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GE Introduces 500GB Holographic Disks
bheer writes "According to the NYTimes, at a conference next month, GE will debut their new holographic storage breakthrough — 500GB disks that will cost 10 cents a GB to produce at launch. GE will first focus on selling the technology to commercial markets like movie studios and hospitals, but selling to the broader corporate and consumer market is the larger goal."
"This could be the next generation of low-cost storage," said Richard Doherty, an analyst at Envisioneering, a technology research firm.
The G.E. development, however, could be that pioneering step, according to analysts and experts.
So a player that could read microholographic storage discs could also read CD, DVD and Blu-ray discs. But holographic discs, with the technology G.E. has attained, could hold 500 gigabytes of data.
You guys remember that cool new technology that was going to revolutionize the way we store data? The one that was just 11 years away? Well we could be one year closer to that realization today perhaps maybe.
People that know more than you and might even be experts possibly speculated that this might be a reality within some amount of time. It brings me great joy to announce to you that now we're maybe in the ballpark. You yourself have the chance to be alive when this thing hits. And it could be big.
Perhaps tomorrow it will be in my computer or the fabrication process might not ever be cheaply implemented and then we could wait longer than five years possibly. "It's so tantalizingly exciting but still just over that next hill we think," is what I said last year and now look. I may have been correct or at least within one standard deviation of time for this product.
This is exciting to the point that I very well may scream. I think now is the time to possibly ask yourself: are you ready for what might turn into something big? Because it could be around the corner.
My work here is dung.
Then I will belive.
$0.10/gb * 500 GB = $50. I can buy a 1 TB hard drive for around $80. Why would I use this stuff?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Will this hologram technology be capable of storing a Holoduke?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
No NYT account so I can't RTFA.
What's the long-term reliability? (as I sit looking at a growing pile of failing hard disks)
Now if they could only replicate the technology from a Jedi holocron.
1 terra byte drives cost around $100. That is 10 cents a gig at retail. So they cost less than 10 cents a gig to manufacture.
They word the pricing to make it sound attractive, only 10c/GB, but that makes this 500GB disk a hideously expensive $50! That's too much.
By the time this tech comes out, that will be orders of magnitude more than HD prices. Maybe even flash storage will be cheaper by then.
The real question is how robust the things are to scratches and other negative environmental effects. If it has to be enclosed in a case like the old Zip disks were, then it's effectively a fancy hard drive in a smaller and lighter format.(though slower by a huge margin I'd bet).
Unless it's as damage resistant as a normal CD or DVD, it's not going to make a blip in the marketplace.
And I haven't even bought a Blu-Ray player yet.
Are we talking about TB disks are that fit ipods and cell phones?
Are these RW or preloaded?
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
...and it'll store it Forever too!
[...] perhaps in 2011 or 2012, holographic discs using its technology will be less than 10 cents a gigabyte [...]
Yeah perhaps the disks will be that cheap. From the summary, I assumed that they were 10 cents a GB already...
500GB disks that will cost 10 cents a GB to produce at launch
But I guess you never can be too sure in life.
Seems like buying a SATA-USB bridge with a case and a 1TB hard drive (totaling less than $100)would be much more cost effective, not to mention durable, than buying a $50 disk.
I can see the merit in having a single disk being able to store 500GB as a technological advancement (perhaps towards large capacity microSD cards and their ilk), but I fail to see how this works on a practical level as-is.
Above quote from Computer World
I wasn't sure from the TFA, but previous holo disks were WORM media, where they were intended for archiving.
With media this inexpensive, it would be a boon for both hospitals, but companies in general who have to archive everything, due to Sarbanes Oxley, HIPAA, CALEA, and other regulations.
What GE will need to work on, once this comes out in a standard cartridge format, is some type of autochanger that can reliably move media in and out. In days of yore where companies had WORM optical media, one loaded a library with 50-100 disks, and as they got full, labeled them, swapped them out for empty ones, and either stored them in a tape safe, or dropped them in a tub for Iron Mountain to pick up and store.
how the hell has OCZ's new 1TB 500MB/s PCI-E flash (http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/flash_drives/ocz_z_drive_pci_express_ssd) drives not gotten a mention anywhere that ive seen.
