GE Developing 1TB Hologram Disc Readable By a Modified Blu-ray Drive 238
Globally Mobile writes "The Register has this article concerning GE's announcement that it has been developing a 1 terabyte DVD-size disk that can be read by a modified Blu-ray player. Peter Lorraine, GE's lab manager, talking at an Emerging Tech conference last week, said that license announcements could be expected soon. He also mentioned the notion of disks having the capacity of 100 Blu-ray disks, implying a 2.5TB or even 5TB capacity, gained by increasing the number of layers used for recording. The discs will be used for high-end commercial niches initially and then migrate to consumer markets in 2012-2015. Also here is a video of the technology explained. Wish we could see this sooner! Reminds me of the technology that Bowie's character came up with in The Man Who Fell to Earth."
Well (Score:3, Informative)
Great, I haven't still even got a normal bluray player. Nor did I get HD-DVD. Seems like I might just skip it and wait for the modified player that supports this.
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Great, I haven't still even got a normal bluray player. Nor did I get HD-DVD. Seems like I might just skip it and wait for the modified player that supports this.
Yeah, I got a PS3, too. Who wants a "normal" Blu-ray player?
"Informative".... Nice.
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Re:Well (Score:5, Funny)
Parents cut off your allowance again?
Re:Well (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Well (Score:4, Insightful)
Upgrading to the Bluray version of Star Trek eliminated the annoying artifacts present on the DVD version. That's an improvement that's visible even on a standard definition set.
Also there's nothing to skip in the case of Bluray. 1920x1080 progressive is the highest standard available, and will be for several decades (NTSC lasted almost 70 years and ATSC will probably last several decades too).
I agree about the gaming consoles. I'm still having fun with my PS1/PS2 and N64/Gamecube library. Why upgrade?
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Netflix membership + blueray: $6.00/mo for one disc out at a time. Average turnaround time: 3 days. That works out to .60 cents per night per blueray rental.
Little bit cheaper than $1 a night dvds ;)
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Much of the tech I actually care about has reached the "good enough" stage >> why bother upgrading? (This is especially true for gaming platforms)
IMHO, DRM technology has become crimminally intrusive >> I don't want to support those bastards
I have a family and a mortgage >> I have more important ways to spend my money
Much of what I want to do and see is available online >> why buy even more physical stuff?
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trust me, you're not missing anything. Seems nothing has changed, they just take the same old stuff and slap a new coat of paint on it. Guess Hollywood isn't the only ones who have run out of new ideas.
Re:Well (Score:5, Funny)
So you went from ME to Vista? Sap!
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I'm guessing more like XP to 7.
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Jan and Marcia Brady are the same generation, just siblings.
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Re:Well (Score:4, Insightful)
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I assume that meant the back seat.
Otherwise, the phrase "put the kids in the back" takes on a whole new meaning.
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Blu-ray blanks are what, $25 a disk still?
Try around US $3 (ex. tax) upwards. Admittedly, that's for single-layer 25GB write-once BD-R, and the very cheapest, generic original obscure brand ones at that. Nowhere near as cheap per GB as DVD-R, but still nowhere near $25.
to be correct here (Score:3, Informative)
This is actually Bluray 1.0. There were experiments being done involving multi layer discs way before bluray. [wikipedia.org] Sony is the one who dictated the 50GB size for the discs for consumers (25GB for data). Bluray discs themselves can hit considerably higher.
Meanwhile, who knows what kind of DRM will be put on this crap as it's supported by all your favorite media dinosaurs.
