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FrozenGate by Avery

White disc player






styropyro said:
This reminds me of an HVD > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc
It used two colors though, not white light. It has a capacity of 3.9TB.

Damn. This is expensive. The 1000mW green laser alone, is powered by a 5000mW IR diode. Probably a C-Mount. Still though... That diode alone costs $500. The crystals would probably be another $500.

I think they would be better off replacing the green with 405nm. They would have to perfect getting 1W of blu-ray. But not only would it be cheaper then 532nm, it would be much better. Probably 5TB or more.
 
They already have commercial HVD drives available. They're $18,000 and they store 300gb. The 800gb and 1.2tb versions are coming in the next year or two.

http://www.inphase-technologies.com/products/media.asp?subn=3_2

The main real advantage here is the extraordinary lifetime of the discs... 50 years... So the people buying these now would mostly be broadcasting studios and whatnot who need reliable longterm storage for their archives.

Sony and a few other companies also have their own holographic storage solutions in the works and should be commercially available within the next 2 or 3 years.
 
Well the estimated lifetime really isn't that extrordinary; it's pretty typical of (pressed) optical media. However, the storage density--coupled with that lifetime--does make it a very attractive option. I certainly would like to use that for backing up my computer's files. DVDs are just too small.

Back in the late 90s there was this "Fluorescent Media Disc" (FMD) that used fluorescent instead of reflective mediums for storing media. It meant the discs could be essentially clear, and would allow for possibly hundreds of layers for up to 1TB of space using shorter wavelength lasers. Unfortunately, the company who was developing it (Constellation 3D) wanted to have something to show for COMDEX 2000 and faked the demonstration by using a hard drive, and they lost funding. Maybe it'll be developed again.
 
I've read something at some point that was mentioning the interesting property of holograms is that if you break it apart you end up with smaller holograms of the full image, but from less angles... which could imply that the medium is very resistant to data loss, though I haven't seen anything about this being used in real life.
 


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