Yes ill probably get modded off topic, but it seems to me it's managed to fall below the radar where it shouldnt have
High density discs and have been a PR staple for years. I'm still waiting for one announced in '99. Yes, disc capacity will increase gradually and at some point today's fat Blu-Rays will be hopelessly limited curios, but the trick isn't so much about jamming bits into ever smaller sectors as it is creating compatibility with installed player bases, burner ecosystems and jittery rights holders. GE doesn't come to mind as a company with experience getting that done, nevermind getting such consumer products in the stores or even out of the lab. Good luck guys but I don't see it happening.
- js.
If this technology suffers from the same longevity and data integrity issues that other rewritable optical media always has, then I don't want it to begin replacing magnetic media. The Next Big Thing in storage should be a step closer to the data longevity we enjoyed with cuniform tablets, not a step farther away. Speed and capacity aren't the only criteria for judging storage media. Media is, after all, supposed to store data... how well it does that is a big deal.
This technology is for discs, like DVDs. So you'd use this for the same reasons we often use DVDs instead of hard drives; hard drives just aren't right for many applications (often because hard drives have moving parts that can break).
We have fast cheap broadband virtually everywhere in the civilised world (excluding US, of course). We have dirt cheap HDs.
Video retailers are moving to streaming. Backups are done in RAID servers. Everyone has a thumb drive to carry small files or has a ftp server to transfer big ones.
Why would anyone be burning discs today? I don't see why I should be excited by optical media technology. In the 90's this would be huge. Today, its just an interesting toy.
entropy happens
This has, I would suggest, a very, very slim market. Home users won't bother, because it costs more (significantly more at 10c/GB to produce) than an external HD. Hollywood won't bother, because BR still has lots of legs and I don't foresee QHD becoming mainstream any time soon. By then, the video algorithms may have even caught up with the resolution jump and we still won't need more than 50GB for a film. IT won't bother, because if it doesn't go reel to reel it's not a "real" backup solution.
About the only real reason to use this format is distribution of very large data sets to parties locked into a proprietary reader format (medical imaging and digital cinema seemed to be the thrust). That's a pretty low volume marketplace to be pitching to. Oh well, at least it will give justification for high medical costs and high ticket prices at the theater.
FWIW, the search for the holy grail of optical storage was started when CDs held 30x the typical hard drive size. The sheer cavernous storage of 650MB in a 5-20MB hard drive world was so enticing, that it seemed logical that some other removable optical storage would surely keep ahead of hard drives. Backing up 3MB with a box full of $1 floppies was a pain. Backing up a server with a box full of $100 discs just isn't quite as attractive. (For the record, it would take 5 of these to back up my server - though 90% of that is actually a backup of 300 physical DVDs which rest sticky-finger-free in a box in a closet - but the thought of re-ripping all those in a catastrophic failure is not a pleasant one)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I haven't RTFA but I do know a bit about holograms. Normal holograms have several properties that could be extremely useful as media devices because of the way they store information. The major one being that every piece of a hologram contains the full hologram. So if you were to make a 10ft by 10ft hologram plate and cut it into pieces of 1 sq in, every one would contain the full image only at lower power. (I don't remember how it scales.) Theoretically, a holographic plate can store a very large number of images related to the degree of incidence of the laser reflection onto the plate. So image another image every 1/2 a degree through about 140 degrees. There are practical limitations with this idea because I've only seen up to 3 images per plate. The plates can also be double exposed at a specific angle, so you can analyze how an image changes due to a condition.
If this new storage contains any of these features, I'd be glad to pay a bit more for it compared to the standard hard drives or DVDs to secure my data. This would be a whole new way to store data and has the potential to store a lot more of it and store it more or less indefinitely.
If you look at all the projected lifetimes of Fe-LiNiO3 devices, which I guess is they system they are talking about in their glorified press releases, they are supposed to be around 100 years at operating temperatures! Compare that to the 30 some years of DVD-R media!
Though it still isn't as good as some chalcogenide based phase change materials which are predicted to last for 100's of years, it is important step in keeping our data around.
Any idea on the drive specs? Throughput, read/write latency, durability ?
Many technological inventions have had their adoption assisted when the porn industry started making use of it. Perhaps GE will quietly partner with an adult entertainment company, who in turn, will release these discs preloaded with hours and hours of 1080p video. Mmmm... holographic boobies.
We need a stock bump.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
How much were writable CDs when they first came out? Over $100, right?
How much were writable DVDs when they first came out? Over $100, right?
