Expose:

ArsTechnica Misses the Point (on Holographic Data Storage)

April 30, 2009 by Kyle Brady
Tags: Ars Technica, Future, Mistaken, Storage, Technology
As required by the FTC, a Full Disclosure is available - this piece adheres to the Code of Ethics

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ArsTechnica did a writeup of a new optical disc technology from GE that can produce 500GB storage on each disc... and they were sneering at it.  I'm here to clear the air.

Essentially the discs use a holographic imaging technology to accomplish multi-layer storage on a special material that I'm assuming is a variant of plastic.   You can read the tech specs on it if you want.  But here's a quote from the Ars piece:

If anyone can make the case for a 500GB optical disc in 2011, I'd love to hear it.

Excuse me?  I think that's a little overly critical.  Maybe there's not a market for ginormous data storage for the average person... or maybe there is?

Consider that the average music collection today is in the Gigabyte range, and can easily reach double-digits.  Personally, I'm sitting on about 65GB of music.  Not all of that fits on my iPod, and it sure isn't very portable to other devices since the iPod doesn't facilitate easy data transfers.

Ever tried burning some music for a friend on CDs these days?  I've resorted to using DVDs because of the larger storage capacity.  Who's to say that a 500GB disc wouldn't be useful?  You could burn your entire music collection to disc while you're sleeping, pop it in the car on the drive to work, listen from your work computer, etc.  All from one disc.

But this is just the immediate and most obvious use.  Imagine the implications.

CD technology paved the way of using a combination of lasers and plastic for data storage, quickly followed by DVDs and now Blu-Ray DVDs, each successor having larger storage and a greater feature set.  But non-portable storage hasn't changed that drastically in almost two decades... excluding a small minority of solid-state drives (in things like new iPods, netbooks, etc.), we're still using magnetized plates read by a mini robotic arm.

Solid-state drives have their own glories and limitations, which I won't get into.  But GE has made a successful application of holographic technology for data storage.  Isn't this important?  Yes!  Once the method is shown to be successful, others are going to look at how to apply the same ideas to their hardware projects, and experiment with improving it.

We're not going to reach ubiquitous and unobtrusive data storage via solid-state drives, unless something drastically changes - the memristor has potential.    But it's definitely not happening with standard hard-disk technology.

Holographic pattern storage is likely the future of large-scale data permanence, or something derived from it.  And yet Ars Technica missed this crucial point.

Expose pieces are irregular posts attempting to hold people and organizations accountable for their actions.
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