to store the data with relative ease, but couldn't retreive the data later on.

    Is that like write-only memory?

  • It's "tera-", not "terra-".

    (Without this paragraph, I get "Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted.")
    --

  • Forgive me for not keeping up with all of the technologies, but...

    What's the expected density of the data in a holographic medium, as compared with more conventional media?

    Though I'd love to have a holographic television or monitor, is data storage really expected to get much better with holographic techniques than with other ones?

  • Yup, sounds about right to me here as well. Except you try to post your comment and get logged out, and then your comment doesn't get posted, so you have to start again, or go to another site.

    Face it people, holographic storage for the masses as 5 years off, 10 years for reasonable acceptance. Sure, a few devices might dribble out over the next couple of years. The best hope appears to be the FMD disc/card devices which might appear as early as next year.

  • "The substance, a mixture of glass and plastic, has retained imprinted information perfectly for at least six months"
    Now that's a statement sure to inspire confidence in the consumer. It holds tons of stuff... just not permanently.

    Mordred
  • So what you are saying is that a huge amount of information can be crammed into a tiny piece of recording material. I know that Prototype holographic memory devices have already been made so that they can store and read out video data in a little cube. Some of these cubes use 'photorefractive' materials.
  • I'll wait for CDDD (http://www.c-3d.net/) and their 140GB compact disk.
    Rumor has it that they will be offering the first generation of their products in the next month or two. Plus it will work with the current drive technology (with a few mods) so that I don't have to buy another drive.

  • Why?

    Because I still have stuff on 5.25" floppies. I've been working on these "PC" things for decades (umm... 3 now... geez...) and some old, old projects [real code remains Beta until a) the user dies OR b) the last coder dies] I'd like to move onto something else.

    I have noticed... 9 track tape (@1600 BPI) is still in use. Imagine (what a Beowulf cluster of Holograms could do with) that.

    --

  • The initial read once holographics would be useful for clandestine data transfer, or RIAA "listen once" demo songs, etc. Not perfectly since that initial read could still be used to copy the data off, but it's a thought.
  • I could use some Holographic swim trunks that prevent shrinkage.
  • Wow , holy pixels per seconds batman , it looks like the giant bat diamond in the bat computer is one step closer. Who remebers the giant bat " diamond " plastic thing from that show ? i myself would rather remeber cat woman
  • Well this all depends on the definition of a 'liquid'.

    If the only definition of a liquid is that:

    1) it lacks any long range order
    2) it is isotropic (no changes in physcal properties with direction
    3) it deforms plastically (i.e. flows; note no time scale given!)

    then glass is a liquid. all glasses will deform given enough time. I'm not talking in minits here! Obsidian (wolcanic glass) do deform slowly over milions of years, Even at room temperature! Of couse it deforms much faster at elevated temperatures.

    On the other hand, if a material deforms over time (like a candle or a glacier) does not mean that they too are liquids.

    The problem here, is how we define a liquid. From the purely physical point of view, only the definition given in the beginning as well as a fourth one (thermodynamical one) is adequate:

    4) liquids aquire internal thermodynamical equlibrium after a small temperature change
    (irrespectively to wether or not the liquid state is the stable state, alas applies also for supercooled liquids)

    All supercooled liquids posess a transition temperature (as noted in the article above) called 'the glass transition temperatre', below which the physical poperties change from a classical liquid to that of an other state where local internal equlibrium is not maintained (the glass state). In this sense glasses is not liquids, but belong to their own group of materials: the Glasses
    The glass transition temperature is not constant, but changes with cooling rate, as slower cooling allows the liquid to maintain internal equlibrium to lower temperatures. There is a lower limit, however, as a liquid below the melting temperature cannot have lower internal energy (Gibbs' free energy) than the crystaline phase. (for more comprehensive study: refer to Solid state Chemistry and its Applications by Anthony R. West)

    Well enough physics for today: the bottom line is, if a glass is above the glass transition temperature, then is IS a liquid, if it is below it is NOT.

    Yours Yazeran

    Plan: to go to mars one day with a hammer.

  • WOM Cubes ;)
  • Heh... I used to do Adam West's tech support back when I worked at rmci.net (restraining verbally abusive former employer fit). Had to show him how to reinstall DUN ... he's not exactly the techie type at all ;) Did anyone see the Johnny Bravo episode with Adam West? The guy sure can poke fun at himself! At least he's having fun with his retirement. Mr T. could take a lesson. (Yes, I have his contact info somewhere in my mail backups. No, I'm not going to give it out. :P )
  • Just because it says it has retained imprinted information for at least 6 months doesn't mean that it only holds information for 6 months. It just means that in their tests then the information was still good after 6 months and would probably remain good for quite a while after that. [Insert own humour here]
  • Oh powerful and wise crystal tower, what is the average velocity of an unladen swallow?
    Would that be an African swallow or an European swallow?
  • but the man really thinks he is batman , thats just weird, wasnt he also on space ghost ?

  • Rimmer should check this out (Score:4)

    by sphix42 ( 144155 ) on Wednesday March 14, 2001 @06:53AM (#364007) Homepage
    It may help boost his self confidence
  • I think they'd work in HERE products too.

  • Any different than a CD/CD-R/CD-RW? (Score:3)

    by Svartalf ( 2997 ) on Wednesday March 14, 2001 @06:57AM (#364009) Homepage
    Small flaws in the polymer coating or in the recordable layer (be they polymers (in the case of CD-R's) or sputtered metal films (in the case of CD-RW's)) will cause bit errors. How do they compensate for/know about the errors? Error correction placed into the stream written out to the disk. It'd be little to no different with holographic storage.

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