Hard Drive is dead. Long live the HD.

tw · 06-22-2007, 11:57 PM

It was predicted to have been commercialized maybe last year. IBM was assumed to be in the forefront. Mechanical disk drives were to be replaced by holographic technology. Current DVDs store data in one (or two) layers on a disk surface. But what happens when a cube can store data everywhere inside its volume.

Well I hear rumors of a holographic memory drive coming from a CO company that Lucent spun off long ago. Two lasers shine upon a point inside the storage medium. Out the other side comes a light pattern that would be maybe 4, 16, or 64 bits. Data written into this medium by partially melting a pattern within each microscopic data volume.

How much data? Well upper end predictions could store 5 seasons of a TV series on something about the size of a DVD. Maybe half a terabyte?

But again, this technology had been demonstrated long ago and is over due. I cannot confirm that this new product will be marketed in the next few months.

30 years ago, Intel was promoting bubble memory as the storage medium to replace disk drives. But disk drives kept getting better. Solid state replacement for disk drives just never happened. Well disk drives have now been less than one inch for maybe a decade or longer. The disk drive industry is promoting 0.85 inch drives because ... flash memory suddenly threatens to do to disk drives what hydraulics did to excavation machine manufacturers. Currently are 8 disk drive manufacturers in the world. New flash memory devices using numerous technologies from ferrous to ovonic unified to magnetic – at least 20 different manufacturers - all threaten to make disk drives obsolete.

A battle for survival appears to be converging on the cell phone / Ipod / Blackberry industry. Do they use 0.8 inch disk drives or flash memory? Clayton Christensen discusses this in his book "Innovator's Dilemma". Apparently mechanical data storage is about to follow the minicomputer, carburetor, steam locomotive, and Franklin stove into something called disruptive innovation .

06-22-2007, 11:57 PM	#1
tw Read? I only know how to write. Join Date: Jan 2001 Posts: 11,933	Hard Drive is dead. Long live the HD. It was predicted to have been commercialized maybe last year. IBM was assumed to be in the forefront. Mechanical disk drives were to be replaced by holographic technology. Current DVDs store data in one (or two) layers on a disk surface. But what happens when a cube can store data everywhere inside its volume. Well I hear rumors of a holographic memory drive coming from a CO company that Lucent spun off long ago. Two lasers shine upon a point inside the storage medium. Out the other side comes a light pattern that would be maybe 4, 16, or 64 bits. Data written into this medium by partially melting a pattern within each microscopic data volume. How much data? Well upper end predictions could store 5 seasons of a TV series on something about the size of a DVD. Maybe half a terabyte? But again, this technology had been demonstrated long ago and is over due. I cannot confirm that this new product will be marketed in the next few months. 30 years ago, Intel was promoting bubble memory as the storage medium to replace disk drives. But disk drives kept getting better. Solid state replacement for disk drives just never happened. Well disk drives have now been less than one inch for maybe a decade or longer. The disk drive industry is promoting 0.85 inch drives because ... flash memory suddenly threatens to do to disk drives what hydraulics did to excavation machine manufacturers. Currently are 8 disk drive manufacturers in the world. New flash memory devices using numerous technologies from ferrous to ovonic unified to magnetic – at least 20 different manufacturers - all threaten to make disk drives obsolete. A battle for survival appears to be converging on the cell phone / Ipod / Blackberry industry. Do they use 0.8 inch disk drives or flash memory? Clayton Christensen discusses this in his book "Innovator's Dilemma". Apparently mechanical data storage is about to follow the minicomputer, carburetor, steam locomotive, and Franklin stove into something called disruptive innovation .

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