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GE To Sample 500GB DVD-Size Discs Soon
siliconbits writes "GE Global Research announced earlier today that it has managed to cram up to 500GB worth of data on a standard DVD-size disc, an increase in storage density of roughly 100x. What's more, the tech arm of conglomerate General Electric Company says that the storage solution will record data at the same speed as Blu-ray discs while increasing storage capacity by 25 times. The Blu-ray Disk Association says that the commonly available 12x speed Blu-ray writers have a maximum writing speed of up to 400Mbps (or 50MBps) which means that in theory, it would take just over three hours to fill that new holographic hard disk. GE has confirmed that its R&D and licensing team will be sampling the media to qualified partners that may be interested in licensing the technology."
...that optical media was dead.
If it costs more per gigabyte than pocket sized hard drives, it's dead to me.
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it does.
Standard blu-ray discs, which are the same size already store 50GB and there are already blu-ray solutions that are supposed to store multiple times that. So, at most 10x, certainly nowhere near 100x!
When 1person suffers from a delusion,it is called insanity.When many people suffer from a delusion,it is called religion
The government bailed out General Motors, not General Electric.
Since the reference is to standard DVD-sized discs, it's reasonable that the 100x is to standard DVD capacity, which is right around 5GB.
It's also insanely expensive. I can pick up a BluRay writer for about a hundred quid, and blank disks are about £1-2 for WORM disks and £3-5 for rewriteable ones. I couldn't find any LTO-5 drives, but I found an LTO-4 one... for over £2000. I did find LTO-5 tapes, but they cost about £85 each. So, LTO-5 works out about half the cost of BD-RE if you just factor in the cost of the media, but you need to back up a lot before it becomes cheaper overall. Cost of backing up 20TB with BD-RE is about £900. Cost for LTO: about £2500.
Sure, if you're backing up a few TB every day, LTO is good value, but for home users it definitely isn't. BD-RE is big enough for incremental backups, and a lot cheaper - not to mention the fact that BD-RE disks have been dropping in price for a long time. You need to back up about 50TB before LTO's cost per GB is similar to BD-RE, and that's a lot more than a lot of small businesses produce.
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I would like to see how much they could cram into a disc with a 1" radius. The way I see it, the only way this technology will really take off is if they make it cheap and convenient. There is little need for 500GB of portable general purpose optical storage - portable HDs work fine. But I could see a use for ~20GB of cheap, portable, and disposable storage; the sort of thing you hand off to someone knowing full well you will never get it back. Around 20GB would be enough for HD video content, anything more would be wasted - better to reduce the physical size.
One thing I like about Amanda is that if you just dump part of the first file on the tape onto something with "dd" or similar it has INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO USE IT IN THE HEADER. How is that for future proofing? I've recovered files from an Amanda tape without using Amanda, just "dd", "tar" and a text viewer to read those instructions.