A lot of people are talking about the future of storage and come up with names like "Holographic Storage". Could somebody explain how powerfull companies that allready say that they will release 2.5TB Hard Disks in 2009 like seagate could survive if holographic storage would come and shine by that time? I mean...it would be not hard to imagen which storage device would be faster and better and would slow down your pc more.....holographic storage or the Hard Disk which today is still the big bottleneck in pc performance nomatter how strong your CPU will be. A little info on "Holographic Storage" can be found here.

http://www.inphase-technologies.co [...] index.html

You can find some advanced "holographics people" in holoforum.com maybe you can find the answer there.

Wow. I can't wait for the day we can get 200gb on one disk. Amazing.

Do you work for InPhase?

How could reading and writing to a holographic disk be faster than using a hard drive? Is that what you're saying? I can't really tell.

I have no idea about holographic storage. It looks great but they aren't very clear about how much storage we are talking about at this time. And it says it has an archival life of 30 years. This is probably under the most optimal conditions. So who knows really how good it is.

One thing I can say for sure is flash memory is something that is an already proven and viable option. I feel that within the next 5 to 10 years you will see computers with flash drives. Flash memory capacities will catch up to HD if it keeps going at the rate they are. Plus the fact is how many people out there need a 2.5TB HD? How many people really need a 250GB HD? We are already seeing 64gb and 32gb flash chips out there. I would rather have that than a faulty hard drive.

Hard Drive manufacturers need to be looking to the future. Instead of kidding themselves like in the HD 50th aniv article. Hard Drives our old technology. They are already obsolete

Aren't you forgetting that flash drives degrade over time? They only have so many read/write cycles in them before they go kaput; hard-drives might eventually fail due to mechanical issues, but the medium itself is pretty darn stable. Besides, holographic storage isn't exactly your traditional hard-drive. Flash may be better than traditional magnetic storage, but that's not saying that some new technology can't come along and challenge it. Flash is not the be all and end all of memory.

Ok, wow, I distinctly remember having a conversation with some of my buddies about holographic storage during my freshman year of HS...some 11 years ago. Old, old news. Thanks for the memories.

Well, yes actually I am I think it will be a huge difference in performance.

Holographic Storage will be way more advanced then Flash.

I didn't say that flash was the end all. Of course there will always be something better to come along. That's how technology works.

And BTW degradation is something I heard was a real concern about 20 years ago. Do an internet search on the subject. It's hard to even find info on that particular subject. Nowdays you see flash memory in all major appliances and electronics equipment. The technology has improved to the point where it can be used for things like mp3 players and such. Ever heard of a mp3 player being returned because of degradation?

Point is flash is much more reliable than HD. And on par will last longer because there is no mechanical failure possible. And if you want to talk about the medium itself, flash memory is more stable than HD platters.

More advanced..perhaps. Better...time will tell.

Yes could be a good solution for the future. I can see flash drives achieving their capacity in a "flash" time. 2 gigs in less than 1 inch stick.

But why manufacturers always sticking, enhancing and advancing on RAM drive ?

It'll be nice if in our PC there will be no more "active moving parts" peripherals.

Holographic storage is for more than just hard drives, The disc they are talking about (I am pretty sure) is a dvd sized disc, and that even puts HD-DVD and Blue-Ray to shame.
Check this and this for some more info.
Wikipedia has some interesting info on it as well.

Deep storage space is always needed, especially if your a buisness... or your like me who never deletes anything... What I'm wondering about is the future of HDD storage. So we got PMR recording, but that will only tide us over for another couple of years. With the advent of HDTV, and mkv, ogg, H.264 codecs which gobble up space like nothing... So what does the future hold?

We know that flash will be implemented sooner or later in computers, they already have it in some sort of fashion, where you can put in a flash drive on an old computer and treat it as system memory... Is there a maximum capacity on flash right now? If there is what is it? Maybe I should take some Solid-State classes...

It will definitely be more advanced than the flash of today, because it'll probably be another 15 years before it sees the light of day. :-)

I did a paper on optical computing and holographic storage in college, and that was quite a while ago. The estimate at that time was that in five years we'd have holographic storage on the market that was much faster than hard drives, and that a 1 cm cube could hold a terrabyte of data. Since then, I haven't seen anything new on holographic storage.

Seeing as we are comparing current magnetic platter hard disks to holographic storage (a highly theoretical future storage medium), How about when we have to replace all our brand new Core 2 Duos with Positronic Circuitry? OMG how will Intel stay in business?

the 4 layer blu-rays will be 100 GB thats getting close to the amounts of storage you were talking about in holographics. but of course bluray doesn't get as small as a postal stamp or any of that business...

The ultimate future of storage is non-volatile memory chips of SOME sort (if not flash).

It is not possible for another method to be as fast because the other alternatives depend on mechanical parts, and thus also break-downs. So the other alternative may have a higher density, but beyond a certian point I predict density is not going to matter so much.

Once DRM has locked down everything and you can get content on demand, what will you need to store that won't fit in a few dozen (or more) terabytes?

The more interesting applications for light in computing are high speed busses, not storage.

Intel's already making their lightspeed chip, we'll see how it plays out...

Although, they said they were getting out of the telecommunications industry... shrug, dunno how much of an effect these lasers will have on bus speeds though...

Agreed, although the industry will probably go beyond real need.

Well, you know that DRM will not become universal, right? The more greed attempts to squeeze, the more there will be opportunities for other systems to grow. A few dozen TB... If you think in terms of right now, that's a decent estimate. But I expect that as storage gets faster and continues along the path of reduction in cost per unit size, information density (example: image resolution) will grow to increase storage bloat.

Too much is never enough.