Sounds really good, but neither the article nor any information I could find on the company says anything about read/write speed compared to other options. I would think that would be a big factor when you're dealing with that much data.
1) What on earth do they mean by "zero energy storage"? Magnetic tape doesn't consume energy at idle either. Hell, even hard disks can be powered down.
2) "Also, the optical-based new tech’s touted 50-year life is 10x the life of magnetic tape." Say what? Most magnetic tape is rated for up to 30 years in storage. You might only get a few years out of a tape if you're writing to it frequently... but this new format is write-once, so it's not even in the running.
3) People have made wild claims about holographic data storage being the Next Big Thing since the 1980s - in particular, there was a whole wave of them in the late 2000s claiming to have a DVD replacement under development. None of them have brought products to market. I'm not confident this one's going to be any different.
Anyone know the history of long-term reliance on proprietary technologies?
I.e., how often does it actually work out for the adopters?
Are their licensing / escrow schemes the meant to mitigate the risks from the original supplier going out of business? How often do those schemes pay off?
I wish we had something better than "walk through multiple hard drives as a data nomad and remember to use them every now and then" as a cost-effective and consumer oriented method for cold storage. I don't even care for the speed. Tape is obnoxious with high up front investments, not even targeting private use, Blu-ray never really became a surefire way and there were too much uncertainty and variety depending on brand.
There's nothing better for consumers because backing up is not a consumer behavior. Backing up is a business behavior and because it is a business behavior people pay other people to do it.
Or to put it another way, the association of backing up with moral virtue doesn't pass ordinary people's subconscious bullshit detector.
The lto10 info and stats are wrong? It's 30TB / 75Tb compressed. Read write many, and can hit speeds of 1GB/s ? I didn't read any info on the write and then read speeds of this holotape.
I am reminded of the story from the early 2000's about researchers who were storing data on sticky tape. This came up on HN a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26040009
The trouble with holograms, if I understand them correctly, is that when storing information in a phase structure, to change one small part of the information you are storing, the hologram must be adjusted everywhere. The bits are encoded in a way that’s a bit nonlocal. I think a reasonable analogy is how small changes to a structure affect its Fourier transform. The whole thing leaps in Fourier space for a little wiggle in direct space. I foresee that being troublesome for write operations.
New storage tech like this never ever comes out.. I remember 300gb or 500gb holographic discs touted 20 years ago.. every other storage tech like that since then has been announced and never made. IBM had a millipede project that used MEMS probes to read/write data at a density of 1 terabit per square inch.. never came out. Countless other examples that I'll never remember exist. Never came out.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 27.2 ms ] thread2) "Also, the optical-based new tech’s touted 50-year life is 10x the life of magnetic tape." Say what? Most magnetic tape is rated for up to 30 years in storage. You might only get a few years out of a tape if you're writing to it frequently... but this new format is write-once, so it's not even in the running.
3) People have made wild claims about holographic data storage being the Next Big Thing since the 1980s - in particular, there was a whole wave of them in the late 2000s claiming to have a DVD replacement under development. None of them have brought products to market. I'm not confident this one's going to be any different.
I.e., how often does it actually work out for the adopters?
Are their licensing / escrow schemes the meant to mitigate the risks from the original supplier going out of business? How often do those schemes pay off?
Or to put it another way, the association of backing up with moral virtue doesn't pass ordinary people's subconscious bullshit detector.
I'd be happy to be proven wrong though.