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Movie Playback From 1TB Holographic Disc
qorkfiend writes "Optware Corp. has announced successful playback of digital movies on a new holographic recording disc with a reflective layer. Known as the Collinear Holographic Data Storage System, the disc has a one terabyte storage capacity and one gigabyte transfer speed. The disc size is 12cm, comparable to that of a DVD and a CD."
I've already heard plenty of complaints about a scratch destroying more info on a DVD than a CD due to density. How much would an errant fingernail wipe out on something this dense? I can appreciate the cool factor of cramming so much data on a single disc, but if I have to handle it like a Fabrege (sp?) egg, what's the point?
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
...on the consumer end.
Given the proven nature of tape-based backup (and the anecdotal/proven(?) volatility of optical-disc backup), I figure the enterprise market won't touch these w/ a 10-foot pole - at least not until it's been on the market for many years.
However, the low-end/consumer-level backup market is mostly using CDs and DVDs these days (due to the cost associated w/ tapes/drives). I see that market segment moving to this more or less instantly, while growing at a VERY rapid pace (similarly to what happened with Zip disks/drives about a decade ago).
(And yes, I am assuming that this won't hit the market for a few years - however, given that the biggest standard drives are about 250GB now - and uncommon - it seems unlikely that drives will commonly be much larger than 2 TB 4 or 5 years out, such that HVD would be an inconvenient backup solution (compare the inconvenience of backing up a 40GB drive -> 10 DVDs, vs. a 4 TVB drive -> 4 HVDs).
The above presumes that they can get the tech out there for a market appropriate price - while the article doesn't shed much light on pricing, I can't imagine that new HVD media would cost too much (prob. a similar prive curve to DVD). However, the price-friendliness of the servo-technology they describe is pretty much an unproven quantiy, so who know how much the players/burners will go for...
Whether the media companies follow-suit and use the media to distribute movies (i.e. create compatible players), I have no idea. However, people will lilely be backing those movies up on these HVDs, even if only to re-burn to MPAA-approved-media-of-the-week later, as I don't see digital distribution of (uncompressed, un-DRM-encumbered) digital HD coming down the pike anytime soon.