Ask Slashdot: What Happened To Holographic Data Storage? (youtube.com) 86
dryriver writes: In an episode of the BBC's Tomorrow's World broadcasted all the way back in 1984, a presenter shows hands-on how a laser hologram of a real-world object can be recorded onto a transparent plastic medium, erased again by heating the plastic with an electric current, and then re-recorded differently. The presenter states that computer scientists are very interested in holograms because the future of digital data storage may lie in them. This was 35 years ago. Holographic data storage for PCs, smartphones, etc. still is not available commercially. Why is this? Are data storage holograms too difficult to create? Or did nobody do enough research on the subject, getting us all stuck with mechanical hard disks and SSDs instead? Where are the hologram drives that appeared "so promising" three decades ago?
Ask Google, not Slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
[techradar.com]My third result for your question pasted verbatim into Google [techradar.com] gives the answer. Did you even try google?
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Damn, you beat me to it. [lmgtfy.me]
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it's "what we were HOPING would happen"
Question remains unanswered
I'm still only seeing prototypes in the last year.
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"Troll" is when you say things that aren't even true to piss people off. I'm saying something true, to educate and inform, and I provided a citation. Fuckfaces like you getting modpoints is exactly why this place is deadsville
You realize you are doing exactly what you are accusing parent poster of?
Re: Noobs with modpoints (Score:2)
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Re:Ask Google, not Slashdot (Score:4, Funny)
even rouge employees cannot copy.
How about jaune employees? I know for a fact vert employees are in fact bleu.
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Rouge is Rogue with makeup
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So, the answer is (Score:4, Interesting)
I RTFA, and the gist is this:
- Storage is the same disk, not a cube
- Capacity is meh
- Write speed is abysmal
Jesus (Score:5, Insightful)
It never got cheap, dense, fast, or reliable enough to become a product anyone would ever care about.
How is this a question?
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How about virtual holographic data storage. The thing about holograms, the storage of frequencies, rather than on and offs. So you can create it virtually by storing frequencies in transistors, so not off or on but on storing a specific frequency oscillation. So then a transistors can not store more than just on of off, 0 or 1 but could store 0 or 1-9 or even 1 - 999 and when tested it presents either a 0 or a number corresponding to that frequency between 1 and 9 or 1 and 999 as a response. Good for data s
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How exactly would you store a frequency in a transistor? Moreover, how would you maintain transistor-based storage without a power source being connected 24/7?
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Disregard the second question - flash works just fine without power. :-D
Re: Jesus (Score:1)
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But flash is not based on transistors ...
EH? (Score:2)
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We used to call those things a tri-state in university, not transistor. But I guess I stand corrected.
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Re:Jesus (Score:4, Funny)
How is this a question?
That's the real "ask slashdot"
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How come this isn't a major motion picture? :-D
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Because it has an question mark at the end.
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More over Bluray filled the niche it was aiming for. Archival Bluray discs are supposed to last a lifetime and so far seem to be holding up. They are also cheap, easily available and compatible with standard Bluray drives.
The other issue is that discs in general are going away. Many computers don't even have an optical drive these days.
Always just around the corner (Score:3)
Too expensive (Score:2, Informative)
There are various optical and mechanical things that have to be in place to make holographic storage useful. A Multilayer DVDRW is a holographic storage, the medium wears out and degraded over time. It's also slow as molasses compared to modern silicon and the optics need mechanics that simply don't make financial sense.
On the other hand silicon is cheaper faster and denser, stacked on top of each other we now have stacked 3D NAND for better density.
Until silicon runs out of capacity, we simply don't need i
Re:Too expensive (Score:4, Informative)
A Multilayer DVDRW is a holographic storage
No, it isn't [wikipedia.org]. HVD is [wikipedia.org], but it has never come to market.
It couldn't keep up with silicon (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It couldn't keep up with silicon (Score:5, Informative)
Remember floptical disks [wikipedia.org]?
It turns out they... flopped.
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Zip discs pretty much killed off all the competition like floptical, LS120 and Castlewood Orb.
And the Zip discs were killed off by cheap USB flash drives that worked without the need for a special drive. But for a while the "high density removable disc" concept was viable.
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I still have about 20 Zip Disks and a SCSI connected drive.
I wonder if there are USB adapters for it. IIRC the disks hold about 100MB, quite a bit for a time where a afordable hard disk was 500MB.
