GE's breakthrough can put 100 DVDs on a disc

Experts say the breakthrough holds the promise of being a big step forward in digital storage with a wide range of potential uses.
(From The New York Times)

The story "GE's breakthrough can put 100 DVDs on a disc" published April 27, 2009 at 10:30 AM is no longer available on CNET News.

Content from The New York Times expires after 7 days.

[iamwho]

I'd be interested to know the lifespan of such holographic media, especially for backup/archival purposes. And would such a disc be only a read-once design?

[Rolker]

The question is how fast the the data can be read from these discs. The same goes to writing onto them. One of the problems with today's optical discs is that they are much slower compared to HDD, and it takes a long time to burn large files.

[rapier1]

True, but it depends on the required bit rate of the data found on the media. If the data access doesn't require the speed of HDD or SDD, like say its for a movie, then you can get by with a relatively low throughput. Additionally, you need to keep in mind the frequency with which it will be accessed. If you can move infrequently accessed data from (comparatively) expensive rotating media to optical media then it makes perfect sense.

[zeroplane]

Technically interesting, but the media companies wouldn't love this type of technology at all. You will bet a Music company will sell a disc that can hold 500 gigs but only put 100 megs worth of content (say the entire Beatles library, including live performances) and sell it for $800.00.

Then of course you could buy the equivalent as a DVD-Video with 5 live video performances and many videos that were say 200 gigs on a 500 gig disc for $120.00.

I guess it wouldn't make much sense to judge the price of content based on the file size or disc used would it? From my observations of the market today I can buy a Blu-ray copy of a new album in 5 channel audio (that happens to have video) for less then just buying the music.. case and point.

CD of the same content $22.55
http://www.amazon.com/Song-Remains-Same-Remastered-Expanded/dp/B000VWYNNW/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1240862580&sr=1-3

DVD of the same content in 5 channel audio: $12.55
http://www.amazon.com/Led-Zeppelin-Song-Remains-Blu-ray/dp/B0012YYZYK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1240862524&sr=1-1

huh what type of economics is this?

[clamenza]

case in point, not case and point.

[Bitwise]

As Aurther C. Clarke fortold: "The 9000 series uses holographic storage..." Considering the form factor of the holographic storage devices portrayed in 2001: ASO, HAL was stacked!

[Randys2cents]

I would be interested in seeing the physical size of the discs come down
to "one inch", so that these discs could fit into small consumer products.

[hawkeyeaz1]

Oops, my teething infant just bit out 4GB of info...

[SactoGuy018]

Actually, there is a use of such a high-density disc: move theater digital projection systems.

That way, instead of each theatrical digital projector having a bank of hard drives per movie, the entire movie in a theatrical digital format will only need ONE disc, including multilingual audio channels and multilingual subtitling. This could rapidly spread the use of theatrical digital projection, especially it will be incredibly cheap to send a single holographic storage disc from the movie distributor to the theater versus sending around four hard drives per two hour movie and definitely cheaper than sending six 35-pound 20-minute reels of 35 mm film for that same two hour movie!

[rapier1]

Actually, its looks like cinegrid is the way of the future. No physical media to track at all. You can also use advanced cyrptographics techniques to bind the movie to a specific theater etc etc etc.

[CITechnologies]

I find the title misleading. Their breakthrough didn't allow the 100 DVD's to fit on the disk. Their breakthrough made it more cost effective. I remember reading articles about holographic disks back when HD-DVD and BlueRay first were being talked about as a future release. I even remember reading about one or two Cable companies using it for their storage needs. (Don't quote me but I think it was Ted Turner who was using it in one of his ventures.) The article should be GE finds cheaper more economical way to replace BlueRay in the future using Holographic Medium.

To those thinking it is not practicle... I say, look at BlueRay now. Video games still don't use the full disk nor do the movies, but the extra storage allows them to record their content multiple times on the same disk making the disk more resiliant to scratch issues and bad sectors. The space isn't always wasted. The movie industry loves more space to advertise crap interviews of directors nobody wants to watch or only watch once. The good media companies add other features and have been capable for years, but those features just haven't caught on yet. For data storage, it is meant for archiving not regular searching for that one file. I think I could wait a minute for the drive to find that one pic I took 10 years ago rather then sorting through a couple hundred cd's.

[clamenza]

practical, not practicle.

[megustansalchichas]

disc technology? isn't that going the way of the dodo? how much will 500 gigs cost at 10 cents a gigabyte -ummm $50? by 2012 ain't I going to be able to get a 500 gig hard drive for 40 bucks? but the hard drive is rewriteable, but i'm going to need more space by 2020 -so shouldn't the real goal be coming up with a technology that's expandable instead of fixed capacity, like the world wide SAN?

[CITechnologies]

Absolutely off base actually. They aren't developing this as a replacement to hard drives. It is designed for back-ups which hard drives by a long shot may be cheaper but also by a long shot not as reliable for crucial data. Optical disks unless handled frequently and irresponsibly don't suffer near as many potential failures and loss. You mention by 2012? CD's were the sufficient choice for the majority of backups until hard drives were 40GB. Then DVD's finally after several years in the market finally became cheap enough to replace them. Right now your Optical back up equivelant choice is Blue-Ray which costs approximate $4 per disk when bought in spindles of 25 (and those are only 25GB disks). For those who think only good deals are the lowest GB/$ ratio...you are looking at about $.16/GB for Blue-Ray. This is after a few years in the market. GE estimates $.10/GB and then lower after it has been out. Seems like for Optical, it is still ahead of the game. As far as SAN, in a perfect world where we don't have power surges that fry your hard drives and flash based drives or even just hardware malfunctioning, then maybe you would be right. They are not a good alternative to optical backups. Even tape backups are more stable.

[Tod Smith]

I think this could work with the XBOX console. That's MS could use a 100 GB Disc.

They already fully sublicenced the HD-DVD tech and they own the MS WMV tech.

[ag2311]

this is good news for companies like microsoft who no longer have to depend on blueray for the future of their gaming consoles. With a 500gb disk games could be meade that no one has seen before.

[guest86]

OH MY GOD! I need put all of old games, movies, programs on it for Windows XP! Why? To bring all old memories back! Let get on it! Cheers!

Please support this for Windows XP!