A few years ago, GE announced that they were working on a storage device which uses micro-holographic technology, that will offer a whopping 500 gigabytes of storage on a Blu-ray-sized disc. Now, the company said that their research group came up with an optical disc writer that is capable of recording data at speeds equivalent to a Blu-ray writer.
Peter Lorraine, manager of the Optical Research Unit at GE, said, “The disc is a polycarbonate material with millions of the micro-holograms stamped onto the disc. When the light source — whose beam is the same wavelength as that of a Blu-ray drive — hits the disc, it erases the necessary amount of holograms to represent the data it is recording. Theoretically, consumer drives in the future could be backwards compatible with the Blu-ray format.”
Since the use of physical mediums has been decreasing as we are moving towards a cloud-based era, discs are now being designed for archiving purposes. The 500 GB disc is said to be able to keep data intact for one hundred years, which is pretty long.
It will take at least a whole day to fill up a whole 500 GB disc at 4 to 5 MBps writing speed, but Lorraine said that there could be specialized drives that features multiple write heads that will enable it to write date at a faster rate.
GE has not made any announcements when these discs will be available commercially, and we’re sure that we won’t be seeing it anytime soon as Blu-ray drives haven’t reached its peak yet.
via: Tech Radar
