Sanyo Invents 12X High-Speed Blu-ray Laser

Lucas123 writes "Today Sanyo said it has created a new blue laser diode with the ability to transfer data up to 12 times as fast as previous technologies. The laser, which emits a 450 milliwatt beam — about double that of previous Blu-ray Disc systems — can read and write data on discs with up to four data layers, affording Blu-ray players the ability to store 100GB on a disc, or 8 hours of high-definition video."

Comments

obligatory! (and more serious..)

[apodyopsis]

"man thats a lot of porn!"

and on a more serious note, what would a normal PC user use this for?

archiving video (see above)?

archiving MP3, I guess not many people have >100GB of MP3s?

an easy method of archiving an entire HDD in a few disks?

when you look into it only video/HD makes such a disk make sense.

and on a *much* more serious note, stop waxing lyrical about the storage capacity and start talking about the durability, its life span, its resistance to UV, its archival qualities. I would be much more interested in a 4GB disk that actually had a change of lasting >10 years in a normal environment (for me..? room temp, light sealed bag).

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[nine-times]

and on a more serious note, what would a normal PC user use this for?

It's telling that people are likely, these days, to ask how a normal PC user would use these disks to store his own data, rather than how media companies will use this to distribute their products more cheaply.

Anyway, yes, this would be handy for backups/archives. What else do people use physical media for? I have to back up 5TB of data every week, so don't tell me that these disks have gotten too big for practical application. Even at home, it'd be nice to be able to back up my entire computer onto one disk.

Go ahead and figure out how to store massive amounts of data on cheap plastic with no moving parts. I'll figure out a use for it.

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[Skye16]

How, precisely, do you scan in books? Do you have to manually scan each page?

I'd really have no trouble spending a few hundred dollars on a scanner that would basically do it for me. I really want to move to an e-book, but most of the books I love are rather modest Fantasy books that aren't available in e-book form. A flat bed scanner would take me probably a year to get my entire collection scanned in, and that just won't do.

Re:450mw beam

[Somegeek]

They are not retailing a bare laser, they are (well, someday) selling a drive. How is that any different than selling a microwave? Do you know what parts they use in those?

arrrg, should have been a car analogy. -slaps head-

Re:I don't get it

[Austerity Empowers]

One caveat, flash memory is not as reliable of a storage medium as some believe, particularly as densities increase, particularly as they use smaller and smaller processes. Depending on the specific technology, and the level of error correction built into it, optical (even with dust and scratches) is more robust. Flash is great for sneaker net, or the family vacation pictures, but I'm not sure it's suitable for anything you care about.

As long as the market driving this media is digital photography, the concern about the occasional bit being flipped isn't going to change anything. Flipping a bit on almost anything else, is catastrophic.

Re:I don't get it

[Khyber]

Guess you've never heard of OUM memory technology. Same glass substrate that's used on re-writable optical media, but instead of using a laser to flip bits you use an electrical pulse to change the state of the glass from amorphous (bit 0) to semi-crystalline (bit 1) and voila no more worry about bit flip. It also is stronger than silicon wafers and can tolerate more heat and requires less power for changing bits. Also, due to using the crystalline structure representing 1 or a 0, it's non-volatile. Access times are faster than standard flash devices today. The read/write cycles are several orders of magnitude higher as well than current flash memory.

Re:I don't get it

[evanbd]

So, can I buy it? Where? What does it cost?