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."

Comments

Not good enough.

[Hatta]

$0.10/gb * 500 GB = $50. I can buy a 1 TB hard drive for around $80. Why would I use this stuff?

Re:Not good enough.

[Bieeanda]

Because that's only the projected cost at release? You remember how much writable CD media cost when it was first released, right?

Re:Not good enough.

[AKAImBatman]

I can buy a 1 TB hard drive for around $80

This is the next generation of optical storage, not hard drives. It's meant to be the follow up to BluRay discs. (Which already contain a simplified version of holographic technology.) $50/disc is too expensive for the short term, but I imagine the idea is to drive the price down through economics of scale. By the time they've got most of the specialty applications out of the way, they can move on to the early adopters. i.e. The people willing to pay $30/movie to watch Spiderman XI on their ED (extreme definition) television sets.

Re:Not good enough.

[Bentov]

Yep, I was cleaning my apartment and found a cd-r with a $10 price tag on it....seems like so long ago..

Re:Not good enough.

[blincoln]

$0.10/gb * 500 GB = $50. I can buy a 1 TB hard drive for around $80. Why would I use this stuff?

Power surges and giant magnets probably won't erase a holographic disc.

The media is separate from the read/write mechanism so being able to read the media (outside of a clean room-equipped lab) is not tied to the lifetime of a single drive's mechanical components.

It's a lot harder to accidentally erase the contents of a WORM storage device.

Re:Not good enough.

[jd]

If the disk is holographic (as opposed to the data), doesn't that mean it's not actually there?

Re:Not good enough.

[Tanman]

Because a 1TB hard drive has a minimum of 3 platters. This could get it done in 2 platters. And that matters. A lot. First there is size, second there is the number of moving parts required. And that is with this tech at its infancy and HDD tech being very mature.

Then there's also the issue of durability. It will be interesting to see if this new format breaks down, or if it can store data more indefinitely.

Hard drives are cheaper now.

[jumpingfred]

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.

Expensive

[tom17]

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.

Re:Expensive

[dgatwood]

Yes, and like all optical storage in the past, by the time it reaches price parity with hard drives, it will take so many of them to back up a single hard drive that it will be near useless. Remember when DVD-R seemed like it had promise? Well by the time I could afford to do a backup of my collection of HDs, I had to order two spools of a hundred to do it. BD-R is still only down to about $0.18/gig (and double that if you want 50 GB discs), so it still has to drop in half to reach parity, but the sweet spot for hard drives is 1TB, and it would take 40 of the 25 GB discs to back up one drive. That makes it very nearly useless for backups because you can't automate dozens of disc changes. So it still hasn't reached price parity and it is already way, way beyond impractical as a backup medium.

For optical media to really matter to me, burners would need to be available at consumer prices this year so that they would be starting to make their way into mainstream computers by two years from now. That way it will only take 4-8 discs to back up an average hard drive by the time the burners are broadly available. Unfortunately, this is still in the laboratory stage, which means that it probably won't be in consumers' hands for at least five years. Assuming HD density continues to increase at somewhere approaching current levels, this will likely take over a hundred discs to back up a typical hard drive by the time consumers get it, making it even farther behind than Blu-Ray is today, and nearly as bad as DVDs are today. And ten cents a gig would be okay right now. By five years from now, that will be about 50 times more expensive per gig than hard drives, so roughly on par with Blu-Ray today cost-wise. Thus, by the time this comes out, the cost to back up a typical hard drive with this technology will be about 2.5x more expensive than it is today using Blu-Ray.

Unless something changes fairly dramatically, I'd expect flash to make optical media completely obsolete within about five years. Optical media is already impractical for backups, for carrying around data with you, etc. and Internet downloads are rapidly becoming a viable replacement for physical media for movies and music. It's a shame; optical seemed like it had a lot of potential two decades ago, but the industry got way behind and can't seem to catch up. If anything, they seem to be rapidly falling farther behind.

Data Integrity?

[Plekto]

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.

Why does it matter?

[iris-n]

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.

Re:Why does it matter?

[wjh31]

i dont buy that. in the uk the fastest provider is probably virgin who offer a 50Mbps connection, that is only 1.5Mbps up. Once you consider the requirements to leave a connection up long enugh, and for it to be realiable long enough to transfer, say, the 4.5GB of a DVD, its still easier to transfer it on a DVD, and we are still far far from 500GB being reasonable over current internet speed, even over a 100Mbps LAN it would take helava time

Re:Why does it matter?

[FatAlb3rt]

How long does it take you to transfer 250 GB to the other side of town?

Re:Same longevity issues as other optical media?

[Jane Q. Public]

There is no real reason that archival media and rewritable media should be used in the same ways.

If you want guaranteed longevity, used existing bulk archival. That works. If, on the other hand, this is not rewritable, then the point is moot, isn't it?

Could also be...

[Capt James McCarthy]

We need a stock bump.

It's not for you.

[Anonymous Coward]

$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. :)

Re:I Could Be Really Excited About This--Maybe

[rot26]

Low cost? 10p for GB is more than you pay for a hard disk.

10p/GB was the manufacturing cost. Multiply that by 15 to 100 to figure out what it will SELL for.