We had only recently, on one of our Future Watch articles, covered a new technology being developed by GE, the U.S. based electronics giant. It talked about holographic storage that will allow users in the near future to straddle a staggering 470GB of data on a singe disc.
Now, we have another team from Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, in collaboration with Samsung who are working on a new technology that can help create discs with a capacity 10,000 times greater than current generation DVDs. The technique allowed them to store an incredible 1.6 terabytes of data on a singe disc - with the potential being believed to be in the vicinity of 10 terabytes! To give you a fair idea on how large this is, a singe terabyte of storage space would be enough to hold 300 feature length films or 250,000 songs.
The technology will use a nanostructured material incorporated onto a disc in such a way that the researchers would be able to increase capacity without increasing the physical size of the disks. This is achieved by "adding" two more spatial dimensions on to the discs in addition t the existing ones. The new dimensions are the spectral and polarization dimensions. These new additions helped researchers to significantly up the storage capacity of the discs.
As for issues, the most daunting one is to find a way to write data on to the discs without having to wait for long periods of time. In any case, it would be a while since these discs would ever make it to the consumer market. We envisage a serious medical and military use of this one as this can be used for storing large amounts of data with encryption - a thing made easier, thanks to the increased data density.
Hey heres a thot. If solid state drives are the future - then any and all kinds of discs will shortly be passe.
So movies and music will be bought on mem cards or solid state storage devices - chips. .(not on dvds or bluray discs)
Thus video players will be so small (just the electronics - no moving parts.) Thus lifetime of such media will be very long.
Hi.
I feel techtree has no reason to hold information on this unique storage device. As source of information for viewers and browsers like us it would be more supportive to enrich on the latest. Its the company Samsung and the Australian unversity which would hold on to any information. I feel techtree would be more happy to update followers like us.
1. What are the write and access speeds?
2. What would be the cost?
3. Do we have to wait till the present stock of existing terrabyte Hard disks are sold out?
4. What is happening in the field of increasing the capacity of Flash drives to Terrabyte?
,Thiruvananthapuram-Sashi Tharoor's place, on May 31, 2009 10:24 AM
I wish some scientists will invent a surgical method of implanting or adding spatial dimentions to our BRAIN also so that we could store more in our head. ....Nothing is impossible if we dream-visualise and make it happen