WEHT Holographic Memory Crystals?
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- LyleAustin
- Posts: 202
- Joined: Sun Mar 14, 2004 6:04 pm
- Location: Anchorage, AK
WEHT Holographic Memory Crystals?
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?
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?
- LyleAustin
- Posts: 202
- Joined: Sun Mar 14, 2004 6:04 pm
- Location: Anchorage, AK
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.
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.
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.


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
Muh ha ha ha
Rippped from the pages of /.
Still a disk rather than a lump of crystal, but getting there. Run to /. for
more details and of course flamage.
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.
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