GE's Holographic Storage to Yield 500 GB Discs

[JMcEntegart]

General Electronics this week announced a breakthrough in holographic storage technology which could allow us to store up to 500 GB of data on one disc. In other words, ten Blu-ray Discs in one.

GE's Holographic Storage to Yield 500 GB Discs : Read more

 

[the_one111]

Interesting to say the least.

However, I still do not see how something like this won't be pricey.

....Maybe the extra 90 cents will be found in the readers for these?

 

[pug_s]

Hard drive platters now store 500gb each.

 

[A Stoner]

Put the meat on the table. We hear all about all these great next generation storage solutions and they end up being pretty small potatoes and no where near enough meat to satisfy the consumer.

Blu-Ray blows, no one is buying the over priced players, and the over priced media. At first it could have been due to the fact that they had compitition and everyone knew someone had to lose, so why buy into a possibly dead format. Now there is no excuse other than the fact that Blu Ray does not deliver what the consumer wants.

This could be great, or it could be HD-DVD. In the end what consumers of this type of media want is the ability to back up their information securely and at a low cost. That means speed, that means the disc has to survive for a long time before degrading to unusable, and that means low cost hardware to use it in. No chance in hell of movie studios using this large of a format, it is already apparent that they refuse to use even Blu Ray, because the cost for converting to a high defintion is too much for them to spend, unless it is a new release of course. They are afraid that high quality media releases will be pirated, thus a movie that has 500GB of data scares them to death. They will also fight tooth and nail til the death to prevent the release of this media, because then pirating by way of disc will become a bigger problem again, where they are trying to kill ISP bandwidth to prevent pirating as well as ligitimate transfers of information, they will not allow a new format that can hold 20 of their precious movies in pure form, or 50 to 100 in a compressed form.

Hope I am wrong, but as I said at the beginning, put the meat on the table and let us taste it, until then, it is nothing.

 

[daft]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc

just a little something i found over a year ago

 

[scryer_360]

Hmmm, if this works it could keep physical storage media in the market for some time. Yes HDD's just hit 500 gigs a platter, but you can't hot swap hdds like you can discs into a player. All the better then if GE can get this working in existing Blu-Ray players.

Could the same technology be applied to a hdd platter in some way? Because if discs just went (well, will go) from 25 gigs a layer (BD single layer) to 500 gigs, that is a 20 fold increase. Anyone else thinking 50 terabyte platters in a HDD?

 

[chise1]

I hope that they come up with a good solution to excessive burn times... Imagine how long it'd take to put 500 gb onto one disk!

 

[hellwig]

If it can hit a resonable price, it could be worth it. However, a 16-layer Bluray disk can store 400GB (and apparently they're working on a 1TB Bluray disk). No you can't buy them in a store, but you can't buy a Holographic disk or read/writer either. Couple in the fact that they are aiming Holographic Disks at the storage market, and not the consumer market, and this technology probably won't make it very far. It will sit on the shelf with all those multi-thousand dollar tape drives and hundred dollar tape cassettes already being used for storage.

 

[antilycus]

at 10 cents per GB, thats still 50, bucks a disc....

I would see the future in Memory Card or Bar Codes... the 2D Barcode on teh back of your license holds, 80 GB... Yes I am serious and yes I am right.

 

[aalkema]

[citation][nom]Antilycus[/nom]at 10 cents per GB, thats still 50, bucks a disc....I would see the future in Memory Card or Bar Codes... the 2D Barcode on teh back of your license holds, 80 GB... Yes I am serious and yes I am right.[/citation]

80gb? I'm pretty sure barcodes hold on the order of bytes, not gigabytes. Where did you hear that from?

 

[vgdarkstar]

[citation][nom]Antilycus[/nom]at 10 cents per GB, thats still 50, bucks a disc....I would see the future in Memory Card or Bar Codes... the 2D Barcode on teh back of your license holds, 80 GB... Yes I am serious and yes I am right.[/citation]

Um, no... just no

http://www.turbulence.org/Works/swipe/barcode_faq.html

 

[Guest]

Hey guys... it's just new technology... When (and mostly important IF) it become a product, it will somewhere in it's life cycle reach mainstream prices, and if we can have disc-based optical storage up to 1TB, it's really worth it.

The big question is if that new disc-based storage technology will get mature and affordable in enought time before online-based storage services combined with faster broadband access simply overkill local storage in a cost/benefit aspect for common user applications.

 

[jecht]

I can't see much of an application for this, other than maybe for back-ups. Unless they start making ultra-HD resolution movies/TVs that display ten times the resolution or something. But by then, would you even notice the difference? It's hard to even tell the difference between 720p and 1080p...

 

[trucmuche4]

I don't if we're talking about the same GE but the one I know is General Electric, not Electronics.

