Thursday, July 21, 2011

500 GB on one Blu-Ray disk - coming soon

Holo disk technology from GE
You can never have too much data storage. In the old days (say five years ago) it was great that I could back up all my photo shoots for a week on one DVD disc (4.7GB.)  Now, with hi-res cameras, I can easily shoot 16 to 40 GB of photos in one day, which equates to 4 to 10 DVD's worth of data.

Well, for the folks at GE, that wasn't good enough, so they have now figured out a way to cram 500GB of data onto one standard size DVD disk.

From their press release: "Traditionally, DVDs stored data on a thin metal layer applied to the disc’s plastic hull. Recent advances upped storage capacity by adding up to four metallic layers, each densely packed with data in a way only a blue-laser optical reader could un-compress fast enough. GE’s micro-holographic disc will differ from forerunners in that it will embed data directly onto virtual layers within plastic, stacking 20 blue-laser readable layers one atop the other to realize 500GB capacity. Ultimately, a cross-functional team comprised of researchers from the GRC’s Applied Optics and Functional Materials labs is working toward micro-holographic discs that can store 1,000 GB, or 1 terabyte, of data. That’s enough capacity to store all the X-ray films of a large hospital on a single disc."

I'm putting my order in for a couple right now.

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