Plasmon Exhibits Working Blue Laser DVD Drive

tedgyz writes "CDR-Info has an article describing the first working prototype of a blue-violet laser optical disk drive. The drive boasts 30GB of storage, dubbed Ultra Density Optical (UDO). The article has technical details and images of the drive and media." We've been hearing about the advantages of blue light for seemingly years now. It's cool to see a product prepare for market that actually uses it.

Comments

As a side note...

[Hayzeus]

This is only slightly relevant, as these aren't laser diodes, but but I noticed this AM standard long-wave UV LEDs have hit the electronics surplus market in big numbers lately for cheep (All Electronics has these at $1.75). All you experimenters out there can stock up now!

Just as DVD-R approaches affordability...

[Gossy]

..they have to torment me with 30Gb drives. As I work up to getting a DVD-R, now they're under £200 I've been thinking 'Ah great, smaller stacks of CDs, easier backups..' - and but with these it'd be even easier.

Great. Can't sit around forever I guess, though.

It'd be nicer if optical media had kept pace with hard drive storage. At least it's now starting to catch up - I spotted in the article that "Future generations of drives and media will increase the usable capacity of discs to 60GB and 120GB. Backward read capability will be maintained throughout the whole product roadmap."

120GB on a single disk? Optical media may be really useful once again - providing it's cheap enough, soon enough.

standard???

[thadeusPawlickiROX]

UDO is about to become the next generation standard on 5.25-inch optical drive technology, replacing the existing magneto-optical (MO) base of drives and discs of the same diameter.

So this is about to become the standard? IMHO, there are still issues with normal DVD's with standards (DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD R, etc.). I think this is a step forward, but I think all the companies manufacturing the new line of blue laser DVD burners need to agree with a standard and keep with it. The other point though... when will this "generation" be the current technology? I still think that by the time the drives and media are cost effective, you might as well buy a hard drive to store the data. Yes, I know that obsolete technology like the floppy disk is still around, but I still think that 30, or even the possible 120 gigs as seen in the article will be too small by the time the drives hit the main market at reasonable price.

Re:Until I have it in my computer....

[osgeek]

I'm usually pretty quick to cry "vapor", but these blue-laser DVDs are already a proven concept to lots of companies in their consortium, and they have a standard for it. Unlike other vaporish storage technologies that are always too good to be true, promoted by a small unknown company, rely upon nebulous revolutions in technology, etc. -- blue ray DVDs and their ilk are on the way.

It's a done deal, now we're just waiting to see who wins the race to get them out first.

Re:Not when you see the price

[cbreaker]

Only $1/gig? Probably much more then that. And, these discs are in cartridges (which personally I think normal DVD's should have been like) so that will add a little cost too.

I'm betting at least $60 a disc when they first hit market.

Cool stuff though, and I'd love to have a re-writable version of this for a real backup solution without mucking around with DLT tapes like I do now. (at home)

Mini-DVD's

[rf0]

What would be cool if we could get these density DVD on an 8cm mini-DVD. That way it would be a nice solution for portable MP3 player/high denisity hard disk. Just a clue for any product people reading :)

Rus

DataPlay

[jetkust]

What about dataplay, 500MB in the size roughly of a quarter. Very neat, but i think they ended up filing for bankruptcy over competition with flash cards and hard drive based mp3 players. I think even Britney Spears was scheduled to release an album using this technology.

Re:Not when you see the price

[cbreaker]

I still think RAID is the #1 way to protect data from hardware failure. Backups are never the newest data, and generally backups are only used to recover data from user error, data traansportation (copy a large database to tape, mail it to DR site), archival. Way way down on the list is recovery due to hardware failure, because RAID is such a perfect solution.

I worked at a data center with thousands of drives, some of them in a 30+ drive RAID set. In the five years I worked there, not once did we lose data due to drive failure.

For home, IDE/ATA RAID is becomming more and more of a reality. When serial ATA comes to saturation, I forsee lots more built-in hardware raid functionality due to easy cable management.