Microholography Could Lead to 500 GB Discs 158
angrykeyboarder writes "Scientists have discovered a way to fit 500 GB of data onto DVD-sized discs. These discs would be created with a process called 'microholography, which combines multilayer storage of data with holographic imagery. From the article: 'Microholography allows data to be stored in three dimensions. The technology works by replacing the two-dimensional pit-land structures currently found on CDs and DVDs with microgratings, which are holographically induced using two laser beams. In other words, instead of recording to a series of bumps and pits like standard CDs, the new technology creates three-dimensional holographic grids that can be used for reading and writing data throughout the physical structure of the disc.'"
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Strong feeling of deja vu here (Score:2, Interesting)
DMD and Piracy (Score:2, Interesting)
a qoute from wiki is that it will improve piracy protecion
"HD-DMD enables dramatic improvements in piracy protection, by taking advantage of the multiple layers of information."
They still never learn, what was made by man shall be cracked by man.
Yet more deja vu all over again again (Score:5, Interesting)
It does make some sense to spin a disk rather than reorient the beam. But a solid crystal holographic storage device not only has lots of locations within itself to store collections of data, but can also be turned on a turntable and have the beam attack it from different directions, storing more data in the same place but at a different angle.
3D holographic storage design has another benefit -- it is self-searching via "reverse" holography. You shine a laser off a target and let it reflect to the memory, and out comes as many copies of the reference beam as their are stored data sets (with a realistic situation of most dissimilar results being buried in noise). Each beam is proportional to the strength of the reference beam according to the similarity of the dataset it came from. You can pick the strongest if you want to find the closest match, or you can statistically test the range of beam strengths to check for uniqueness of the target, or any number of things. The search process is virtually instantaneous, the speed of getting the result limited only by the speed of the measuring and calculating processes.
Re:I miss minidisc (Score:3, Interesting)
I have no data handy about it, but I'm pretty sure the same practice was not applied to hard disks and floppies, otherwise we'd be still saving data to punchcards.
Re:Not again. (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand, at the rate available bandwidth is increasing, there is a much smaller need for portability. With a 4G mobile data network you may as well leave most of your data in a RAID array (where 'D' stands for whatever the densest cheap storage mechanism is) and stream what you need, with a few GBs of local cache. Latency is still going to be a problem, but WAN latency is still lower than optical disk latency in a lot of cases.
Re:What do you suppose would happen... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Good point (Score:2, Interesting)
I personally don't own a desktop anymore and just hook my laptop up to a keyboard, monitor, and mouse when at home or work. I foresee the desktop dying except for hardcore gamers and servers. If I'm correct then spinning media doesn't make sense. Motors drain battery life and increase latency while throwing in a mechanical cog that can fail.
-My Discman 2 from 10 years ago is still spinning and reading discs prefectly despite numerous drops on pavement.
-As usual, minor latency isn't a big deal when we're talking about data backup. If this takes the place of the DVD, then it will not become your next harddrive that you install anything on. It would just take the place of the DVD and be a backup solution. When was the last time you got frustrated at a DVD's access times? Or when was the last time a DVD drive failed on you? Neither of these has happened for me. So I welcome any major improvement to the DVD-- I want to get rid of that 100-disc spindle full of data DVD's, and everyone keeps claiming to have a solution but nobody has actually brought one to market.
Re:What do you suppose would happen... (Score:5, Interesting)
Something you might find interesting anyway.
Re:What do you suppose would happen... (Score:2, Interesting)