GE Developing 1TB Hologram Disc Readable By a Modified Blu-ray Drive 238
Globally Mobile writes "The Register has this article concerning GE's announcement that it has been developing a 1 terabyte DVD-size disk that can be read by a modified Blu-ray player. Peter Lorraine, GE's lab manager, talking at an Emerging Tech conference last week, said that license announcements could be expected soon. He also mentioned the notion of disks having the capacity of 100 Blu-ray disks, implying a 2.5TB or even 5TB capacity, gained by increasing the number of layers used for recording. The discs will be used for high-end commercial niches initially and then migrate to consumer markets in 2012-2015. Also here is a video of the technology explained. Wish we could see this sooner! Reminds me of the technology that Bowie's character came up with in The Man Who Fell to Earth."
I would have thought (Score:4, Insightful)
Tb or TB or TiB? (Score:3, Insightful)
The title is confusing. Are these Tb or TB?
Re:Well (Score:3, Insightful)
Great, I haven't still even got a normal bluray player. Nor did I get HD-DVD. Seems like I might just skip it and wait for the modified player that supports this.
Yeah, I got a PS3, too. Who wants a "normal" Blu-ray player?
"Informative".... Nice.
Re:Remix (Score:5, Insightful)
"Can != Should" is pretty well agreed upon here.
"Can == Will" is an unfortunate reality in most cases...
Error Correction (Score:5, Insightful)
How many MB will be wiped out by a pathetically small scratch on the disk? Remember the promises made of audio CD's?
With well-designed error correction, nothing. Enough error correcting data would be distributed all around the disc to recover from localized scratches.
$ Better Spent Elsewhere (Score:1, Insightful)
I see portable disk based storage for the most part going the way of the dinosaur. With computers having ever increasing capacity and more devices having internal hard drives, throughput is going to become more important. Why put anything on a disk when you can download it from your home server using your cell phone anywhere in the world? That's the technology worth researching.
On a side note, this is still impressive. If they find a way to make these disks/drives faster, more reliable, and somehow overtake magnetic disks as new hard drive technology I think they would be much more valuable than they are as a new type of DVD/Blu technology. I just have a hard time seeing the laser/spinning disk method going there.
Re:Off-site backup? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I would have thought (Score:3, Insightful)
DVD-DL has largely been ignored due to DVD shrinkers and splitters.
Seriously though, you can get verbatim DVD-DL for $1 or less per disc if you buy spindles, just look more carefully. Note that Verbatim is almost the only brand worth buying if you expect to be able to read the discs for any length of time. Or at least it was a few months back when I did my last spate of research and disc buying. I'll buy whatever for day use; I buy Memorex for medium-term use and Verbatim for storage and long-term use. YMMV, I guess.
Re:Well (Score:3, Insightful)
trust me, you're not missing anything. Seems nothing has changed, they just take the same old stuff and slap a new coat of paint on it. Guess Hollywood isn't the only ones who have run out of new ideas.
Re:Well (Score:4, Insightful)
Can they be pressed? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:*Yawn* (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:to be correct here (Score:5, Insightful)
Every year there's another "hundreds of layers of storage" article, and we're still sitting here with dual layer DVDs. By the time we see terabyte discs we'll probably all have petabyte hard drives. I remember them talking about blu ray in the 90s, with the prototype arriving in 2000. [wikipedia.org] Back when we had 6gb drives the idea of 50gb discs was amazing, but they dragged their feet so bad creating a standard that by the time it reached market we all moved on to terabyte hard drives. Blu ray burners are still too damn expensive [newegg.com], costing five times ($160 vs $30) more than a DVD burner costs. And once you have one then what? Pay $3 to $7 for each BD-R disc? [newegg.com] No thanks, even at $3 for 25gb that's $120 per terabyte, 50% more than a 1 terabyte hard drive [newegg.com].
So forgive me if I don't get all excited every time they announce a new high capacity disc format because they haven't fixed the one they have out now.
Re:Well (Score:4, Insightful)
Upgrading to the Bluray version of Star Trek eliminated the annoying artifacts present on the DVD version. That's an improvement that's visible even on a standard definition set.
Also there's nothing to skip in the case of Bluray. 1920x1080 progressive is the highest standard available, and will be for several decades (NTSC lasted almost 70 years and ATSC will probably last several decades too).
I agree about the gaming consoles. I'm still having fun with my PS1/PS2 and N64/Gamecube library. Why upgrade?
Re:Well (Score:3, Insightful)
Netflix membership + blueray: $6.00/mo for one disc out at a time. Average turnaround time: 3 days. That works out to .60 cents per night per blueray rental.
Little bit cheaper than $1 a night dvds ;)
Re:Well (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well (Score:1, Insightful)
If you put a thousand of these in the back of a VW bug and drove it from California to New York....
Being a rear-engine car, that might not be the best idea...
Re:to be correct here (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:to be correct here (Score:5, Insightful)
I posted a similar comment about a year ago. Optical media should be a great backup medium, but because they take so long to ramp up production and push the cost of the media down, it is useless before anyone can afford it. Blu-ray media at 50 GB per disc is already useless and it still isn't even close to price parity with hard drives. To fully back up a 500 GB hard drive (the industry average size now) takes 10 discs to back up once. At 30 minutes per disc, this is five hours of continuous burning, during which time you have to have someone swapping out discs every half hour. For a terabyte HD, you're more than an entire work day. You should be doing a full backup at least every month and incremental backups weekly. Do the math, and you're spending the better part of a week every month just doing backups. The average hard drive needs to be able to be backed up on a single disc or you've already failed. Blu-ray has already failed.
As a result, recordable optical media is basically worthless except for people burning content to give to other people, which is a tiny fraction of its potential user base. If they would ramp production way up and flood the market with cheap media immediately even before the recorders are available in quantities, people would flock to them in droves. It's counterintuitive, but the only way any optical format will ever be particularly useful to the general consumer is if the industry decides to make it a loss leader for about a year. By the end of that year, you'll have so much adoption that it won't be losing money anymore, and it will be in the hands of consumers early enough to be broadly useful.
wake me up when it ships (Score:2, Insightful)
i won't be setting the alarm.
just spent $68 on a 1 TB wd my book btw. they're not getting less dense - or more expensive.
- js.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
If you increase the storage density, there will be more bytes per track, which will increase the data transfer speed. However, there will also be more tracks on the disk, and as you can't increase the number of tracks read per minute, it will take longer to read or fill a higher capacity disk.
PCRam (Phase Change RAM) (Score:1, Insightful)
Holographic storage, phase-change memory [arstechnica.com]
PCRam is far more interesting than holographic BluRay storage. It is going to market _now_ and Samsung is set to begin mass production.
Currently the storage capacity isn't yet on par with SSD - but that should just be a matter of time as the technology matures. As it stands right now it is already faster and significantly more durable than SSD/Flash Ram.
Re:to be correct here (Score:3, Insightful)
The great thing about DVD's and blu-ray discs is that they are not mechanical and not subject to mechanical faliure like hard disks are which is still a significant risk.
They are optical and scratches will cause loss of data. Of course if you store them and don't use them then you are safer from scratches.