So at $50/disk for a brand new technology, it sounds pretty cheap to me. If the standard catches on (if the same drive can read CD and DVD, and store 500gb onto a writable disk, it sounds like it's possible), how long until their disks reach the price writable CDs and DVDs are at?
The problem with a lot of the snide slashdot kiddies is that they aren't old enough to have seen all this before. Or if they have, they've just failed to learn anything from the experience.
Create new tech, let it get popular, it gets cheaper, then it becomes low cost. Rince, repeat, ad infinitum.
CDs can store more than an hour of uncompressed audio, yet here we are 20 years after music CDs hit the market and they still contain the same 35-40 minutes of music as vinyl records.
The movie industry's way of coping with DVDs that can store far more than one movie has been to put one movie on a DVD, and load up the extra space with previews, outtakes, commentary, and all kinds of other crap that's not a movie.
How will the movie industry handle a DVD that can store 100 movies? Maybe by grouping them, for example the Star Trek series or films by the same director or main actor. But based on history I'm guessing won't put more than 5 or 6 movies on a disc plus hours and hours of "bonus" material.
No, you missing the point. It will cost 10 cents / gig TO PRODUCE. It will sell at a lot more than that. Why would you not want to buy into a new technology when it is much more expensive than the terabyte hard drives that you could buy and use today?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
While they're launching the disks, there is unfortunately no drive to read them yet. The movie studios have no problem with that, though; they actually see this as a strong positive.
The last I heard about optical development was a multi-layered DVD. It had about the same capacity: 25 layers/disc by 4G/layer = 100 G/disc.
Too bad these are mostly vaporware articles because this would be nice from an archivist's point of view. I am not sure of the lifetime of magnetic disks sitting in drawers for 100 years. Optical seems to have a much better chance in that environment.
When applied to computers and periphals, it is always "disk" with a "k". "Disc" only came into use as the Compact Disc
Blu-ray Disc also uses "disc", as does the DVD Forum's semi-official expansion of DVD as "digital versatile disc". The pattern here is that optical storage uses "disc", while magnetic storage uses "disk".
To all the physicists out there: what are the theoretical limits to holographic storage? Could you use, say, a 1m x 1m cube to store a few yottabytes?
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
Remember, you don't need to ship bandwidth
Yes you do. It's called pulling cable. There are parts of the United States that still can't get DSL or DOCSIS service, where 0.05 Mbps is considered a "good connection".
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It is the year 2109 and they have just released a disc that can hold all the data ever created by mankind. Now selling in 50 and 100 packs.
The manifest absurdity of it is too obvious to require explanation
I want my holodisk with my holonovel now. Can i be the first to Brand this? oh.. maybe someone already has.
$0.10/gb * 500 GB = $50. I can buy a 1 TB hard drive for around $80. Why would I use this stuff?
Would you rather drive a Volkswagon or a Porche? They both do the same thing.
You seem to have missed the point where it's targeted at commercial (and I would imagine, military) applications. If you only keep your data on a sheltered computer desk, maybe not so much. Comparing holo to a solid state drive would be more appropriate, where 1 TB ~~$1500+.
With both holographic and solid state:
- No moving parts, shock-damage is limited to physical chips or cracks in the medium.
With only holographic:
- No risk of EM interference
- No electric charge needed to maintain data integrity
Ultimately it's an important development simply to place more data in a smaller space. We're already stacking magnetic bits on their ends instead of flat, and interference between them will create a physical density limit. A Blu-ray beam reads a pit 150 nanometers in size, holographic beams converge at 1.5 nanometers. I don't own a 50GB BD-R/W drive yet, but a "disc" with one-hundred times the storage and nearly infinite re-writing at very close to the speed of light will sound pretty good in about 10-15 years.
Enjoy your punch buggy. :)
It's too bad this is a product of Generally Evil because it looks very promising. Since it's been developed by a company that loves Iran, pushes political agendas through it's MSNBC organization in order to make profits. I think I'll skip it.
You can keep you mercury filled CFLs and I'll generate as much CO2 as I want thank you. I'm not paying you a tax every time I breath.
Although, maybe that would cut down on the hot air from Washington.
DOWN WITH GENERALLY EVIL!!!!!
