WEHT Holographic Memory Crystals?

[LyleAustin Profile E-mail LyleAustin]

Whatever happened to holographic memory crystals?

I remember reading about them in the late 90's. They were memory crystals about the size of a sugar cube, accessed by lasers and had incredibly fast data access rates and enormous storage capacity. I don't remember how much they could hold, but I do remember they could retrieve 10,000 bytes of infomation in just under 2 nanoseconds. The holographic nature of the data storage mechanism was also supposed to be very fault tolerant.

Bud? You know anything about this technology?

[Bud]

10,000 bytes of infomation in just under 2 nanoseconds.

Holy crap! That's got to be a theoretical max data rate. Never heard of such a thing.

Bud? You know anything about this technology?

Nope, sounds like Sci-Fi to me.

[LyleAustin Profile E-mail LyleAustin]

Nope, not Skiffy! (SciFi)

I did a little googling and found some information at HowStuffWorks.com

Evidently there is a lot of information out there, once I took the trouble to look it up. I just thought it might make for some interesting comments here on the board.

[Bud]

early holographic data storage devices will have capacities of 125 GB and transfer rates of about 40 MB per second. Eventually, these devices could have storage capacities of 1 TB and data rates of more than 1 GB per second

These figures sound much more believable. 10,000 in 2ns is a data rate of 5 Tera-bytes/sec. That ranks right up there with warp drive. However, Tera-byte capacities with Giga-byte transfer rates will certainlybe seen in our lifetimes. We're getting close to that with magnetic media and current optical technologies.

So, I guess I should qualify my previous statement. (Sorry, I was checking the board from work, so I was short in the response.) I've certainly heard of holographic memory technology. Hell, we made actual holograms in my high-school physics class, it was cool. (I kept trying to do a project myself so I could keep one, but the instructor never did get the materials.) It's the data rate I was balking at.

I'm pretty sure that Intel has a lab doing research on optical computing. I woudln't be surprised if holographic memory was part of that, but I'm not involved at all so I don't know anything about it. However, I think we will probably see some of this technology in the next generation of optical disks. If you think about how current optial disks work, they are really a primative form of this already.

Good article, thanks for postsing it.

[Woof]

Rippped from the pages of /.

qorkfiend writes "Optware Corp. has announced successful playback of digital movies on a new holographic recording disc with a reflective layer. Known as the Collinear Holographic Data Storage System, the disc has a one terabyte storage capacity and one gigabyte transfer speed. The disc size is 12cm, comparable to that of a DVD and a CD."

Still a disk rather than a lump of crystal, but getting there. Run to /. for
more details and of course flamage.