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Floppy disk: 1.44MB
Floptical disk: 25MB
ZIP disk: 100MB
LS120: 120MB
CD: 650MB
DVD: 4.7GB
DVD Dual-layer: 9GB
USB flash drive: 64k-256Gb (or more)
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CD/DVD burners were more of a pain though. When I first got a 2x drive it took 45 minutes to burn a disc and anything other than write-once was janky and not well supported. Even later Zip drives were easier.
When I first got a Zip drive a single 100MB disc was larger than the 85MB hard drive in my primary computer.
Re: It couldn't keep up with silicon (Score:2)
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You left out Bournelli, Syquest, and magneto optical. My Apex had 4.6 GB before the Zip disk or DVD.
I miss the reliability of magneto-optical.
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Don't forget, CDRs jumped almost immediately to 700MB
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Zip disk, meh, LS120 yeah they were cool, Castlewood Orb, Holy crap did you just nostalgia punch me in the face. I completely forgot those existed, a piece of IT history that lived briefly.
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There is a phenomenon that can be identified in other examples in the history of technology where the early commercial success of one particular technology option in a product space attracted increasing and then very large amounts of capital to keep improving it in a self-reinforcing cycle. Success breeds investment and more success. Even of other technologies seem objectively superior in some role they cannot compete against the result of vast cumulative investment of money and ingenuity and industrial exp
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Your characterization of spinning disks and tape is a bit off. Spinning disks are still cheaper than an SSD, which makes it better for many people with a lot of data but not a lot of money. Sure SSD is great if you have deep pockets but spinning disks are far more economical on capacity. SSD is great for when performance is critical. Also, a recent news article touted that tape capacities could go to many 330 tetabytes (not a typo) on a small tape. Tape is good for backup of data for cold storage, and for m
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Access time and density (Score:2)
Access time for holographic storage, at least as envisioned in the '80s, would have been limited by the electromechanics of the read/write optics, comparable to the way HD seek times are limited by the time constants of voice coil actuators. Electrothermal erasure time constants would have been a problem too, perhaps with a limited erasure lifetime of the media.
Holographic data storage densities would have seemed quite appealing in the mid-'80s, but that was in the era of barely sub-micron feature sizes on
It was just an illusion (Score:2)
Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality...
Oh the 80s... (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the 80s, holograms were all the rage. I remember I received National Geographic back then, and one issue had a "massive" hologram on the cover of the magazine, including in depth articles about how it was created. Just did a quick google, and it's the March 1984 edition. So apparently in 1984 holograms were simply the big thing, and somehow everyone was trying to get in on the buzz of this technology somehow, including data storage.
In the end all they were really useful for was anti-counterfeit type use on credit cards and other "seals" of authenticity stuck on various products, because of the expense and difficulty in manufacturing them.
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The current buzzword is blockchain. Thirty years from now the question will be "What ever happened to the promised Blockchain wonderfulness?"
The answer then will be, as it is now, these things were buzzwords and suffered from many of the failings and faults that befell buzzword-based technology -- they were simply ill-conceived solutions to problems that did not exist.
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Nah, git will still exist in thirty years.
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While I like git, it is probably the only source control system that is full of oxymorons:
a) you can not use it from the command line, because it is impossible to memorize the stupid idiotic finish to english translations of the options
b) you can not use it in modern IDEs because they always mess something up, so you have to use the command line
c) in teams it is completely unusable without tools like bitbucket
d) it is nevertheless the best we have
I hoped one would rewrite it, and give the commands proper na
Re: Oh the 80s... (Score:1)
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Probably you don't know what a block chain is, or how it works.
You ever got a cheque from someone else? Tried to use it for payment in a super market and get the surplus money back as change?
That was very common for a while in North Africa, partly Europe. What has that to do with block chain? If you hand over the check you have to sign it with you name on the back side. Checks often changed hands a dozen times until the final owner cashed it in at the bank: that is a block chain.
Now go of my lawn, youngster
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https://www.amazon.com/Attack-... [amazon.com]
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I remember around the same time coming across a real hologram, it was a simple spigot sticking out of the wall looking very real, could even get on your hands and knees and look up the pipe and it still looked real and had to try to touch it to realize it was just a projection. That's what I think of a real holograph, not a flat 3d looking thing on a magazine.
As I remember the explanation, it was filmed with a laser beam, split into 2, one beam taking a longer route and the reflection applied to film, basic
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I've never seen an almost transparent faucet. And no, that hologram would not have had any detail "up the faucet" past where the laser could reach.
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It looked pretty solid and up the spout turned into shadow fairly quick, just like real life if you don't shine a light up it.