Holographic Memories, Scientific American, November 1995, by Psaltis & Mok
A very good article on the principles involved in holographic storage. It focuses on solid state storage systems -- relatively large 3D lattices storage in a crystal or block of doped material. The robot that navigated its way around the lab using holographically stored images is very cool. The technology involved made use of a technique that the disks can't -- the playback beam is an image of a target, and produces an output beam from every storage cell being illuminated (up to all of them), the strength being proportional to the similarity to the target. Finding a match or closest-to is a simple matter of finding the strongest output and looking at it.
Much of the work examined was done at Stanford. They've continued developing the research, and recently announced that they holographically stored a 35 bit images "in the quantum space of a single electron" http://storagemojo.com/2009/02/03/quantum-holographic-storage/ (I assume they mean an electron's orbit). Like the 3D solid state devices before, it can stack holograms, storing two images in the same space.
In keeping with the device described in TFA, let's keep with as much current technology as possible. At 70 bit per electron, an iron atom could carry 227 bytes plus a 4 bit checksum. As iron oxide, each molecule would have 34 electrons, giving 297 bytes plus checksum. It would take 3367003367 molecules of iron oxide to carry a terabyte. What's the density of iron oxide on a disk in terms of molecules per given area? I can't find a reference, but I'm sure 3.4 billion molecules would be a tiny portion of the platter. A standard hard drive could carry enormous amounts, or disks could be made much smaller, such as the sub-inch drives (Ob/.SciFiRef) shown in Johnny Mnemonic.
As for the annoucement in TFA, there have been many such announcements from different companies for the last decade, prompting one respondent to one of the many articles to call holographic storage systems the Duke Nukem Forever of data storage. Doing a web search on various permutations of "holography" "holographic" "data" "storage" etc. produces a multitude of announcements, articles, mention of articles, second hand accountings of same, and so forth.
I've no doubt that sooner or later there will be some very expensive storage devices that a very few will be able to afford and even less make full use of. Government can afford such things and the health care industry has the cash flow plus tax write offs for business equipment. I've also no doubt the first adopters will end up stranded with expensive door stops. But these are the usual and apparently necessary steps before we can obtain the technology at more reasonable cost.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
You make a disc with enough capacity to download my entire brain onto it. Until then, stop getting my hopes up.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
How long does it take you to transfer 250 GB to the other side of town?
It depends on whether or not your town has an ISP that isn't dial-up and doesn't cap its customers at 5 GB per month.
... creating compatibility with ... jittery rights holders. GE doesn't come to mind as a company with experience getting that done, ...
Huh?
GE is one of the six conglomerates that, together, own 90% of the media in the US. It's big on movies, broadcasting, cable, news, ... For starters it owns NBC and Universal. See Wikipedia for a more complete list.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I want my flying car and bubble memory!
I wouldn't buy it either, as consumers...not yet. However, I think it is attractive to content creators as there is alot of space to use for more detail/information. Blu-ray drives have gone down quite a bit, now under $100 I have seen. Eventually it will prob replace your regular DVD discs, which for me replaced most of my CD-roms.
the computing marketplace.
... right now, it takes a dozen DVD-9 disks to back up my HD. Or one 500G GE optical disk. Hopefully, demand will be sufficient to get the price down to prosumer levels.
Terabyte-range optical storage has been pushed as coming Real Soon Now for the last few years. I don't want it Real Soon Now, I want it now
Tech Public Policy stuff
Based on this post, it's been done for 10 years :-).
Oh, now be fair. He didn't once utter the phrases, "What?", "I don't understand" or "Where's the tea?"
-FL
I have just created the highest speed network.
It consists of:
1 Boeing 747 Large Cargo Freighter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747_Large_Cargo_Freighter
5,411,764 Blu-ray Disc (100 pc - 7.5" x 12.5" x 22") http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc
That is:
270,588,200GB traveling at about 900km/h
My math isn't good enough (or I am lazy) to figure out what that is GB/s, but I bet it is pretty darn fast. Seek time may be a bitch though.
NT
Anyone else notice that GE sold their plastics division overseas in 2007 because it was just barely breaking even and the market wasn't expected to grow in 2007-2008. But it sounds like they had this in the works since 2003? Why are they selling off R&D units? Are they mad?
Sort of right. GE is not a good corp, but any vitriol directed at Iran is the result of propaganda. I find it amazing after the Iraq debacle that people are still capable of being tricked by state/Israeli sponsored nonsense.