Can someone find the old slashdot article about petabyte holographic storage? I don't remember how far back it was, but talking about hundreds
Re:to be correct here (Score:5, Insightful)
Every year there's another "hundreds of layers of storage" article, and we're still sitting here with dual layer DVDs. By the time we see terabyte discs we'll probably all have petabyte hard drives. I remember them talking about blu ray in the 90s, with the prototype arriving in 2000. [wikipedia.org] Back when we had 6gb drives the idea of 50gb discs was amazing, but they dragged their feet so bad creating a standard that by the time it reached market we all moved on to terabyte hard drives. Blu ray burners are still too damn expensive [newegg.com], costing five times ($160 vs $30) more than a DVD burner costs. And once you have one then what? Pay $3 to $7 for each BD-R disc? [newegg.com] No thanks, even at $3 for 25gb that's $120 per terabyte, 50% more than a 1 terabyte hard drive [newegg.com].
So forgive me if I don't get all excited every time they announce a new high capacity disc format because they haven't fixed the one they have out now.
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Re:to be correct here (Score:5, Insightful)
I posted a similar comment about a year ago. Optical media should be a great backup medium, but because they take so long to ramp up production and push the cost of the media down, it is useless before anyone can afford it. Blu-ray media at 50 GB per disc is already useless and it still isn't even close to price parity with hard drives. To fully back up a 500 GB hard drive (the industry average size now) takes 10 discs to back up once. At 30 minutes per disc, this is five hours of continuous burning, during which time you have to have someone swapping out discs every half hour. For a terabyte HD, you're more than an entire work day. You should be doing a full backup at least every month and incremental backups weekly. Do the math, and you're spending the better part of a week every month just doing backups. The average hard drive needs to be able to be backed up on a single disc or you've already failed. Blu-ray has already failed.
As a result, recordable optical media is basically worthless except for people burning content to give to other people, which is a tiny fraction of its potential user base. If they would ramp production way up and flood the market with cheap media immediately even before the recorders are available in quantities, people would flock to them in droves. It's counterintuitive, but the only way any optical format will ever be particularly useful to the general consumer is if the industry decides to make it a loss leader for about a year. By the end of that year, you'll have so much adoption that it won't be losing money anymore, and it will be in the hands of consumers early enough to be broadly useful.
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Yeah but selling optical discs with Terminator 5 on them is cheaper than selling hard drives with Terminator 5 on them.
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The great thing about DVD's and blu-ray discs is that they are not mechanical and not subject to mechanical faliure like hard disks are which is still a significant risk.
They are optical and scratches will cause loss of data. Of course if you store them and don't use them then you are safer from scratches.
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"Can someone find the old slashdot article about petabyte holographic storage? I don't remember how far back it was, but talking about hundreds + layer holographic storage basically." Every year there's another "hundreds of layers of storage" article, and we're still sitting here with dual layer DVDs. By the time we see terabyte discs we'll probably all have petabyte hard drives. I remember them talking about blu ray in the 90s, with the prototype arriving in 2000. [wikipedia.org] Back when we had 6gb drives the idea of 50gb discs was amazing, but they dragged their feet so bad creating a standard that by the time it reached market we all moved on to terabyte hard drives. Blu ray burners are still too damn expensive [newegg.com], costing five times ($160 vs $30) more than a DVD burner costs. And once you have one then what? Pay $3 to $7 for each BD-R disc? [newegg.com] No thanks, even at $3 for 25gb that's $120 per terabyte, 50% more than a 1 terabyte hard drive [newegg.com]. So forgive me if I don't get all excited every time they announce a new high capacity disc format because they haven't fixed the one they have out now.
Makes you stop and think when the cost of a disk + disk drive is lower than just a disc... At what point do they just scrap the whole optical media idea altogether and just package removable magnetic hard drive disk's.
Gonna have to buy another copy of (Score:3, Funny)
the White Album.
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I would have thought (Score:4, Insightful)
It would be nice if you (Score:3, Funny)
I agree (Score:4, Funny)
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DVD-DL has largely been ignored due to DVD shrinkers and splitters.
