Sony demos four-layer holographic recording technique
By Donald Melanson 
posted May 23rd 2007 3:37PM
posted May 23rd 2007 3:37PM
Sony looks to be making steady progress with its attempts at holographic recording, recently announcing that it's managed to bump up its previous single-layer Micro-Reflector recording technique to a full four-layers. As with the previous system, Sony used a standard blue-violet semiconductor laser diode to write on the 250 μm-thick photopolymer recording layer, with nothing more than a few optical parts added to change the focal point depth in order to write on multiple layers. They've apparently still got quite a bit more work to do, however, as they've reportedly discovered that the reproduction signal gets significantly weaker by the time it reaches the fourth layer (about half that of the first layer), with the data transfer rate also suffering as a result. Sony seems confident that it'll be able to overcome that problem soon enough though, even going so far as to boast that it'll one day have a 500GB disc made up of twenty layers packing 25GB apiece.
Can't say I'm all that impressed, what with 1.6TB discs and 100 peta-byte disks on the horizon.
Data Storage on plastic disks is not efficient enough.
What we need are high capacity storage on some type of portable device with no moving pieces.
I think we should focus on data storage on crystal molecules or possibly nano particles.
I with Big on this. Fie on moving parts!
What do you think the recording medium is? Definitely not standard "plastic". Photopolymers and Iron Lithium Niobate are recorded to by changing their crystalline structure by changing the mediums refractive index, depth, or absorption. CD-rw's , phase change medium, uses the crystalline structure of the medium to record data too.
Oh, and if you did a little research it is possible, theoretically, to have holographic storage with no moving parts. Its just a matter of deflecting the laser cheaply. If thats wrong i've fucked my paper up a treat
Not exactly thrilling, tbh... by the time we get 500Gb discs, we'll all have so much HDD space, it'll still take 20 discs to back it all up.
I need a 2TB tape (or disc) option that doesn't costs the price of a new car!
Right on. I mean, hasn't anyone seen the recent Superman movie?
Hopefully they have some good data error correction for this thing. I'm already getting dual-layer coasters for data erosion, I certainly don't need quad-layer coasters. Is it just me or is data burned on DVDR not as resilient as stuff burned on CDR? I have tons of CDR discs that I burned 5+ years ago that read just fine, but for some reason I have DVDR discs that can't be read after as little as a year or two.
You are all educated stupid. You can't handle the magnificence of Sony's Simultaneous Four-Layer Harmonic Micro-Reflector.
I'm not interested until there is a blu-ray drive and Harddrive that can move data fsat enough to fill a disc like that in under an hour or two. Considering it takes 5 mins to burn an entire DVD at 18x (because remember it doesn't record at 18x for the entire process) imagine how long it would take to fill 100 times that
We all know Sony will ruin this technology with their DRM campaign..