G.E. puts 500GB on a disc - Blu-ray killer

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General Electric says its researchers have achieved a breakthrough in digital storage technology that will allow standard-size discs to hold the equivalent of 100 DVDs.




It’s merely a lab success at this stage, but the new technology is intended to work in products that can be mass-produced at affordable prices, the company says.

The New York Times reports:

But optical storage experts and industry analysts who were told of the development said it held the promise of being a big step forward in digital storage with a wide range of potential uses in commercial, scientific and consumer markets.

“This could be the next generation of low-cost storage,” said Richard Doherty, an analyst at Envisioneering, a technology research firm.

Can it really?

First, the facts: the G.E. researchers’ work is in the field of holographic storage, an optical process that stores 3D images and digital data together, encoding it all and placing it on light-sensitive material such as a DVD. The theory is that holographic storage has the potential to pack data far more densely than conventional optical technology, such as what is used in conventional DVD and Blu-ray.

Holographic discs could hold 500 gigabytes of data. (In comparison, Blu-ray comes in 25-gigabyte and 50-gigabyte discs, and a standard DVD holds 5 up to about 8 gigabytes.)

source: blogs.zdnet.com

 

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500GB 'DVD' unveiled
According to the BBC, General Electric has developed a DVD-sized optical storage disc that holds 500GB of data. Using 3D optics, instead of the "2D" pit method of writing/reading data, the discs, which hold more than ten times the data of the current highest-capacity Blu-ray discs are first being targeted at the "archive" market, but the fact the company is running with a storage medium that is the same size as traditional DVDs and CDs lets us know that they are eventually aiming at consumer markets.


In fact, the 500GB capacity of these disks places them at more than one hundred times the size of the writeable DVDs most of us use for backups. Technology editor Darren Waters says, "A single GE disc could be used to package up a library of high definition movies but is there pent-up consumer demand for such an offering?" But the question is a no-brainer for most of us. A quick and easy way to back up an entire hard drive, using one or a small number of these disks, will be good news for consumers with lots of photos and other media they have digitized.

These are micro-holographic discs, meaning that information is stored in three dimensions. As Brian Lawrence, head of GE's Holographic Storage, says, "Very recently, the team at GE has made dramatic improvements in the materials enabling significant increases in the amount of light that can be reflected by the holograms."

The fact that GE will be using the same basic size for these new optical media means a big benefit for consumers in terms of backwards compatibility: "The hardware and formats are so similar to current optical storage technology that the micro-holographic players will enable consumers to play back their CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs [on the same machine]." GE is cautious, however, given the relatively poor take-up of Bluray, but they are thinking about the future.

Lawrence concludes, "The hardware and formats are so similar to current optical storage technology that the micro-holographic players will enable consumers to play back their CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs [as well as the new media]." The big challenges for GE now are to get the hardware manufactures on board and to convince consumers of the benefits of such high-storage capacity. The road ahead is long, but, if we think back to the shift from CD to DVD as a means of optical storage, there is a precedent, and the consumer desire for larger and larger amounts of data storage seems to be insatiable.

Source: bbc.com