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If that Blu-Ray looks too small….

Sunday, May 3rd, 2009 by Roberto Saracco

General Electric has announced a microholographic disc that can store 500 GB of data (a Blu Ray store “only” 50 GB). The one announced is just a lab prototype but they expect a product to hit the market in 2012 at a cost of less than 10c a GB. This can be the next generation of optical disc.

Blu ray, as DVD, stores bits in tiny holes on the surface of the disc, each one corresponding to a 0 or 1. On the contrary, with holographic technology the bits are stored as interference pattern and there can be many bits stored in the space that was before required to store just one.

Holographic storage is not new: InPhase Technologies has a product on the market but it is too expensive to hit the mass market. The GE technology promises to cut the cost dramatically thus making it affordable and viable to consumers.

We can expect to see a need for this kind of storage in our homes early in the next decade as many moments of our life will be captured in bits.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, May 3rd, 2009 at 1:55 am and is filed under Digital Images. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

One Response to “If that Blu-Ray looks too small….”

  1. Minseok Kim Says:
    May 3rd, 2009 at 4:18 pm

    I was looking for this ‘post-bluray’ disk also, but it seems like many Korean IT users are skeptical about this holographic storage can be as useful as current storage gadgets. They pointed out following reasons:

    /*
    - Even this holographic storage can read/write, I prefer to use my usb pen-drive, the main reason is, I don’t like the noisy sound of spinning the disk.

    - As bluray disk took a long time to get in mass market, I think this new-type storage will take much longer to be in a mass market. 500gb is huge data, I don’t think many general computer users would like to use this storage that much. Most of all, I don’t like spin-up delay. I think ODD will disappear like FDD was.

    - How many times have I read articles about a great new holographic storage breakthrough? 3 ~ 5 times? How many holographic products are on the market? 0. I’ll believe this when I see it. */

    However, there are also different kind of people who saying that we need that technology NOW(Not in 2012). So, in my opinion, the main problem of the holographic disk is the expense and stability, I personally hope that this 3D storage gets cheaper than Blu-ray disk, because it will save me a lot of money instead of buying several dvd disks for the backup. As GE said, compatibility that covers current dvd&Bluray disk could be another strong point.