Seriously though, you can get verbatim DVD-DL for $1 or less per disc if you buy spindles, just look more carefully. Note that Verbatim is almost the only brand worth buying if you expect to be able to read the discs for any length of time. Or at least it was a few months back when I did my last spate of research and disc buying. I'll buy whatever for day use; I buy Memorex for medium-term use and Verbatim for storage and long-term use. YMMV
Remix (Score:5, Interesting)
How many MB will be wiped out by a pathetically small scratch on the disk? Remember the promises made of audio CD's?
Re:Remix (Score:5, Funny)
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Pretty soon you'll be able to store your entire porn collection on a 1 pedobyte disc.
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And games, you can just hear the publishers: "But games nowadays need so much content that we'll have to increase prices to 120â".
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1TB discs? Now porn collections can be even BIGGER!
Fixed that for ya.
Re:Remix (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Remix (Score:5, Insightful)
"Can != Should" is pretty well agreed upon here.
"Can == Will" is an unfortunate reality in most cases...
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Error Correction (Score:5, Insightful)
How many MB will be wiped out by a pathetically small scratch on the disk? Remember the promises made of audio CD's?
With well-designed error correction, nothing. Enough error correcting data would be distributed all around the disc to recover from localized scratches.
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Two things I feel the need to point out...
"well-designed error correction"? How likely is that?
"Enough error correcting data would be distributed all around the disc to recover from localized scratches." Yes, but this isn't random-access memory. Data is easiest to read if it's stored in a linear fashion. And if you're worried about circular scratches too, you'd have to put the error-correcting data even farther away.
Re:Remix (Score:5, Informative)
So do what most people do and dedicate a portion of the disk(s) to some form of error correction [sourceforge.net] data.
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You sure do have a funny definition of "most people".
Re:Remix (Score:4, Interesting)
How many MB will be wiped out by a pathetically small scratch on the disk? Remember the promises made of audio CD's?
You're assuming that in order to fit more data on the disc, they've just shrunk CD technology. That's not the case. Holographically stored data are spatially distributed. I'm not sure exactly how they handle damage, but I think a "pathetically small scratch" would have a pathetically small effect on the replay.
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You can't go AC! If you left, where would we get our snarky judgemental posts containing nothing but old man flavored bitterness and epenis size comparisions?
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So add parity. Even if you added 50% parity, that'd still be a decent amount of information on each disk, enough to back up every photo I've ever taken and some video.
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With that much space they could have software that automagically stores some parity bits somewhere else. Or write the data twice. If you are storing 100 GB (a shit ton) you could write it on the disc about 10 times.
Or have a backup. i'd use these disks as a backup, rather than primary storage.
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I take it you're a glass-is-half-empty kind of guy. Just imagine how much information can now be stored in a scratch on the disc!
Off-site backup? (Score:2, Interesting)
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Re:Off-site backup? (Score:5, Funny)
8' thick slab of granite, with letters laser cut through. This is then sealed in the middle of 30' of non-reactive UV resistant clear polymer. This cube is then set on top of a mountain on the south pole of the moon, aligned so that the sun only strikes it once every 240 earth days, shining through and then having flaming letters 300' high show up on the shadowed wall of crater Faustinni.
Tb or TB or TiB? (Score:3, Insightful)
The title is confusing. Are these Tb or TB?
Re:Tb or TB or TiB? (Score:5, Funny)
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TriBbles. It's an unfortunate organic consumable necessary for disc production, but they're fairly easy to replicate.
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Storage is always in bytes. Bits would be transmission rate (because it correlates to frequency). tFA was consistent in using TB.
Good job at pretending to be confused by a typo, though.
(if you really were confused and not being pedantic, fork over your geek'n chit so we can tear off a corner)
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Storage is always in bytes. Bits would be transmission rate (because it correlates to frequency)
In information theory, storage is also considered a (noisy) communication channel. You still have the same problem of representing bits in terms of something analog, with a suitable coding to minimize errors.
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Storage is often given in bits. For example, the size of every one of the NAND Flash ICs listed in Micron's online part catalog [micron.com] is given in gigabits.
