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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."
It'd have to be *more* damage resistant, at that price. With flash drives up to 64GBs at a reasonable price, and growing all the time, and no word on if these are reusable, requiring a specific drive, etc etc. It'd be a hell of an uphill battle. Probably worse than Blu-Ray's got.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
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.
Actually, no it's not. When applied to computers and periphals, it is always "disk" with a "k". "Disc" only came into use as the Compact Disc, which for a number of years was an audio format that had nothing to do with computers.
But to the extent that there are any rules for such things, "disk", in the context of computing, is spelled with a "k".
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.
GNU HURD is no longer 2-5 years away. Even the debian port has stopped being remotely useful.
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?
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1.1x10^22 atoms per gram of iron. I get 3,276,000,000 Terrabytes in a milligram of iron stored this way. (3.276 Zettabytes if I'm counting the number of zeros on my calculator correctly.)
Note - this might blow a hole in the idea of quantum limits on computing if we move from atoms to electrons.