OT: A Sign of the Times

Tinle wrote on 11/15/2005, 12:06 PM

Tom's Hardware reporrts the following:

"Turner Network Television airs commercial from holographic storage device

Humphrey Cheung
14 Nov 2005 19:16

Westlake Village (CA) - Holographic storage devices are still a year from being available to consumers, but a major broadcaster has already started playing around with the drives. Turner Network Television (TNT) recently aired a commercial from an InPhase Tapestry drive. Hitachi Maxell, an InPhase partner, built the drive which can write 300 GByte to a single disk.

Storage technologies often get a workout in the broadcasting business before going to consumers. "This was done to investigate the feasibility of using holographic storage for broadcasting television content," says Ron Tarasoff, vice president of broadcast technology and engineering at Turner Entertainment

The Tapestry drives can record 300 GByte at 160 Mbit per second. Future drives will scale to 1.6 TByte at 960 Mbit per second. This week, InPhase will publicly demonstrate the Tapestry drive at the International Broadcast Equipment Exhibition.

So far, TNT is the only broadcast user to try out the new holographic drives."

Comments

Yoyodyne wrote on 11/15/2005, 2:54 PM

Very cool - I want one, but just because I really like the term holographic drive ;) How much are these puppies going to cost?

winrockpost wrote on 11/15/2005, 3:23 PM

I'm beta testing the supersonic atomic drive, will report in a few weeks.

Chienworks wrote on 11/15/2005, 5:32 PM

Only supersonic? Hmmmph. I'm holding out for the superluminal drives. :)

fldave wrote on 11/15/2005, 7:59 PM

I'm waiting for the DNA drives. Take your data with you. Always.

ushere wrote on 11/15/2005, 8:21 PM

have this drive growing in a test tube in the back of my fridge. should be ready any day no.........

agh...........

FrigidNDEditing wrote on 11/15/2005, 9:27 PM

" have this drive growing in a test tube in the back of my fridge. should be ready any day no.........

agh..........."

well - he must have had his wife clean the fridge again - quite possibly the #1 thing holding back the major developments in science :)

Dave

JJKizak wrote on 11/16/2005, 5:46 AM

I remember some time ago that InPhase had an 8 laser holographic drive in the works with the same size discs in use today.

JJK

Jonathan Neal wrote on 11/16/2005, 8:35 PM

So I decided to try out the new holographic drives today, and my advice to you all is ... DON'T! I couldn't write a darn thing to the device without getting data manifestation errors, program sentience, and gaps in performance during extended 'byte wars'.

At one point, I was led to believe that my machine had been seized by its holographic control. In a desperate attempt to save my expensive hardware from its bitter vengeance, I made a bargain with the drive and spent several hours purchasing and feeding it the RAM it "required to achieve reality matter status".

Finally, I was able to solve the problem and beat the Holographic Drive at its own game, by fooling the device (who called himself 'Bob', at this point) into believing it had escaped its own metal confinements and entered into the real world, when in actuality, it had transported itself into a running game of The Sims 2. Here's a picture of me holding the holographic drive, containing Sims 2 containing the rogue holographic data.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f6/ST-TNG_Ship_in_a_Bottle.jpg

Apologies for the long post, it's been a longer day.

John_Cline wrote on 11/23/2005, 9:22 AM

Maxell Introduces the Future of Optical Storage Media With Holographic Recording Technology. Uncompressed storage capacities achieving 1.6 TeraBytes per disk and data rates as high as 120 MBPs.

The first generation of holographic media with 300 GB of storage capacity and a 20 MBPs Transfer Rate is scheduled for release in late 2006.

Maxell Holographic Press Release

John

vitalforce2 wrote on 11/23/2005, 12:59 PM

Holy crap! I thought you guys were kidding!

I made a joke about a holographic drive on this forum about a year ago. I included a quartz crystal structure as the medium of storage, but it looks like Maxell is using something similar, i.e. a 3D approach to storage.

Man. On the one hand I get this chilly feeling that this is the next step toward building those robot brains that later became Terminators, and then governors of California.

But the serious question is: Picture a holographic storage device built into, say, Panny's new HD 24p camera? Just plug into it and edit--and publish?

Oh man. My wife is in for some really boring patter from me now.
.

John_Cline wrote on 11/23/2005, 1:44 PM

I was a bit surprised by all the "humor" in this thread. Holographic recording is indeed quite real and I, for one, can't wait. We all need cheap storage and lots of it! 300 gig on one optical disc would be a good start.

John

PeterWright wrote on 11/24/2005, 4:53 PM

Not directly relevant, but another sign of the times - on the radio this morning they were discussing the development of a new still camera which will use light sensitive bacteria. Each bacterium meaures about 1 micron, so the result will be a 100 megapixel picture!