But if you've not figured that out by now, all words to the contrary are probably wasted air. If only we could export blind ignorance and violent stupidity as commodities, the nation's economic woes would be vanquished. Oh. . , hold on. No, that's what got us into this mess in the first place.
*sigh*
-FL
Yeah, because hospitals like to be on the bleeding edge of data storage technology and will of course commit their patients' precious data on some zany new technology.
Just like the hospital I work for, of course.
Oh, wait...
np: Dakota Suite - This Failing Sea (The End Of Trying)
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
Good grief! GE is a giant company that can afford the press to make it seem like they invented this. IBM developed the basic idea years ago and INPhase Storage corporation has sold a 600 Gig Holographic disk for two years. INPhase will release a Terabyte disc this year. They last for at least 50 years and you can store them underwater if you like. Is this like Microsoft Corporation inventing the browser?
So your whole collection would fit on one disc, what is the point in wanting to carry around a pile of such discs?
At a cost of $50 a disc to produce, how much do you think that disc will cost in the stores? Hint: Everything else you buy in the computer store costs 3-4 times the cost of production, do you think that GE is going to change that, particularly if people have already paid an outrageous price for a burner and so are willing to pay the price? How much would that pile of discs you plan to carry around in a sack have set you back?
Where are you going to carry this expensive pile of over priced optical discs to? With a hard drive (1.5 tb is often available at just over $100 now, and you could even put it in a e-SATA case for a total cost less than 1 piece of this hyped media. And a portable 1.5 TB drive in an e-sata case could be used on many modern systems. But this media is only useful where a very expensive drive can access it, and these will be few and far between. So don't start throwing thousands of dollars of holographic media into your backpack just yet.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I remember watching something on TV back in the 80's about storing data on crystal cubes that were about 1cm square. Data was stored in holographic form, and could hold, as I remember "the equivalent of 50 full-length feature films" on it. It was either on the Discovery Channel, NOVA, Beyond 2000, or some program with David Suzuki or that British guy (they both did *alot* of science & technology programs), I can't quite remember which.
It was really cool, resembling something like the crystal from the movie "The Fortress".
I'm quite surprised that it still hasn't made the jumps that most other fields of technology have made.
Disk-based storage is so Thomas Edison. Is there any reason to think solid-state storage won't be catching up to disks in terms of density, longevity, price, etc. anytime in the foreseeable future?
I mean c'mon people! It's the 21st century and our computing machines still have motors in them!
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Correction, it wasn't a 1 gig device, it was a 500 meg device. Here's a link to one of the early hypes about it: http://www.howstuffworks.com/ces20012.htm . This device will be just as popular as the Data Play disc has become. And no one will care that the sconomy of scale has not kicked in because no one will use it.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Anyone got some real meat on this?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I think this technology is a great opportunity to explore other means to save data. If this is successful this will be a technology that will replace hard drives and provide an easier way to store data This would be great for portable devices like laptops.
I know, backwards compatibility. But, if the medium is a hemisphere, it doesn't have to move. The "laser" would be a much smaller moving part so it could be made to move faster, improving access times.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
Call me when you have something that can hold 200 kiloquads of data.
TFA:
Hmm. Okay, so 2-3 years from now, the cost per GB for this new technology will be about the same as today's cost (10-15 cents per GB).
I'm sorry, but I hate hate HATE it when companies do this. Go and read some R&D press releases. Without fail, they always say that although they're years away from the market, the consumer price of the end product will be about the same or slightly less than what we pay for current similar (but inferior) technology. Usually not significantly cheaper (unless it'll let them use some phrase like "pennies per square foot") and never will it cost more, regardless of the advantages.
I wonder, do they hire psychics who can can foresee all of the engineering and manufacturing hurdles that they're going to face whilst bringing it to market? Have they bought a time machine and know not only what their raw materials will cost in 5 years, but how consumers will be using technology by then? Do they have spies planted in R&D labs around the world so that they know exactly what they'll need to do in order to compete?
If they knew all of this, it wouldn't take them years to introduce the product in the first place!
Personally I think this will be a great asset in the gaming markets where larger and larger amounts of space are needed. As of now a lot of games are pushing DVD's to the limits and multiple DVD's are sometimes needed to hold an entire game.
