Monday, April 27, 2009

Optical disc offers 500GB storage

It looks like a color tweaked button from a pair of Levis jeans, but it is really a new super DVD. A normal DVD holds 4.7 GB of data (8.5 GB if it is double layer).
Optical discA disc that can store 500 gigabytes (GB) of data, equivalent to 100 DVDs, has been unveiled by General Electric.

The micro-holographic disc, which is the same size as existing DVD discs, is aimed at the archive industry. But the company believes it can eventually be used in the consumer market place and home players.

Blu-ray discs, which are used to store high definition movies and games, can currently hold between 25GB and 50GB.

Micro-holographic discs can store more data than DVDs or Blu-ray because they store information on the disc in three dimensions, rather than just pits on the surface of the disc ...

While the technology is still in the laboratory stage, GE believes it will take off because players can be built which are backwards compatible with existing DVD and Blu-ray technologies.

In a statement the firm said: "The hardware and formats are so similar to current optical storage technology that the micro-holographic players will enable consumers to play back their CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs."

''GE's breakthrough is a huge step toward bringing our next generation holographic storage technology to the everyday consumer,'' said Mr Lawrence in a statement.

He added: "The day when you can store your entire high definition movie collection on one disc and support high resolution formats like 3D television is closer than you think.''

via BBC NEWS | Technology | Optical disc offers 500GB storage.

There are 2 TB drives (2000 GB) you can buy now for around $300, but 500 GB on a DVD is great.

exabytedriveSome facts from wikipedia:


  • The U.S. Library of Congress Web Capture team has claimed that "as of May 2008, the Library has collected more than 82.6 terabytes of data".[1]

  • Ancestry.com claims approximately 600 TB of genealogical data with the inclusion of US Census data from 1790 to 1930.[2]

  • Hitachi introduced the world's first one terabyte hard disk drive in 2007.[3]

  • In 1993, total Internet traffic amounted to approx. 100 TB for the year.[4] As of June 2008[update], Cisco Systems estimated Internet traffic at 160 TB/s (which assuming to be constant comes to 5 Zettabytes for the year).[5]



I hacked my first computer's OS to display that it's molecular hard drive has a 500 exabyte capacity.
"One exabyte is the equivalent of about 50,000 years of DVD quality video."[18]

I'm upgrading to a 5oo xenobyte quantum hard drive powered by dark energy in 2013. Then I'll go around saying, "I gotta lot a yottabytes," because, of course, one xenobyte is 1000 yottabytes. (Pass the word!)

A yottabyte is 10 24 bytes.  That is 1 septillion, which is a 1 followed by 24 zeros: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.
1,000,000 = one million (MB, megabyte)
1,000,000,000 = one billion (GB gigabyte)
1,000,000,000,000 = one trillion (TB terabyte)
1,000,000,000,000,000 = one quadrillion (PB petabyte)
1,000,000,000,000,000,000 = one quintillion (EB exabyte)
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 = one sextillion (ZB zettabyte)
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 = one septillion (YB yottabyte)
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 = one octillion (XB xenobyte)

3 comments:

pochp said...

A very good idea but is it safe to use?

Pixel-Shack » One Disc To Rule Them All said...

[...] Optical disc offers 500GB storage « Xenophilia (True Strange Stuff) [...]

Phil said...

Yes, its true, I read it a few days ago, but the infrared(?) photo above looks fake. You can almost make out writing in the upper right of the disk, just like a jeans button.