Forget HD-DVDs and Blu-Ray DVDs, Here Comes 2 Ray!

[Tuckerfan]

i’m guessing that’s what they’ll call it when it comes to market.

Imagine taking the entire collection of historical documents at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and storing it on a single DVD.

University of Central Florida Chemistry Professor Kevin D. Belfield and his team have cracked a puzzle that stumped scientists for more than a dozen years. They have developed a new technology that will allow users to record and store massive amounts of data – the museum’s entire collection or as many as 500 movies, for example – onto a single disc or, perhaps, a small cube.

Belfield’s Two-Photon 3-D Optical Data Storage system makes this possible.

“For a while, the community has been able to record data in photochromic materials in several layers,” Belfield said. “The problem was that no one could figure out how to read out the data without destroying it. But we cracked it.”

According to the article, you can fit as much as 1,000 GB (wouldn’t that be a terabyte?) worth of data on a disc. That’s a lot of bonus features to add to a disc.

[garygnu]

Ah, holographic storage. I first saw a note about a prototype of something like this last year. Imagine the same type of technique applied to a hard drive. A 200GB drive could become a 40,000GB drive.

[Fritz]

Guess I’m going to have to buy the White Album again…

[Least_Original_User_Name_Ever]

Ha. Perfect. Make it open source and compatible with both format readers and watch Microsoft AND Sony pitch a giant hissy fit (and open a bidding war).

[Mindfield]

Meh. Over the years I’ve seen all kinds of fancy new storage methods. Data stored by arranging the crystals by laser in a block of ice. Data stored by a similar method in a small cube of salt. PRobably some others I’m forgetting. Nothing has ever come of them though; they never really passed the proof of concept stage either because of other problems inherent to the design or because the cost and/or process of its manufacture was too expensive and/or too slow and/or too unreliable. While the technology may at some point be boiled down to something more manageable that is a closer fit to existing technological configurations, I can’t see it being adopted wholesale.

Not that the phrase, “Yeah, I think I have that stored on holocube somewhere” doesn’t sound futuristic and cool, but thus far and without fail the realities of marvelous new technological innovations ultimately get stripped down to bare and relatively bland concepts by the time they reach the OEM and consumer level.

[friedo]

@Tuckerfan

i’m guessing that’s what they’ll call it when it comes to market. According to the article, you can fit as much as 1,000 GB (wouldn’t that be a terabyte?) worth of data on a disc. That’s a lot of bonus features to add to a disc.

1TB = 1024GB.

I find it doubtful that you could store 500 movies, though, unless they were sampled at rather poor quality. A plain, non-HD DVD stores roughly 4.5 GB, which means you could fit maybe a little more than 200 movies on a 1TB disc.