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: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.