Re: Oh the 80s... (Score:1)
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"In depth articles.." I see what you did there... :-)
semantics (Score:4, Insightful)
Because if you went back to 1984 and gave them the specs on your NVME stick, their eyes would bug out. Just because you append the word "holographic" to something does not make it inherently better.
That said, I'm looking forward to hyperspace quantum light saber flying care data storage dot com, should be pretty sick.
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Because if you went back to 1984 and gave them the specs on your NVME stick, their eyes would bug out. Just because you append the word "holographic" to something does not make it inherently better.
That said, I'm looking forward to hyperspace quantum light saber flying care data storage dot com, should be pretty sick.
Make that "flying cat data storage", and you're on to something. Admittedly, the cats would kill you, because they have light sabers, and they're cats. It would make for a great movie if anyone survived to see it.
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Take a bite out of holographic and one potentially could retrieve it. The same couldn't be said of NVME.
Re: semantics (Score:1)
similar things are still in the works... (Score:3)
https://winbuzzer.com/2019/11/... [winbuzzer.com]
Re:similar things are still in the works... (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, this link is better: https://www.microsoft.com/en-u... [microsoft.com]
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If they give civil rights to holograms, civil rights don't mean anything.
Not dead yet (Score:4, Informative)
HVD (Holographic Versatile Disc) has been under development for many years now, as a successor to Blu-Ray as a format for media distribution. The newest revision of the standard supports up to 6 TB discs with a transfer rate of 1 GB/s -- which is still above BluRay (BDXL 128 GB now, BDXL 4 at 400GB) and SD-card (1 TB now).
I'd think that getting users and the whole industry to switch, however, is not that easy -- which is why a HVD product has never launched.
The launches of both CD, DVD and Blu-Ray each took several years: and you have to get all parties aboard.
Ultimately, when a format is introduced, it has to meet some kind of consumer demand. The first devices and discs, to be picked up by early adopters are projected to be quite expensive.
I think that other formats will be enough for a while, and when the time comes, other media than HVD are going to match it.
I think e.g. thumb-drives with USB C would become more suitable for media distribution before HVD will be.
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wow 6tb thats massive. I can see why hvd hasnt come to market then yet. Until sony et al reaches the most they can milk out of bluray theyre not gonna switch to a new medium.
If a 4K movie at a decent bitrate takes up 100gb, then a 8K movie would take up 400gb, 16K movie 1.6tb and a 32K movie 6.4tb. So at current tech it is good enough for a 16K movie plus extras. Assuming encoding codecs stay the same.
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I often wonder if this kind of tech has been purposely held back because of it's potential to shake up current storage markets. SSD has already done so over conventional mechanical drives.
You can be absolutely certain it is being held back. Hard drive manufacturers are also the ones making SSDs, but they have capital investments in hard drive factories they want to pay back, especially after the flooding in Thailand. If not for those floods, much higher capacity SSDs would already be available. Seagate publicized a 60TB SSD—in 2016. They were supposed to start selling them in 2017. If they actually did, they weren't sold at retail and they aren't talking about it.
Samsung, on the o
Hur hur (Score:1)
"Holographic storage is an optical storage method" (Score:2)
No, holographic storage is not an optical storage method. Reading is optical, storing is, obviously, as mechanical as your nostalgic LP.
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Well, there are plenty of different concepts.
And they all are optical. No idea what you talk about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The idea the question asker actually is about crystal storages:
https://www.pcworld.com/articl... [pcworld.com]
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/p... [ssrn.com]
DVD DVD-R CD CD-R (Score:2)
All of these techs are variants of 'holographic' (aka optical) memory in 1-D. Organizing things in 3D is mathematically complex and as of yet there has not been sufficient market to justify the capacity of a 3D form factor. Considering you can fit whole movies and encyclopedias on a DVD and could even go to Double sided if you want I don't see a market for it unless the process can be made fast enough to uses as primary storage or working memory.
What happened to holo storage? (Score:2)
Well that depends... (Score:2)
From what I've researched.. (Score:2)
Spinning disks and tape most economical still (Score:2)
IBM recently announced a tape capacity breakthrough that would allow 330 TB to be stored to a tape cartridge. Spinning disks are still the most economical option for random access. Some have commented that SSD is displacing tape or spinning disks, This is inaccurate. Spinning disks are still the choice for the most MB per dollar for random access storage. Tape looks like it could be the most economical by far if you can do with sequential access. Sequential access still works beautifully for offline cold ba
Holo storage a never was (Score:1)