General Electric can produce 500GB DVDs and it is not the limit!
Elena Vnorovscaia / Chişinău / Moldova.ORG / -- GE Global Research today announced another major breakthrough in the development of next generation optical storage technology. The announced innovation is micro-holographic material which is 100x more sensitive than its predecessor and ups recording speed to that of Blu-ray discs.
There was a time when users thought that the 50GB storage they got from dual layer Blu-ray discs were over killing. But 2 years ago, GE announced that it was developing a prototype form of storage that could store up to 500GB of data. And it looks like the company has managed to accomplish what it started.
How the disc works:
The disc is a polycarbonate material with millions of the micro-holograms stamped onto the disc. When the light source—whose beam is the same wavelength as that of a Blu-ray drive— hits the disc, it erases the necessary amount of holograms to represent the data its recording. Theoretically, consumer drives in the future could be backwards compatible with the Blu-ray format.
The General Electric’s press release says: “Holographic storage is different from today's optical storage formats like DVDs and Blu-ray discs. DVDs and Blu-ray discs store information only on up to four layers at the surface of the disc; holographic storage technology uses the entire volume of the disc material.
Holograms, or three-dimensional patterns that represent bits of information, are written into the disc at controlled depths, and can then be read out. Because micro-holographic discs can use the entire volume of the material, their storage capacity is much greater than existing storage technologies today.
GE's breakthrough material, when used in a disc, will match the capacity of 20 single-layer Blu-ray discs, 100 DVDs or the hard drive of most laptop computers.
Ultimately, the team is working toward micro-holographic discs that can store more than one terabyte or 1,000 gigabytes of data”.
Someone can say that the cloud-based future gives no chance for this GE’s new technology. But the thing such person should take into consideration is that these new discs are designed for long term archival purposes. The disc is said to be able to keep data intact for a hundred years – which is a pretty long time to keep something.
There is no information about the time when these discs will become available to regular consumers.
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