GE Developing 1TB Hologram Disc Readable By a Modified Blu-ray Drive

Globally Mobile writes "The Register has this article concerning GE's announcement that it has been developing a 1 terabyte DVD-size disk that can be read by a modified Blu-ray player. Peter Lorraine, GE's lab manager, talking at an Emerging Tech conference last week, said that license announcements could be expected soon. He also mentioned the notion of disks having the capacity of 100 Blu-ray disks, implying a 2.5TB or even 5TB capacity, gained by increasing the number of layers used for recording. The discs will be used for high-end commercial niches initially and then migrate to consumer markets in 2012-2015. Also here is a video of the technology explained. Wish we could see this sooner! Reminds me of the technology that Bowie's character came up with in The Man Who Fell to Earth."

Comments

Well

[sopssa]

Great, I haven't still even got a normal bluray player. Nor did I get HD-DVD. Seems like I might just skip it and wait for the modified player that supports this.

Re:Well

[Dogtanian]

Blu-ray blanks are what, $25 a disk still?

Try around US $3 (ex. tax) upwards. Admittedly, that's for single-layer 25GB write-once BD-R, and the very cheapest, generic original obscure brand ones at that. Nowhere near as cheap per GB as DVD-R, but still nowhere near $25.

Re:Well

[oldspewey]

I remember when my life included time for things like multiple movies per week, regular weekend getaways, evening drinking excursions downtown, and reading entire books in less than a week.

Those days are long gone. I have movies bought months ago that I still haven't watched. Our satellite TV company recently phoned and tried to talk me into a $10/mo movie channel package. I asked them what's the point? We'll be lucky if that works out to $5 per movie.

Re:Well

[glittalogik]

Jan and Marcia Brady are the same generation, just siblings.

The Man Who Fell to Earth

[Geoffrey.landis]

Reminds me of the technology that Bowie's character came up with in "The Man Who Fell to Earth."

A quick reminder that the movie actually came from a novel, The Man Who Fell To Earth, by Walter Tevis.

(Movie was a moderately faithful adaptation, as such things go-- unlike some SF movies, where little is taken from the book other than the name, and--in the case of Bladerunner--not even that.)

Re:Remix

[thisnamestoolong]

If it is being used for audio/video applications, scratches would be no more damaging on this super HD disc (10,080p!) than a regular Blu Ray or DVD. If you are using it for data storage... I have bad news for you...

to be correct here

[poetmatt]

This is actually Bluray 1.0. There were experiments being done involving multi layer discs way before bluray. Sony is the one who dictated the 50GB size for the discs for consumers (25GB for data). Bluray discs themselves can hit considerably higher.

Meanwhile, who knows what kind of DRM will be put on this crap as it's supported by all your favorite media dinosaurs.

Can someone find the old slashdot article about petabyte holographic storage? I don't remember how far back it was, but talking about hundreds + layer holographic storage basically.

Re:to be correct here

[Anonymous Coward]

The average hard drive needs to be able to be backed up on a single disc or you've already failed.

When was this ever the case?

Floppies, CD's and DVD's have always been smaller than my HD at the time.

Re:Remix

[Chyeld]

So do what most people do and dedicate a portion of the disk(s) to some form of error correction data.

Re:Industry

[PRMan]

Chinese street vendors could use them to create 1 disk sets. All Disney Films on one disk, for example.

FTFY