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I'm waiting on the Holodisc!
Here's to hoping they just concentrate on getting it to store stuff, rather than "protecting" it.

'til then, DVD does just fine for me...

If capacity is the most important issue, neither format is large enough. Even BluRay will only hold about 2 hours of video at 1080i (of course they can crank up the compression as needed). The best solution I've seen is a third format - holographic disc (http://www.engadget.com/entry/9772446245622191) which stores multiple bytes per cell instead of single bits. They can put about 1 terrabyte on a disk, and Toshiba just became an investor in Optware (the Japanese company that owns the technology) http://www.optware.co.jp/english/index_what.htm ... Things could get interesting if Toshiba (one of the main companies behind HD-DVD) suddenly backs a format with 20 times Blu-Ray's capacity.

If capacity is the most important issue, neither format is large enough. Even BluRay will only hold about 2 hours of video at 1080i (of course they can crank up the compression as needed). The best solution I've seen is a third format - holographic disc (http://www.engadget.com/entry/9772446245622191) which stores multiple bytes per cell instead of single bits. They can put about 1 terrabyte on a disk, and Toshiba just became an investor in Optware (the Japanese company that owns the technology) http://www.optware.co.jp/english/index_what.htm ... Things could get interesting if Toshiba (one of the main companies behind HD-DVD) suddenly backs a format with 20 times Blu-Ray's capacity.

I don't know what methods this uses, but my money is on the colinear Optware system. It is very simple in theory, and will
provide very high bandwidth. (since it writes 52 bits at a time...) The 20MB/s transfer rate that Inphase lists is very unimpressive when considering discs 1TB in size.

See http://www.optware.co.jp/english/top.htm for more info.

That is exactly what I was thinking. It is only a couple of months since there was a Slashdot story about a CD sized optical disk that using Collinear Holographic techniques can store 1TB http://www.optware.co.jp/english/index_what.htm. Now if instead of having a rotating rigid plastic disk, you have a long piece of flexible plastic wraped on a spindle, that just happens to be in the same form factor as a DLT tape, then at the same storage density one tape would store approximately 185TB of data.

However transfer speed is still an issue. At the 1GB per second transfer rate of the HVD it will take 52 hours to fill the tape. To make it viable you would have to fit at least four independent read/write heads to the the drive.

As you need in the order of 100 slot tape libraries with multiple drives to back this amount of data up at the moment, I know that people would jump at the chance to replace them with a single tape drive that would fit in 3U of rack space.

A similar story was posted last month on slashdot.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/25/163922 4&tid=198&tid=1

Optware -- the company claiming to have done this a month ago -- has a press release available at:
http://www.optware.co.jp/english/what_040823.htm

Deal with satan! Just check out the photo! That left disc has issues! Red beady eyes and huge gnashing teeth... hmm, maybe i inhaled too many solder fumes today...

And of course, it's 120 mm = 12cm != 12 inches ~= 36 cm...

Basically, they:

• "split" the beam of light in differents rays, each carrying data, as opposed to CD/DVD where the beam carries one bit at a time.
• They work into the "bulk" of the recording media, instead in a 2-D way for CD/DVD

From the press release:

The company will start sample shipping of the disc and the replay device in the third quarter of this year.

I always wondered what happened to this technology. Looks like it might finally arrive :-)

From the press release:

The company will start sample shipping of the disc and the replay device in the third quarter of this year.

I always wondered what happened to this technology. Looks like it might finally arrive :-)