Alternative distribution to optical disks : SSD, cards, and download*

[Ninjaprime]

Latency is a factor of a mechanical spinning disc with moving parts, until that changes you're always going to have bad latency.

 

[Blazkowicz]

HDD have an order of magnitude better latency than optical, despite both being spinning discs .
but with the discs being sealed permanently in the drives, I guess that helps. it also stayed pretty the same for decades.

well, the future is bubble memory

 

[AlphaWolf]

Why would anyone invest in the holo disks pipe dream?

Much faster, lower seek times, higher storage density, is why. Blu-ray is falling way behind the demand curve. Holographic might not be the next big thing, but blu-ray has a finite life expectancy based on real limitations.

 

[Brimstone]

Why would anyone invest in the holo disks pipe dream?

Because GE came up with a new material. They've been working on this since 2003.

To date, holographic storage has not been on a path to mainstream use. The G.E. development, however, could be that pioneering step, according to analysts and experts. The G.E. researchers have used a different approach than past efforts. It relies on smaller, less complex holograms — a technique called microholographic storage.

A crucial challenge for the team, which has been working on this project since 2003, has been to find the materials and techniques so that smaller holograms reflect enough light for their data patterns to be detected and retrieved.

The recent breakthrough by the team, working at the G.E. lab in Niskayuna, N.Y., north of Albany, was a 200-fold increase in the reflective power of their holograms, putting them at the bottom range of light reflections readable by current Blu-ray machines.

“We’re in the ballpark,” said Brian Lawrence, the scientist who leads G.E.’s holographic storage program. “We’ve crossed the threshold so we’re readable.”

In G.E.’s approach, the holograms are scattered across a disc in a way that is similar to the formats used in today’s CDs, conventional DVDs and Blu-ray discs. So a player that could read microholographic storage discs could also read CD, DVD and Blu-ray discs. But holographic discs, with the technology G.E. has attained, could hold 500 gigabytes of data. Blu-ray is available in 25-gigabyte and 50-gigabyte discs, and a standard DVD holds 5 gigabytes.

“If this can really be done, then G.E.’s work promises to be a huge advantage in commercializing holographic storage technology,” said Bert Hesselink, a professor at Stanford and an expert in the field.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/technology/business-computing/27disk.html



What it boils down to for the engineers is how to help John Carmacks MegaTexturing method. Radeon cards now have Partially Resident Textures to assist. From an optical drive aspect it seems to me there might be able to improve things by going to a very small disc size just like Seagate Cheetah hard drives. Obviously this cuts into data storage, but thanks GE's holographic data density you can sacrifice the surface area.

Considering how powerful of a company ZeniMax is now with Skyrim, Fallout, the ID stuff, and a few other studios, combined with the fact Carmacks engine technology is going to be used inhouse, having a console optomized for this approach makes sense to me.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Why choose that over a flash cache though? I mean, there are no working comercial holodrives available, so why would any console designer be betting their system on that when flash is pretty perfect and you can use the existing, cheap BRD drives that add movie playback as an option as well?

 

[MrFox]

But holographic discs, with the technology G.E. has attained, could hold 500 gigabytes of data. Blu-ray is available in 25-gigabyte and 50-gigabyte discs, and a standard DVD holds 5 gigabytes.

I can already smell the usual corporate BS. We have a roadmap to 1TB bluray, 128GB ROM can be produced today in mass quantity, 1TB planned to be commercially available for 2014, and GE will come out, one day, with an expensive tech at only 500GB. When? What industry support? Is ROM even planned or is it only for expensive backup solutions? How much will it cost? What's the plan to attain critical mass and commercial viability? Who did they convince so far?

There's no seek advantage, it's smoke and mirrors. Any seek-improving servo-drive technology is equally applicable to bluray. The density and bandwidth claimed aren't any better than bluray improvements planned. Yes it is higher in theory, but their plan doesn't go that far. Right now they have "a new material".

 

[AlphaWolf]

No. Blu-ray will always be saddled with providing compatibility. An emerging technology has no such limitation.

 

[Brimstone]

Why choose that over a flash cache though? I mean, there are no working comercial holodrives available, so why would any console designer be betting their system on that when flash is pretty perfect and you can use the existing, cheap BRD drives that add movie playback as an option as well?

The drive technology as I understand is essentially the same as a Blu-Ray drive. Hence inexpensive.

The magic is the material they use to make the disc. Then question is how cheaply can GE make a ROM version of the disc for mass production.

Considering that Microsoft wouldn't have to pay any royalties to the Blu-Ray group and GE would most likely cut them a sweet deal it shouldn't be a budget breaker.

For publishers and Microsoft the attraction would be anti-piracy. They might be able to use time consuming holographic encryption schemes. Little Johnny wants to decrypt the disc, but it'll take him 10,000 years to do so. Obviously someone will figure it out eventually, but it's just is one more defensive layer.

 

[3dilettante]

The drive technology as I understand is essentially the same as a Blu-Ray drive. Hence inexpensive.

Do you have a link to a statement to that effect?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Well, I doubt any new mass-storage drive tech is going to be introduced price competitive with the mainstream alternative, but even holographic drives are, if they still involve moving a mechanical head, their seek times are going to be an order of magnitude slower than flash RAM accesses, meaning a console with otpical and flash or RAM cache will still outperform it in random access streaming.

 

[AlphaWolf]

The likelihood of something GE has in labs now being commercially viable for mass market within in a 2 year window is close to nil. Blu-ray was a very expensive endeavor for Sony in the PS3 despite it being further along and they had a lot more to gain than MS would by including an unproven technology.

