Slashdot Mirror
6 Firms Form Holographic Versatile Disc Alliance
gardolas writes "'Fuji Photo and CMC Magnentics are two of six companies, who have formed a consortium to promote
HVD technology, which they say can be used to put 1TB of data onto just one disc. The consortium say that a HVD disc could hold about 200 standard DVD's, and transfer data at speeds 40 times that of DVD, about 1GB per second.'
HVD is being seen as a possible successor to Blu-ray and HD-DVD technologies."
pr0n, of course. :D
I fear this new advance in storage will just enable greater and greater copyright infringement and rob hard working content producers of their deserved income.
I hope they have technology built in to thwart these evildoing pirates.
Wow, from TFA:
HVD is a possible successor to technologies such as Blu-ray and HD DVD. Single layer Blu-ray discs hold about 25GB of data while dual-layer discs hold 50GB. Ordinary DVD discs, meanwhile, hold about 4.7GB. HVD technology will be pitched at corporations and the entertainment market, the HVD Alliance said.
Hmm, there's a format war going on with the Blu-ray and HD DVD, and they're already plotting the successor. Of course, they don't give a date in the article or anything firm at all, so perhaps it is a bit of a pipe dream. I must admit, I liked this quip from the article:
If history is an indication, consumers will fill the disc up.
Considering when I got my first computer, and the salesperson chuckled and said 'there was no way in hell I'd ever fill up a 40 megabyte hard drive', it's nice to see that people finally understand the capacity of users to fill up every nook and cranny of a storage medium!
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
Back in 1998, when IBM unvailed their 18GB hard drive, I asked the same thing. Now, 120GB is standard hard disk size. So, who knows...you might actually find a use for 1TB.
Help us Obi-Wan Kenobi! You're our only hope...
Remember when technology used to be about enabling people, rather than disabling them?
Oh, bah. I'm sure when the CD-ROM came out, people liked to roll their eyes at people filling up 540 MB of storage. Even TFA answers your argument, and does a damn good job of it IMHO:
If history is an indication, consumers will fill the disc up. High-definition broadcasting and gaming are also expected to add a heavy burden to existing home storage systems because of the size of the files. Two hours of HD programming takes up about 15GB to 25GB.
There you go, if we do a wholesale switch over to HD TV, finally a terabyte of storage doesn't seem that outlandish does it?
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
The consortium say that a HVD disc could hold about 200 standard DVD's,
That means nothing to me, can someone covert that into a more practical measurement like Libraries Of Congress (LoC) ?.
Who on earth needs a terabyte of storage? And more importantly, Why would we want it on a non-hard disk. The massive storage would be so much better on a hard disk. I can't imagine wanting to carry a terabyte with me on a disk!
Anybody who does scientific work, for instance.
It's not hard to generate a few GB of data in a fluid mechanics simulation. People doing rendering (e.g., Pixar) also run into this ... -- Paul
OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
To effectively use Apple iHDTV 3D Holo-Garage Band home studio with patented QuickTimeHolo technology, we recommend using a G14 computer with a one button psychic-cursor and at least fifty quadrillion golybits of RAM.
I am from a small, grease-loving country in the north called Ca-na-da.
Yes, but I assume you do want backups for your terabyte hard drive? And you are going to want to move large, but less frequently used files (HD home movies anybody?) off the drive.
On the other hand, watching somebody who just lost 1TB of data change colours like a chameleon would be interesting to watch.
My rights don't need management.
-obviousquote-
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." - Bill Gates, 1981
-/obviousquote-
If they made the LOTR chronicles 1TB long, I think I'd have to get another job just to be bored enough to watch them.
But will they put some kind of protection around the disk similar to 3.5 Floppies or MiniDiscs? That's my one big beef about CDs. They're so fragile. I'm careful, but one false move can really mess them up. If you can fit so much on a disc, make them smaller, 2 inch diameter? but make them protected.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
"A tiny speck of dust has crossed the beam and 4gb of data have been lost." The bigger they get, they harder they fall.
I have TB hard drive for my simulations. if I want to back up my data, you suggest 200 DVDs?
this is progress. if you're so lacking in imagination that you can't think of a use for this then just remember that you are not psychic and don't know what secondary discoveries pursuing this technology will bring. when the electron was discovered how many people do you think knew how it would change our lives?
Isn't it funny, the CD was approximately the same as a record with 40-70 minutes of music, the attention span of a human in the 1980s. Past that and nobody listened to the record the whole way through.
Now we can save 200 hours of video but have 5 minute attemtion spans because of all the distractions, TV etc..
Ironic isn't it?
I wonder what they plan to record on that disc.
You just know the PHBs will still use an entire disc to walk a 37KB spreadsheet thirty feet down the hall ;)
I was getting sick of that old redundant legacy blu-ray format, its about time we replaced it..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
From the slashdot article:
"about 1GB per second"
From the cnet article:
"transfer data at over 1 gigabit per second"
Slight difference there of about eight times...
I do computational fluid dynamics -- it is quite easy to generate a terabyte of data in a week. A typical 3-d simulation may be 10 terabytes (including restart files). You usually want to keep the whole dataset around for a while so you can analyse it, and probably need it to be easily accessable until you finish writing the paper(s) describing it (which could be 6 months or so).
So, I could fill up several of these right now. All my data is stored on mass storage systems at various supercomputing centers, but it would be nice to have a local copy too. And RAID is not a backup -- I would like a true backup that I could place in a place physically different than my computer.
Also: think video. 6000x4500 pixels at 30 fps, using 2:1 lossless compression, is 1215 MB/sec. This technology would be perfect for digital movie production.