I have a couple of quid in my pocket....
...and I've been looking at a new NAS to put me porn on.
Access Optical Networks says it has developed a 1.2TB holographic storage cube that can transfer data at 155MB/sec and last longer than 50 years. Oh, and it's done using mirrors – but no smoke. The storage medium is a 1cm cube of photorefractive lithium niobate crystalline material and the claimed cost/GB is $0.11 in 1,000 …
For a moment, I thought the headline said, "ANON", and referenced the near-ubiquitous collective of binary ne'er-do-wells, and said to myself, "What, now they're branching into cloud computing?"
That'd be interesting to see - an anonymous company. Nobody even knows who's employed, no defined products... Pull that one off for a manufacturing business and I'll be impressed. I don't know who I'll be impressed with, though.
Involves the term "hologram" - check
Is cube shaped - check
Requires use of a device called a "Spatial Light Modulator" - check
stores ginormical amounts of data, with ultrafast read and write times - check
sounds like the future to me!
Sadly it'll probably still sound like the future in 10 years time, before it suddenly starts to sound like bankruptcy...
As in almost 20 years ago? They've been at "data crystal" tech for a long time now. When I first saw it, they were using a prototype in lieu of CD-ROMs. You'd think they'd have refined it a lot more than they have at this point.
PS. When I first read the headline, I thought it was a blackmail article, and that the 10TB was a bunch of "juicy secrets".
20 years ago, the lasers and mirrors required meant while the medium was small, the read/write apparatus was humungous. This was because lasers were more difficult to make, and there was presumably significant power loss in the medium.
There have been many incremental improvements since then in both media and laser tech, so I'd guess that it's on the cusp of being a commercially viable technology. The last attempt to produce something was a disc, and aimed at the removable media market, and that introduced certain engineering complications.
These guys have a better chance, as they'll be aiming at the fixed-drive market, and now's a very good time for that, as SSDs have opened the market to non-disk-based systems. It also plays to the miniaturisation trend even more than SSDs - if they can get the power requirements low enough, the next-gen iPod won't only be able to hold your entire CD collection, it'll be able to store your entire DVD collection too... and perhaps even without any additional compression.
Put this in an Android phone and the era of the truly universal personal portable computer will begin, and office desks the world over will have mobile phone docking stations instead of PCs or laptop stands.
Because I've been seeing a lot of "in development" articles and not enough "just about to hit the street" stuff. Revolutionary new tech isn't going to mean much if it can't reach the market.
I'm particularly interested in this tech since it looks like something right out of science fiction: crystalline data storage with gobs of capacity (of particular interest to me, a Babylon 5 fan).