 

[jeraldjunkmail]

It is always the next generation of technology that drives the price of current or last gen tech down in price. So if they release this, BD will plummet in price. Technical advancement is good for us all...

 

[Guest]

Duh - YES its needed for back ups!! That is the MAIN need. Right now its back up one hard drive with another which is a big hassle - there hasnt been another cost effective storage medium out there since CDs first came out (they were sizey enough at the time to backup the size of the HDs back then.) Takes 100+ DVDs to back up todays HDs - ridiculous!! But they announce this vapor hard ware all the time. So I am not excited - Show me the money!

 

[hannibal]

Well those "ultra-HD resolution movies/TVs" are coming eventually, but how usefull they will be reamains to be seen...
But even todays HD gueality movies/tvs would benefit from larger space. Whole Battle Star galactica season in one disk would be nice. But as has been said the hardest part is the market penetration. This may end like those PPU cards. The idea remains, without real products. But eventually those blue ray disks will prove to be too small, the media always do that, so sooner or later we sill see some media that is much larger than we have today... what format it will be, reamains to be seing.

 

[ksenter]

[citation][nom]Antilycus[/nom]at 10 cents per GB, thats still 50, bucks a disc....I would see the future in Memory Card or Bar Codes... the 2D Barcode on teh back of your license holds, 80 GB... Yes I am serious and yes I am right.[/citation]

I hope you're joking. A barcode doesn't not hold GB of data, that's probably the stupidest think I've heard in a long long time... The barcode on the back of your license (depending on your state) holds around 280 bytes of information, which is a lot for a barcode. Here's an example: http://schram.net/articles/barcode.html

 

[crom]

I think the physical medium itself is starting to go out of style in favor of cloud computing, particularly when you're talking about entertainment. Things like iTunes, Netflix online, etc. As a data backup feature, I would think durability and speed of the writing will be what makes this take off or kills it out of the box.

 

[Guest]

This technology has existed for a couple of years now with HVD and HVC. It's really too bad it never took off because I really liked the idea of using a card instead of a disc. Maybe GE can give it the push it needs to reach the mainstream.

btw, it's General Electric. General Electronics is a Chinese battery supplier

 

[gorehound]

as far as blue ray goes i am not buying into it currently.i did a serious test here on my system which is a really good one as i also do video and audio work so i have power conditioners rack mounted and lots of cool gear.anyways i hooked up a PS3 and took a DVD and a blue ray of 10,000 BC playing the blue ray in the PS3 and the DVD in my upsampled Oppo.I saw a difference but it was not what you would of thought you would see in other words the Oppo looked great and the PS3 had a little more detail.
Well sorry blue ray but you are not worth twice the price for a movie nor are you worth even more for a decent player.

this holographic storage could be a decnt thing.

 

[Guest]

I can't speak for everyone, but I still find DVDs to be a bit crap when you actually try to burn data to them, do Bluray burners actually work well for the early adopters out there? I could see this being a tad unreliable, due to the density they are trying to acheive.

 

[Studly007]

I think Blu-ray is doing ok. I'm more of a visual (videophile) kind of guy. I know storage capacity is going to increase with time - and that doesn't really excite me as a consumer.

What excites me is Home Theater HDTV technology progression. I wish all the big companies (Sony, Samsung, Toshiba, Mitsubishi, Pioneer, and Panasonic) would just pull out all the stops and start pushing for 144oP RESOLUTION !!! This will TRULY open up the door for Hollywood cameras (like the IMAX camera used in Dark Knight) to pass on the pixels to the audience that it was designed to capture.

Without that - Blu-ray, Holographic, HD-DVD - it really doesn't matter because it is all limited by the CMOS censor used by the camera that filmed the footage, or limited by the bandwidth of your cable provider, or limited by the bandwidth of the cabling you use with your Home Theater setup, or limited by the codec hardware quality of your Home Theater - a $6000 HDTV don't mean squat if you buy a $299 Blu-ray player. That's why I'm all about the Denon DVD-3800BDCI (I own one). AMAZING.

1440P !!! EVERYONE !!!
SED TV TECHNOLOGY !!!
Laservue !!!
Bring back the KURO ELITE !!!!

 

[jacobdrj]

Optical. Media. Sucks.

Let it die.

The standard is the wrong physical size. It is terribly unstable for long term storage. It is practically write-only. It is so so so slow.

Kudos for innovation, but my god, Flash is so much better.

 

[darkguset]

Has anyone thought about this? Normal optical discs store data on bottom side only. That side is also protected by a protection layer and provides "some" protection from scratches etc. Still lots of media go to digital heaven with a deep scratch at the bottom and sometimes with cheaper media with a scratch at the top as well! And that happens with the data on one side, one dimension only. What will happen if the holographic media gets scratched anywhere or even slightly bent? Since it holds data everywhere, that would mean a huge loss of data and 500GB is a lot to lose on one scratch!