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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."
How many MB will be wiped out by a pathetically small scratch on the disk? Remember the promises made of audio CD's?
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Parents cut off your allowance again?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
"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."
Every year there's another "hundreds of layers of storage" article, and we're still sitting here with dual layer DVDs. By the time we see terabyte discs we'll probably all have petabyte hard drives. I remember them talking about blu ray in the 90s, with the prototype arriving in 2000. Back when we had 6gb drives the idea of 50gb discs was amazing, but they dragged their feet so bad creating a standard that by the time it reached market we all moved on to terabyte hard drives. Blu ray burners are still too damn expensive, costing five times ($160 vs $30) more than a DVD burner costs. And once you have one then what? Pay $3 to $7 for each BD-R disc? No thanks, even at $3 for 25gb that's $120 per terabyte, 50% more than a 1 terabyte hard drive.
So forgive me if I don't get all excited every time they announce a new high capacity disc format because they haven't fixed the one they have out now.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
I posted a similar comment about a year ago. Optical media should be a great backup medium, but because they take so long to ramp up production and push the cost of the media down, it is useless before anyone can afford it. Blu-ray media at 50 GB per disc is already useless and it still isn't even close to price parity with hard drives. To fully back up a 500 GB hard drive (the industry average size now) takes 10 discs to back up once. At 30 minutes per disc, this is five hours of continuous burning, during which time you have to have someone swapping out discs every half hour. For a terabyte HD, you're more than an entire work day. You should be doing a full backup at least every month and incremental backups weekly. Do the math, and you're spending the better part of a week every month just doing backups. The average hard drive needs to be able to be backed up on a single disc or you've already failed. Blu-ray has already failed.
As a result, recordable optical media is basically worthless except for people burning content to give to other people, which is a tiny fraction of its potential user base. If they would ramp production way up and flood the market with cheap media immediately even before the recorders are available in quantities, people would flock to them in droves. It's counterintuitive, but the only way any optical format will ever be particularly useful to the general consumer is if the industry decides to make it a loss leader for about a year. By the end of that year, you'll have so much adoption that it won't be losing money anymore, and it will be in the hands of consumers early enough to be broadly useful.
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