Who needs Blu-ray? – GE working on 500GB micro-holographic media
By Dave Parrack
Blu-ray may now just be starting to make inroads into the market share DVD holds, but it could be that its days are already numbered. General Electric is working on developing a micro-holographic storage solution which would see 500GB of data stored on a single DVD-sized disc. Now that’s impressive.
DVD was a huge step up from the storage solutions of old. Video tapes and cassette tapes now feel so clunky and user-unfriendly as to be laughable. Then along came Blu-ray, which is now managing to grab a decent share of the market alongside DVD. But the future could be a whole different ball game.
Not only do DVD and Blu-ray face a growing threat from digital media and cloud computing, GE thinks the future is shiny and reflective. According to PC World, the company has been working on micro-holographic disc technology which would see data being stored not only on the surface of discs but in the layer underneath as well.
DVDs can hold around 9GB of data, while a Blu-ray disc manages around 50GB. GE claims its new holographic discs can hold 500GB and in the future could hold as much as 1TB of data. Not that this is going to happen anytime soon – the technology is still lab-based, even though GE has been working on it for six years. The company is planning to make it commercially available in 2012.
The technology works by creating images of the data being stored in 3D rather than the current 2D. This makes the amount of storage much larger than is possible on a conventional disc. The good news for all of us is the claim that the technology is fully backwards-compatible, meaning we can hold on to our DVDs and Blu-rays for the foreseeable future. This is because despite being revolutionary, the system is still laser-based.
Some have been predicting that this technology will first be implemented in the next generation of games consoles but I can’t see it. Certainly the amount of storage would come in handy for the increasingly large amounts of data being used in video games but seeing as very few even fill a Blu-ray at the moment, the need for 500GB would seem a moot point.
GE isn’t the first or only company to dabble in this area, with both InPhase Technologies and Maxell promising similar storage solutions in previous years. None have yet made it to market. At this time, the cost of the drives ($20,000) and the discs ($50 – $150) would seem to be insanely prohibitive.
While promising, this isn’t a reason to stop buying into the Blu-ray ideal quite yet. But give it a few years and you never know.
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April 29th, 2009
Pioneer has claimed that using multiple layers (up to 20, theoretically) they can achieve the same 500gb per disc with blu-ray.
Is a new 500gb disc medium needed?
April 30th, 2009
Heard it all before, the author is right to be cautious, as anyone who remembers the “1TB HVD disks, released this year” announcements back in 2003 or so will be.
And even if we assume there really is a wolf this time, if Blu Ray still hasn’t replaced DVD in the consumer’s hearts and minds, what kind of sell-job are they going to have to do on a 500GB disk that will convince the public to make yet another change?
April 30th, 2009
Blu-ray can’t even guarantee a 2 layer movie disk will work with every player out there.
God help us if they ever did try to get that 20 layer pipe-dream out of the lab.