The GP could have checked the article before commenting, but it is perfectly reasonable to wonder whether the submitter intended "1Tb" to be one terabit (exactly 125 * 10^9 bytes), as written, or one terabyte (about 1.0737 * 10^9 bytes, or exactly 2^30 bytes).
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But that's OK, you were only off by about 9%
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Yeah, I'm pretty sure I haven't generated ninety gigabytes of temporary files and duplicates in my entire LIFETIME.
The Man Who Fell to Earth (Score:5, Informative)
Reminds me of the technology that Bowie's character came up with in "The Man Who Fell to Earth."
A quick reminder that the movie actually came from a novel, The Man Who Fell To Earth, by Walter Tevis.
(Movie was a moderately faithful adaptation, as such things go-- unlike some SF movies, where little is taken from the book other than the name, and--in the case of Bladerunner--not even that.)
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where little is taken from the book other than the name
There's nothing wrong with that. It improved Starship Troopers considerably.
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As a "B" grade "alien bug vs. Human" sci-fi action film it was OK but I think it would have been much better if they had NOT tried to follow the original book at all.
Title + completely different story == GOOD || GREAT # see BladeRunner
Title + faithful adaptation of the book == GREAT
Title + lame adaptation == SUCK_MONKEY_BALLS
The movie Starship Troopers, as an adaptation of the book by the same tittle sucked monkey balls. The book wasn't about
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(Movie was a moderately faithful adaptation, as such things go-- unlike some SF movies, where little is taken from the book other than the name, and--in the case of Bladerunner--not even that.)
This is something I often lament, but Blade Runner is one of the few examples where the departure from the novel was a very, very good thing. Don't get me wrong, I am a huge fan of PKD, but Ridley Scott's adaptation worked much better for the screen than a faithful adaptation would have. Dick's style, unfortunately, does not transfer well to the screen (the notable exception being Richard Linklater's fantastic adaptation of A Scanner Darkly).
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Yeah, it really grinds my gears the way that most movies and books differ in both content and title.
But maybe we're just purists.
Someone smack the submitter/editor (Score:2)
So, what is it? 1 Tb (terabit) or 1 TB (terabyte). If you are going to fuck up your abbreviations, at least be consistent about it instead of using Tb in the title and TB in the text.
Actually I think it's the editor that needs to be hit upside the head with a terrabat (no, that's not a typo, that's supposed to be a bat made out from the ground - i.e. granite), as he probably tried to "prettify" the title.
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Bill
Skip the video...waste of time. (Score:2)
The gist of the video was "there is lots of data. we are working to make a holographic disc." Completely information-free!
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They start of by saying it can store "500 gigabytes" now... then, later on, they say that they are going to be able to store "a terabyte or more."
Bill
Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
Industry (Score:2)
The entertainment industry could use then to create 1 disk sets.
All Disney Films on one disk, for example.
Anyone where stamp data is needed for this size.
I can see a solution where you ahve an HD attached to your computer with a special addition BUS designed to push data to these devices at a high rate. Since it's direct you remove a lot of over head,. It would be expensive, but for companies dealing in petabytes of data it would probably be worth while.
Re:Industry (Score:5, Informative)
FTFY
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All Disney Films on one disk, for example
And they would only charge $10,000 for it.
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Why not just buy a cheap eSATA or USB external drive and stick it in a closet somewhere -- it's not much more expensive, lasts longer, and saves you a ton of productivity.
GE expects a 1TB disk will be $100 5 years from now. That's more than a 1TB drive costs now, by then it will be 5 times as much. So people wouldn't use these disks to save money. The only whys I can think of are that it is smaller, and maybe lasts longer. Lasting longer is tough to tell, but historically optical disks have had a longer shelf-life than magnetic media when it has adequate error correction and no DRM.
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Ya, I'm not sure where we are going wrong there either...
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A 24x DVD writer commits 32MB/s. At that speed, it would take just over nine hours to write one terabyte.
