Slashdot Mirror
Holographic Storage a Reality in 2006?
vitaly.friedman writes "What do you do when you're getting close to the limits of 2-dimensional optical technology? Well, how many dimensions do we have to work with?" From the Ars Technica article: "How much greater data density? In the Hitachi Maxell device, a single disc about 1 cm larger in diameter than a CD will buy you 300GB. By way of contrast, HD-DVD currently offers a maximum of 30GB on a 2-layer disc, and Blu-ray tops out at 50GB. Although upgrades are in the works that promise to increase the capacity of both of those formats, even the most pie-in-the-sky predictions fall short of what is planned for merely the first commercial generation of holographic storage. Future plans for that medium include boosting the capacity to 800GB in two years, and 1.6TB per disc by 2010."
Wouldn't it make sense to keep it the same size so they can still use existing cd cases & so we don't have to buy new CD racks/holders? I mean, what's an extra ~50GB between friends? :p
I was going to say the same thing. Storage isn't the problem these days, backing up extremely large hard drives or RAID arrays is. Not only that but access speeds are really becoming the greater bottleneck. Scanning through 100GB of photos can take a little while. I'd like to see companies work on faster indexing and file management. Microsoft, give us back the unified file storage in Vista damnit.
Well CD-rs and DVD-r have upwards of 4-8 years and counting for life. Those people that claim 1-2 years, they are full of shit.
Or they've just bought the wrong batches of media. I have some CD-Rs (Memorex) that I burned in 1997 which are still perfectly readable. I have some other CD-Rs (a PNY spindle, I think) that started to show unrecoverable errors within months. Maybe some brand names are cheaper than others, but I've also had good discs from PNY, and I wouldn't be surprised if other people have encountered bad Memorexes.
Sometimes when other people say something that sounds "full of shit", the problem is actually just that you think you know everything, and you're wrong.