Well now that Blue Ray is slowly becoming more and more mainstream they will most likely start using Blue Ray disks for gaming storage as graphics, content, and multimedia increases. However as history shows by the time Holographic Storage is mainstream enough to where its cost effective for the normal consumer games will be most likely at the point of being ready to utilize more storage. This is especially prevalent as 3D possibilities are starting to be considered more and more.
Ultimately its summed up in the fact that Technology drives innovation and innovation drives technology.
It would be so much nicer if the consumer industry would abandon optical disks for something like a flash-based "cartridge". SD cards are a bit too small, physically, for this purpose, but the technology behind them is pretty much perfect.
Come out with a physical form-factor around the size of a floppy diskette or maybe a GameBoy game: big enough to not lose too easily, small enough to not hog a lot of shelf space, lots of room internally to store flash chips. Put a controller onto the diskette/cartridge, and use a standardised physical interface.
Voila! A future-proof storage medium. Need more space? Just put more (and/or higher-density) flash chips inside. The hardware interface doesn't have to change. The reader hardware doesn't have to change. And you don't have to worry about wear-levelling and what-not, as it's a read-only setup.
You could even reserve a little section of the storage space to include the media codec, so you could "upgrade" the player when you play the media. No more format wars!! Turns the player into a "dumb" device, with a general-purpose CPU/DSP/whatever, where all the smarts needed to play the media is included with the media. (Isn't that how Blu-Ray works?)
Learn from the harddrive market: a single IDE connector/controller can be used for drives as small as 10 MB and as large as 500 GB (I think that was the largest IDE drive). A single SATA connector/controller can be used for drives as small as 80 GB and as large as 2 TB.
Standardise the physical interface ... and you can change the innards as needed.
This could be used for pretty much any kind of media: audio/music, video, applications, you name it.
Of course, the RIAA/MPAA would have a coronary if this ever happened. No more forced re-purchasing of your entire library (Beta -> VHS -> DVD -> HD-DVD -> Blu-Ray -> whatever; vinyl -> 8-track -> cassette -> MD -> CD -> DVD -> whatever). No more forced upgrades of your home theatre equipment to read the latest optical format. Etc.
But wouldn't that be an end-user nirvana!?
Don't even try to make the argument that a DVD is not a good distribution media, optical media is far from "obsolete". I would NEVER install any peice of software or OS that required 25 gigs, not even 10, 5 I will only allow for an OS but any more than 5 and I question the integrity of the source. I will say it now, if ever there comes a day where new Linux distros require something outrageous like 25 gigs to install, I will never use a [new] Linux distro again.
"Optical media is obsolete", do you have any idea what you are saying? Insightful? Are there that many Macbook Air(tm) users on slashdot?
chalcogenide doesnt last long at all. its main benefit is its very large nonlinearity and refractive index its tendency to change over short time spans (weeks to months) makes it difficult to use even within research
This is the best thing since Fluorescent Multilayer Disc!
Also, did anyone else do the math on this?
500GB disks that will cost 10 cents a GB to produce at launch
So that's $50 per disk, production cost? You can get a 100 pack of 4.7 gig DVDs for about $30. By my count that's around 470 gig. And that's purchase price, not production cost.
Moderators: Before moderating a comment Insightful/Informative, check to see if a child post has already refuted it.
I update my HD mirror 3x a week using a copy of Knoppix modified to add custom backup scripts and the mirror lives in a drive rack plugged in ONLY when I'm doing backup. The optical storage is for portable, durable offsite backup and/or the case where the first HD fries followed by whatever killed the first HD doing the same to the second one.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Storing lots of data on this system means I pay, on average about $0.10 per Gb, plus the cost of the reader, right? Lets see how much cheaper this is than just buying harddrives. 1.5Tb costs $100, so that comes to $0.066 per Gb... Ooops.... It's more expensive than harddrives.
Let me predict: It won't sell....
It will be portable unlike a hard disk and the price will come down dramatically over time.
Some breakthroughs BREAK something others just try to break those that do !
I think they are floating this breakthrough NOW because they fear someone else's breakthrough that is about to be announced, although I believe the announcement from Berkley a month or two ago about thin film storage over aluminum and other substrates was MORE DENSE then this one, so they might just be trying to get attention back.
And THAT was just a clever refinement of existing processes so there could be announcements of new products of that type soon.
My gut tells me GE is the MOST POLITICAL company on the planet !!!!!!