I would not ever buy one of these, you can just get a normal HDD for about 1/3 of that price. All you get is a few more seconds in difference. Seriously I can wait 30 seconds more for photoshop to load

Yep, just posting some stuff, take it as you will...

I think with 5-years they will have something else...  Technology has tends to increase almost exponentially.

They are already working on Holographic storage, but it's not what is expected.  It has already been tested, and works.  It is based on optical like we have now, just a thicker media, that can handle multiple beams (2 split from one a reference (read) beam, and signal (write) beam) of light for reading and writing.

The stored data is read through the reproduction of the same reference beam used to create the hologram. The reference beam’s light is focused on the photosensitive material, illuminating the appropriate interference pattern, the light diffracts on the interference pattern, and projects the pattern onto a detector. The detector is capable of reading the data in parallel, over one millions bits at once, resulting in the fast data transfer rate. Files on the holographic drive can be accessed in less than 200 milliseconds.

So, the resulted hologram is projected on to, like a lens, then decoded at that very high rate.  The hologram would not look like anything in particular, just a pattern...

It is very expensive at this time, and is not practical for any home or commercial use (governemnt though?).  The media longevity is 50 years, but you can get that from prime optical media.  Basically, the holo-storage is the fastest data transfer rates to date, but, the parallel processing of the image takes CPU power, and nothing can be made small enough to fit in a 1/4" drive bay at this point in time.  It's like installing a completely separate imaging system, with it's own CPU, and memory.  I would probably go with a multi-core CELL For this application, for the simple reason:  If a GPU is needed, the CELL can double as a GPU, so they won't need to MFG one just for the system.

It won't be anything fantastic like Holographic porn, or images.  The images would look like nothing to us, are written and read by the imaging system. 

Holograms can theoretically store one bit per cubic block the size of the wavelength of light in writing. For example, light from a helium-neon laser is red, 632.8 nm wavelength light. Using light of this wavelength, perfect holographic storage could store 4 gigabits per cubic millimetre. In practice, the data density would be much lower, for at least four reasons:

    * The need to add error-correction
    * The need to accommodate imperfections or limitations in the optical system
    * Economic payoff (higher densities may cost disproportionately more to achieve)
    * Design technique limitations--a problem currently faced in magnetic Hard Drives wherein magnetic domain configuration prevents manufacture of disks that fully utilize the theoretical limits of the technology.

Unlike current storage technologies that record and read one data bit at a time, holographic memory writes and reads data in parallel in a single flash of light.

SO, like on STAR TREK, you can imagine the memory that is required to produce their holographic images, and to store their programs, with that 4Gbits/mm which is 0.5Gbytes/mm!

wow i must be getting smarter because im starting to understand more and more of PS informative posts and not get lost halfway through

blimpie92 wrote:

there good if you drop your laptop a lot.

Sure, but then the laptop breaks, so you can't use the SSD in there anyway...

The_Wii_Nes_Boy wrote:

So whats our next PC storage solution after SSD, if not Holographic then what?

The spindle/plattered HDD system will stay around for quite a bit.  They will simply get smaller, and offer more storage, with less power consumption.  With all this GREEN mentality, anything new would have to conform to low power requirements, thus hindering the application, over development.   Even if something NEW comes out, the spindle HDD will remain, just as DVDs are still being made in light of Blu-ray.   HDDs are now at the 1.5TB mark, and will only get larger in capacity.  I saw they cheated just a little, by raising the top cover on the HDD a tad, to support another platter.   The HDD can expand in size, UPWARD ever so slightly, if it has to, which is what they have been doing with some.

Green? Yeah, global warming my ass!  With snow and freezing temps in April? Who are the hell are they kidding? Not me, not one damn bit.   Scaring the population in to compliance with these scare tactics.  Well, with cold like this on April 8th, no way.  It's called SUN SPOT ACTIVITY, the lack of, makes for cooler temps, but they say we're WARMING up?  Not since 1998, the temps have been steadily changing on a DOWNWARD decent, not upward.  Stupid people, and they were proved wrong, so now it's CLIMATE CHANGE.  Anything to keep the data altered to make them look right, pieces of shit.

5TB?  If you notice, the increase in size is met for demand...   With the windows O/S getting bigger, applications getting bigger, and BR-D dumps getting popular; 5TB by the time people finally switch over to BR-D exclusively.   DVDs are said to be phased out by 2011?  Something like that..  5TB is probably 1.5 to 2 years off, and that's not even guaranteeing it being a conventional HDD. 3.5" drives can only go so far, they may have to double the height to achieve that.    You can get 5TB with RAID anyway...

I like having multiple drives/partitions.  I can keep things where I need them, knowing what drive they are in, without looking through ONE huge drive.   I have partitions for; installed program files, internet files, development, game console stuff, and one for temp space for movies when acquired; un-rared, and MKV2VOBed there then deleted...   Keeps it all separate...

NapoleonMikey wrote:

thats way to organized for me i just keep everythin in there files and i usually know where to look. most of the stuff i have on my computer that takes up so much sapce are movies anyways. i just need to remember on what drive what movie is on.

All my > 4GB movies are on the 400GB External S: NTFS
All my < 4GB Movies, Audio, TV Series, PLUS, is on the 500GB External M: FAT32
Workspace for converting these MKVs to MPG for is drive E:
Primary boot is C:
Applications install is D:
Web sites, FTP sites, drivers, hacks, cracks, game console utilities, app installs F:

Two DVD DL burners, one is DVD-RAM and lightscribe.

I recently bought a barebones CUBE PC (socket 754, REAL small, tiny ATX board), and will use that as the media server with WinXP and media servers, and the two external drives, with wireless mouse and KB ONLY.  That will be down with the Entertainment system, on the 60" LCD HDTV.

If it has a PCEe slot, I will buy a 15.00 128Mb card...