 

[MrFox]

No. Blu-ray will always be saddled with providing compatibility. An emerging technology has no such limitation.

I think it's never been a limitation of bluray, it was an advantage. First, the upcoming higher capacity blurays require exactly the same drive hardware, which cost practically nothing to produce today, so there's no expense there, just a firmware to write. Second, GE said they plan to be compatible with bluray anyway, and that means bluray royalties. Just like Bluray (which was an emerging technology), put a red and infrared laser on the pickup for DVD and CD compatibility, they always have the choice not to do so, but on the market side it's better to be compatible with everything. A bluray pickup without DVD and CD support would cost more because it wouldn't have the production volume of the former. It's counter-intuitive, but the whole pickup which is universally compatible with everything is about $8 today. An emerging format has no chance to compete unless they have something significantly better... and 500GB isn't.

 

[Blazkowicz]

Do you have a link to a statement to that effect?

I have one

There's no seek advantage, it's smoke and mirrors. Any seek-improving servo-drive technology is equally applicable to bluray.

 

[AlphaWolf]

I don't think holographic needs to replace set top blu-ray players to be commercially viable. Blu-ray writers have no penetration in the PC market.

 

[Blazkowicz]

actually if the material is über reliable when written to, magically doesn't degrade then it could find a nice and big niche in data archival.

many-layers bluray can probably only be written to in a factory, I have a feeling if you try to burn a 1TB bluray the layers will break away as can happen with a dual layer DVD.
but honestly I don't know if such problem is not found on a "holo-r" as well.

 

[MrFox]

I have one

The fact that it's limited by the same seek mechanism doesn't mean other parts aren't much more expensive. It needs about everything a bluray drive has, plus the part where it can read a holo frame.

Bluray pickup needs only 3 photosites, (2 for tracking and one for pickup) How many photosites are needed for holo disks? Certainly a LOT more. I have no reference for this but I think that if we still don't read more than one track at a time with bluray, that single photosite must be expensive, multiply by the array size of the holo frame (was it 256?). It could make the pickup much heavier, the whole mechanism could have to be redesigned. We just don't know. All we have is a material which I'm pretty sure is actually dried unicorn blood (remember you heard it here first).

 

[Brimstone]

Do you have a link to a statement to that effect?

So returning to 2009, we started the year with materials in which we could write holograms using 405 nm blue lasers that gave at most 0.005% to 0.01% reflectivity. These materials demonstrated the high-power record and low-power readout behavior we were trying to create, but the patterns reflected too little light to enable high capacity on a disc. However, very recently, the team at GE has made dramatic improvements in the materials enabling significant increases in the amount of light that can be reflected by the holograms. In fact, just a couple of weeks ago, we demonstrated reflectivities as high as 1% in our materials using our holographic recording test setups. This represents a 100x to 200x improvement in performance. More importantly, the higher reflectivity indicates that when we scale the holograms down in size to those that would correspond to the marks created using standard DVD or Blu-ray optics, the reflectivities will be sufficient to enable the storage of up to 500 GB of data in a single CD-size disc. This is truly a breakthrough in the development of the materials that are so critical to ultimately bringing holographic storage to the everyday consumer.

http://ge.geglobalresearch.com/blog...ward-in-ges-holographic-data-storage-program/

Lorraine also noted that the breakthrough in recording speed could hasten the entry of GE’s micro-holographic technology into the consumer electronics market. Future micro-holographic discs using GE’s proprietary material will read and record on systems very similar to a typical Blu-ray or DVD player. In fact, the hardware and formats can be so similar to current optical storage technologies that future micro-holographic players will enable consumers to play back their CDs, DVDs and BDs.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2011-08/16/content_13125991.htm

 

[MrFox]

Lorraine also noted that the breakthrough in recording speed could hasten the entry of GE’s micro-holographic technology into the consumer electronics market. Future micro-holographic discs using GE’s proprietary material will read and record on systems very similar to a typical Blu-ray or DVD player. In fact, the hardware and formats can be so similar to current optical storage technologies that future micro-holographic players will enable consumers to play back their CDs, DVDs and BDs.

They boost about the similar parts of bluray which enables backward compatibility, but no mention about the cost of their pickup array, nor the laser power required. I would guess 1% is still not very good and will require 7 times higher power laser than bluray for the same linear speed and pickup gain.

EDIT: oups, nevermind that 7% was jitter not reflectivity. No idea about reflectivity of BD-ROM at 6 layers, but the old 2 layers was specs between 12% and 28%, and it improved with BDXL.

 

[MrFox]

Multiple reasons why HDD have 10x better seek time. they spin faster and constant, they are sector-based, the disk is a precision metal plate with micron surface quality, the read arm is an extremely powerful and expensive motor and it has only 1 axis to move, all the other axis rely on the mechanical precision, the head practically touches the surface, the air inside is of higher quality than in a operating room. An optical pickup has two angles and two translations to lock into focus, it has to follow the horrible wobble of the disk, and it takes a long time to find back the track when it moves away from the one it was successfully tracking. Most importantly, for some reason they are unable to use an "arm" like the HDD, so moving the head with a screw is a big culprit. I have no idea why they can't use an arm, but logic dictates that if they could they would I mean if they can, please get on with it! Give it now!

 

[RudeCurve]

Optical drives could use a pivoting arm if it was a slow moving arm. The arms used in HDDs move too fast for the the floating optics of a typical optical drive to focus. Anyway modern high speed optical drives don't use a screw mechanism to position the optical pickup they use linear motors.