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GE claims holographic data breakthrough
Author: Gareth HalfacreePublished: 28th April 2009
The new holographic storage medium from GE can hold 500GB in a DVD-size disc - with the promise of up to 1TB in the future.
According to MaximumPC, General Electric has announced a microholographic storage material capable of squeezing 500GB of data into the same form factor as a 25GB Bluray disc.
While holographic storage is, by its very nature, vastly different to traditional optical media – rather than a two dimensional layout, holographic storage uses the entire volume of the disc – GE believes that its six-year research project has yielded an implementation which isn't vastly different to current optical storage devices. Indeed, the company believes that its microholographic players would be backwards compatible with CDs, DVDs, and Bluray discs.
The head of the company's holographic storage division, Brian Lawrence, described the breakthrough as “a huge step toward bringing our next generation holographic storage technology to the everyday consumer.” Lawrence stated that the technology holds the promise for “cost-effective, robust and reliable holographic drives that could be in every one.”
The company's work isn't over, of course: as well as attempts to push the storage available in a standard disc size to 1TB, the company is still concentrating on ensuring the any implementations of the technology will provide backwards compatibility both at the consumer and manufacturing levels.
Despite this, the head of the technology venture team Bill Kernick is confident that GE can “now intensify our efforts in commercialisation opportunities.” The company states that it will be concentrating on the data archival industry at first, before rolling out the technology to the consumer level – although it wasn't forthcoming with a date.
Looking forward to the day you can back up your entire hard drive onto a single optical disc, or is Bluray more than enough for the foreseeable future? Will you believe GE's breakthrough when you see it? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
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Life imitating art again?
Sort of a holographic SSD? :D
Yeah, the capacity of holographic discs, with the resilience of solid state media.
Do want. :D
More storage is always a good thing... but 500GB... if the data read/write rates haven't improved a lot, writing 500GB will take forever. Two things stop me from using Blu-ray as a secondary backup medium - the cost of the discs (the writer drives themselves aren't too bad - about half the price of my first CD writer) and the fact that they write so slowly. :(
But backwards compatible? this seems folklore to me...
I could backup my HDD's and archive them each month or every two months. Ghosting the whole drive.
When you backup all your DVD's on HDD, plus hunderds of CD's and then loose it all, there is nothing worse than doing it all again!
Something to which i might be faced to have to do! :(
Also now HD-DVD and blue offer, loseless audio, maybe the video wont be compressed down to 1080p, allowing a much closer res to that of 35mm film which the films are shot on. This would then lead to what i would call true HD, 1080p is still too small! Newer flat panels, or projectors. Cinema quality, but digital! yay!
I shudder to think how much the film industry will want to charge for totally uncompressed audio and video on discs for films. The price premium on Blu-ray is already significant, and HD-DVD wasn't exactly cheap. My local Comet is still trying to sell off the HD-DVD drives for the XBox 360 and HD-DVD films... they want £150 for the drive and £35 a film! At least, they did just before Easter. They might have pulled them now.
Yeah, and we all know how well that turned out
DESTROY IT BEFORE IT DESTROYS US!
'The world will only need 5 computers' 'Nobody will ever need more than 128k of memory' ' Etc etc.
Perhaps we don't need this much space on a disc at this point in time but that's really not the point.
Optical media are indeed subject to wear and tear and mistreatment but so are all other physical forms of storage. Perhaps the optical discs can be made less prone to scratching,etc. Either way, you just make sure to back them up every few years. Or, more likely, you back up for 8 year old 1TB holodiscs onto newer 200TB cubes or 500TB wafers or whatever.
I totally agree with StephenK: We might not need it today, but what about in 10 years? 20? 50? 100? Seeing how fast HDDs grew in size within the last 5 years I wouldn't say 500GB is OTT.
Also, about the uncompressed movie thing: What about some Super Hi-Vision/Ultra-HD @ 7680 × 4320 pixel?
Size comparison:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/28k_RED_CAMERA.png
FullHD is the little turquoise thing in the top left while UHD is "big blue".
the 1tb harddrive for weekly and these disks for permanent storage would be a very nice setup to have.. only downside is like was mentioned.. what if you scratched one of these discs and it held important data on it- roid rages
If, on the other hand, they made these holographic discs... I dunno, square, or mini-CD sized... or changed the size of the spindle hole, or tripled the thickness of the discs... backwards compatibility would go right out the window. ;)
See that's where the exciting potential lies, if we don't need 500GB, you could fit a Blu-Ray disk level of capacity on a tiny format. Which would be amazing for netbooks etc.