In the race to develop digital disc media with higher and higher capacities, General Electric has announced the development of a new disk using holographic technology and capable of storing 500 GB of information in a disk the size of a current DVD. The company claims that the new media is capable of storing the data equivalent of at least 100 DVDs or DVD ROMs in a single disk.
GE has announced that they will license the new holographic disk technology to other media storage companies to produce players and recorders utilizing the holographic storage design. The technology is expected to be available in retail outlets by 2012, though test marketing may begin sooner in a few selected markets.
The uses for the new 500 GB capacity disk are numerous and widespread, from replacing old magnetic tape archives, to backing up and storing large media collections, including video, images and audio media. So far, GE has not released any information on the cost of producing the high-capacity disks, but Brian Lawrence, a researcher at GE Labs in New York, claims that the technology will be cost-effective, and perfectly suited for storing Hi Def movie collections and other media.
With DVD ROM technology currently limited to less than 10 GB of storage space, the introduction of the holographic disk could be a real game changer for the industry. Being able to store or backup large collections of movies and media on a single disc should effectively do away with keeping up with libraries of DVDs and CD-ROMs.
It may also spawn new markets and products in areas such as the high-definition stock video footage industry, where huge amounts of storage capacity are necessary to deliver product to customers. Previously, some stock video footage collections have been so large that they necessitate being delivered preinstalled in a large capacity external hard drive. The ability to include up to 500 GB of video data on one disc would streamline the process significantly, and potentially open up new markets.
Another area where the GE disk could prove beneficial is in backing up entire computers by creating a “mirror” of all of the contents of your local hard drive, including the operating system and all user preferences. This use could prove ideal in restoring crashed hard drives, or updating to a new system.
The holographic technology could also be useful in the delivery of software programs which are currently too large to fit on a single DVD. Some design programs, for example, are so massive that they require up to 10 DVDs to install. A 500 GB disk capacity would allow these, and even much larger programs in the future, to be easily installed from a single disk.
