Pioneer is to demo a 400GB disk which it claims could be compatible with existing Blu-ray drives.

Like with existing Blu-ray discs, Pioneer’s offering would have 25GB per layer. However, while current Blu-ray has just two layers, the firm says it’s managed to get 16 layers on a single disc.

Up till now, it’s been difficult to use multiple layers because the signal gets weaker across each layer. Even the most ambitious predictions to date have been for eight to ten layers. And the biggest that’s actually been produced in a format compatible with existing drives (after applying a firmware upgrade) is a 100GB model shown off by Hitachi last year.

According to Pioneer, its solution is a “wide-range spherical aberration compensator”, which appears to be a modified surface that makes it easier for the drive to distinguish between the layer it is trying to read and other information. The new discs are also physically arranged in a different way to reduce interference between adjacent layers.

The discs get their public unveiling on Sunday at an optical media conference in Hawaii. At the moment, the discs are solely in read-only format, but Pioneer staff are working on a recordable version.

As is becoming common, the firm is billing the technology as environmentally friendly: they use the logic that the higher capacity will mean fewer discs need to be used in the world.

That makes sense in theory, though the chances people will soon find a way to jack up the bitrates of audio-visual content rather than store more material. Just because it’s possible for a single disc to store 25 movies, stores aren’t necessarily going to want to sell content that way.

And when it comes to data storage, woe betides the sticky-fingered child or long-clawed cat that manages to write off 400GB in one go.

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Entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 8:28 pm under Uncategorized.

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