Time to trade in the DVD burner

[tecoyah]

I give it about five years Max..........anyone for the five disc, Library of Congress.

Group aims to drastically up disc storage
Published: February 3, 2005, 2:47 PM PST
By Michael Kanellos
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
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A few hundred movies on an optical disc? That's the goal of the Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD) Alliance.

Six companies, including Fuji Photo and CMC Magnentics, have formed a consortium to promote HVD technology, which will let consumers conceivably put a terabyte (1TB) of data onto a single optical disc.
A TB-size disc would certainly compress movie collections. The consortium said an HVD disc could hold as much data as 200 standard DVDs and transfer data at over 1 gigabit per second, or 40 times faster than a DVD.

HVD is a possible successor to technologies such as Blu-ray and HD DVD. Single layer Blu-ray discs hold about 25GB of data while dual-layer discs hold 50GB. Ordinary DVD discs, meanwhile, hold about 4.7GB. HVD technology will be pitched at corporations and the entertainment market, the HVD Alliance said.

The technology behind HVD is based on holography technology from Japan's Optware, one of the six founders of the consortium. A technical committee formed last December to flesh out HVD standards.

Sony unveiled a home server with 1TB of storage for the Japanese market last year. Half of the capacity would be enough to record six channels of TV for five and a half days non-stop, Sony said.

The organization, however, is looking at first developing discs with lower capacities. The first assignments of the technical committee involve coming up with standards for a 200GB recordable disc and a 100GB read-only disc.

If history is an indication, consumers will fill the disc up. High-definition broadcasting and gaming are also expected to add a heavy burden to existing home storage systems because of the size of the files. Two hours of HD programming takes up about 15GB to 25GB

http://marketwatch-cnet.com.com/Grou...html?tag=st_lh

[heyal256]

I think that it will take longer then 5 years for this to replace what we are currently using, UNLESS both hd-dvd and bluray flop. I say this because I don't think taht many people will want to switch to a new optical format so soon.
I also don't know how long it would even take for consumer versions of this tech to become affordable to the masses.

[DasButch]

I agree with heyal, I don't see this becoming anything more than a corporate storage device for at least 10-20 years.

[FngKestrel]

GameDaily biz finally got around to reporting on this.

http://biz.gamedaily.com/features.as...feature&email=

Blu-ray/HD DVD Could Become Irrelevant as HVD Nears
When it comes to the format war, all the talk has been about Blu-ray and HD DVD, but another more advanced technology could actually replace both before they even really have a chance to make their respective marks. Holographic disks can store a ton of data and can read and write data faster as well...

While the Sony-led Blu-ray camp and the Toshiba-led HD DVD group battle it out to determine which format will become the successor to traditional DVD, another format is being developed that could quickly make both HD DVD and Blu-ray seem obsolete.

Incredible storage capacity
Called Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD), this emerging technology has been in the works (at least conceptually) for about 20 years. It wasn't until the beginning of the 21st century that real advances were made, however. Holographic disk storage allows for much higher density than DVDs by storing data as light patterns throughout the volume of the polymer disc, or three dimensions. HVD can apparently store up to 60 times the data of a regular DVD and it can read and write data 10 times faster as well.

The two major players in this emerging holographic storage field are InPhase Technologies (an American company) and Japanese firm Optware Corp. Optware recently opened a U.S. branch and intends to launch 200GB HVD drives by the end of 2006; by 2008, the company is aiming to hit the 1TB mark. InPhase also plans on shipping its own 200GB drives by the end of next year. The company has partnered with Hitachi Maxell Ltd. to market the new technology.

According to InPhase, its Tapestry holographic system can store more than 26 hours of broadcast-quality high-definition video on a single 300GB disk, recorded at a 160 megabit per second (Mb/s) data rate. HVD also can hold data for over 50 years without any sign of deterioration, which when combined with its massive capacity makes it an ideal solution for television networks to store all their video.

Attracting networks
In fact, Turner Entertainment, a subsidiary of Turner Broadcasting System, has already turned to holographic tech, making it the first television network to air content originating on holographic storage. Turner has more than 200,000 movies as well as thousands of commercials stored on digital tape. As the library grows, retrieval time and maintaining the tapes becomes costly, especially as more HD content is adopted.

"The holographic disk promises to retail for $100, and by 2010, it will have capacity of 1.6TB each. That's pretty inexpensive," Ron Tarasoff, vice president of broadcast technology and engineering at Turner Entertainment told Computerworld.com. "Even this first version can store 300GB per disk, and it has 160MB/sec. data throughput rates. That's burning. Then combine it with random access, and it's the best of all worlds."

Consumer market next
Both InPhase and Optware are currently targeting the market from an archival perspective—for example, it would be entirely possible to store whole movie libraries on just one disk. However, for the consumer market the companies also are working on developing disks that would be less than half the physical size of DVDs but could hold around 30GB.

With Blu-ray and HD DVD not even on the market yet and HVD fast closing in, it's certainly possible that the real format leap won't truly come until holographic technology is ushered in. Keep in mind that most consumers have only fully embraced DVD movies in the last 2-3 years and will likely be slow to adopt either Blu-ray or HD DVD, just as they were slow to move away from VHS.

And if video game developers like the idea of Blu-ray in the PlayStation 3, just imagine how pleased they'd be with the vast storage and increased read times of HVD in the generation of consoles following PS3. For now, though, all we can do is wait and see how all these formats work themselves out.

[Redjake]

must be fun burning one of these puppies - can anyone say "over nighter"

[MikeSty]

Sweet, a burner that's 40 times faster that must record a thousand times the data.

[sashime76]

My question is how much the costs are for the mega burner and the media. Doubt that the average TFPers will be able to afford. How many of us own a dual layer burner? Now, how much do the dual layer discs cost? too much!

[aberkok]

Recently, while sitting on the john, a couple of ideas came to me regarding data storage technology. Firstly, there are only 24 hours in a day, so the fascination with more data storage will reach a peak when we are falling asleep before a disc runs out. Secondly, compiling more movies onto a disc for archival purposes is all well and good, but any serious collector or librarian knows that spanning an archive over multiple parts is important for the safety of a collection. Imagine having your entire movie collection on two discs, then losing one.

That is all.