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

We can't stop with blue!

[petronivs]

We've been hearing about the advantages of blue light for seemingly years now.

We can't stop with blue light! We need to branch out into purple, yellow, even magenta! Soon all the colours of the world will be under our umbrella, and we will be all powerful!

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.

This is good news for the moral community

[Anonymous Coward]

I have always been wary about purchasing a so-called "red laser" DVD unit due to the historical ties that the color red has to Communism. Communism, as you are probably aware, resulted in hundreds of millions of death in the 20th Century. I could not, as a moral man, purchase a laser of this color. Who could sit down and watch Attack of the Clones without thoughts of the Soviet gulags distracting you?

Blue is the color of capitalism. It is also the color of patriotism and masculinity (as opposed to red, which is very close to the feminine color of pink.) It warms the heart to know that I can now watch my John Wayne collection on a moral device that is consistent with the ideals that I donned my country's uniform for in Grenada and Panama.

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.

I may be nitpicking, but...

[amalcon]

"Plasmon Exhibits Working Blue Laser DVD Drive"

This is not DVD. It's an optical disk drive, which uses much of the same technology as DVD, but is definitely not the same specification. You would not be able to read a blue-laser disc in any 100% DVD-compliant drive.

Optical discs that can hold more than CD's are not necessarily them DVD's.

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.

Re:Awfull read/write speed?

[axis-techno-geek]

This is still faster than a 24x CD-R burner (24 x 150 KB/s = 3600 KB/s = 3.52 MB/s). 4x DVD writing is 5.54 MB/S and they are in the fifth generation.

Not as fast a tape drives for writing (you can get 22 MB/s with compression 2:1, 11 MB/s real), but the random access capabilities of this type of media would put a tape to shame.

Their aimed at replacing MO drives, I currently don't know anybody with one of these at home, as they are still expensive (about $1500 USD). The people using these I am guessing are very interested in long-term archiving without degradation.

Seeing how this is a first generation drive, I guess this is "1x" speed, when the get the 60GB (2nd gen) and 120GB (3rd gen) drives out, if they double this in each generation, that would give you a "4x" (16 MB/sec - equivalent to a 109x CD-R) 120GB drive, this would still take 2 hrs 8 min to fill at "4x", but a 30 GB disc would only take 32 minutes.