However, keep in mind that the biggest limitation to write speed in optical media comes from the maximum rotation speed possible (discs tend to explode above 10k RPM) combined with the areal density. The former we can't get around without switching to something more durable than cheap polycarbonate sandwiches; the
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If you increase the storage density, there will be more bytes per track, which will increase the data transfer speed. However, there will also be more tracks on the disk, and as you can't increase the number of tracks read per minute, it will take longer to read or fill a higher capacity disk.
Godsend for backups (Score:2)
I would love to be able to burn backups to non-magnetic disk, and not have to use 40 of them to back up 1TB or more of data. I would hope that one of the early niches they'll look into will be backups and storage needs.
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No Need for DRM... (Score:2)
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I suspect few geeks have less that 1Tb (or is it 1TB) of disk space...
Personally, I have over 21 Tb in 6Tb, 6Tb, 4Tb, and 5Tb increments...
*Yawn* (Score:5, Interesting)
Wasn't there a company promising this exact same technology about ten years ago? I've found articles from 2005 talking about a holographic disc from InPhase, and I seem to recall hearing about another company working on something similar even earlier than that, though I can't recall the name of it...what I do recall is hearing something along the lines of the company shutting down several years ago.
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Ah! I remembered! FMDs. There was a 50GB prototype demonstrated at COMDEX in 2000, the second and third generation discs were apparently capable of holding up to a terrabyte.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorescent_Multilayer_Disc [wikipedia.org]
No moving parts, please! (Score:3, Interesting)
Everything I'd heard about holography and one of the most appealing and promising things about it was that it would not require, or at least minimize, moving parts. Why are they now recreating holographic media as Yet Another Spinning Disc device with parts that wear out quickly, go out of alignment, and put the media at risk of damage? A digital storage medium without moving parts could easily provide devices with unprecedented longevity.
I get the connection to make a Blu-Ray backward-compatible medium, but why lock ourselves in to a bad idea (spinning platters) for a medium that's had lackluster adoption*?
* - which I contend is almost entirely the fault of the iron grip the entertainment distribution industry has tried to impose on the digital storage industry With Great Fail.
Too late? (Score:2)
The discs will be used for high-end commercial niches initially and then migrate to consumer markets in 2012-2015.
Assuming the Earth doesn't end in a gigantic apocalypse and we're all still here, that is.
Someone has to say it (Score:2, Redundant)
Looks like I'll have to buy the White Album again.
Can they be pressed? (Score:3, Insightful)
Is this a related article? (Score:2)
Is this related to the recent article about the government uses of computers?
versus LTO (Score:2)
I think a big challenge to these holographic schemes is that LTO keeps ramping up, and thus an archive market for non-tape solutions never opens up. LTO-4 now holds 800 GB, and when LTO-5 comes out it wil be 1.6 TB.
Re:It can still lose! (Score:5, Funny)
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'Besides, GE has no link that I'm aware of to the DeLorean Motor Company that I'm aware of.'
Can't see it on the company chart, but I think it fits in somewhere between the Sheinhardt Wig Company ('Not Poisoning Rivers Since 1997') and AHP Chanagi Party Meats of Pyongyang, N. Korea:
http://www.nbc.com/30_Rock/images/placeholder/GE_OrgChart.jpg [nbc.com]
http://www.nbc.com/30_Rock/exclusives/30R_GEWigChart.pdf [nbc.com]
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Ruh-roh, Raggy!
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Soon I may put all relevant music ever made onto a single disk. Internet filters wont have much effect then.
That still fits on a single CD-R.
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I tried to argue that you could fit whole seasons of some TV shows on one Blu-Ray disk, but the argument came back "if it ain't in HD, I'm not buying a Blu-Ray disk." So these new disks could hold entire runs of some series, but it probably won't be sold as such. Pity.
Or I could hold an entire season in HD of a TV series on a single 1 TB magnetic hard drive (for less money).
By "2012-2015" a 1 TB HD will be like what, 20 or 30 bucks?