Optical disc offers 500GB storage (BBC)

[eppur_se_muova]

A 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
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more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8021012.stm

[htuttle]

1. But how long do they last?

One thing that's become clear over the years since I've gone from tapes, to floppy disks, to flash-in-the-pan media like Zip disks to DVDs and flash drives -- none of them last forever. Digital media is inherently unstable over the long term. I would think this would be an even more important criteria for the archive industry than merely how much data they can store on a disk.

Just being cynical after going over some archived old CD backups recently and finding at least 1/3 of them now unreadable...

[Sandrine for you]

2. Yep ! How many times we need to test how many time technological medium last ?

Speak a lot about the difficulties for the future about our transmission.

[krispos42]

3. An entire television series on one disc

Or the collected movies of a single actor or director.




Impressive.