Submitted by “A disc that can store 500 gigabytes 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.”
So many articles on higher capacity optical storage come and go and so far very little result in a commerically available consumer grade product.
Wake me up when something actually is available.
As someone mentioned on here in a comment to another story, it would be so much nicer if the consumer industry would abandon optical disks.
SD cards are a bit too small, physically, for this purpose, but the technology behind them is pretty much perfect.
Come out with a physical form-factor around the size of a floppy diskette or maybe a GameBoy game: big enough to not lose too easily, small enough to not hog a lot of shelf space, lots of room internally to store flash chips. Put a controller onto the diskette/cartridge, use a standardised physical interface.
Voila! A future-proof storage medium. Need more space? Just put more (and/or higher-density) flash chips inside. The hardware interface doesn’t have to change. The reader hardware doesn’t have to change.
You could even reserve a little section of the storage space to include the media codec, so you could “upgrade” the player when you play the media. No more format wars!! Turns the player into a “dumb” device, with a general-purpose CPU/DSP/whatever, where all the smarts needed to play the media is included with the media.
Learn from the harddrive market: a single IDE connector/controller can be used for drives as small as 10 MB and as large as 500 GB. A single SATA connector/controller can be used for drives as small as 80 GB and as large as 2 TB.
Standardise the physical interface … and you can change the innards as needed.
This could be used for pretty much any kind of media: audio/music, video, applications, you name it.
Of course, the RIAA/MPAA would have a coronary if this ever happened. No more forced re-purchasing of your entire library (Beta -> VHS -> DVD -> HD-DVD -> Blu-Ray -> whatever; vinyl -> 8-track -> cassette -> MD -> CD -> DVD -> whatever).
But wouldn’t that be an end-user nirvana!?
Edited 2009-04-27 23:05 UTC
SD cards are cheap these days, but still. A DVD costs like 50 cents or what in producation? A SD card of same size still costs 5 to 10 times more.
Yes, but that’s because they are constantly moving to higher and higher density/capacity chips in the same tiny form-factor.
If you went with a physical casing about the size of a 3.5″ floppy, you could use lower-capacity (less expensive) chips, but include more of them. 2 GB flash drives are less than $5 CDN now. 1 GB flash drives are basically given away. Sure, you’d need 100 of them to be useful, but there’s a lot of space in a cartridge about the length/width of a floppy, and it could be made thicker to allow even more.
Sure, it may not be practical right now, but it’s very close to being practical. And a lot cheaper than these 500 GB discs.
I had been thinking of that too, might even have mentioned it somewhere.
So how much effort to build a box that effectively has dozens? of slots most likely for SD cards now and hook to a Sata interface. It is probably doable with an FPGA controller and some available ASICs but far beyond a hobby project. Most FPGA projects already need to interface to CF or SD chips for their bit files. The rest is more work.
Better off just paying up to buy a real Sata SSD drive, 32GB-128GB is linear in cost, and it is only about 2x the price of bunch of loose cheap SD cards for same storage but at least it works at high speed and reliable (I’d hope) and boots like a real drive.
If you had say N USB flash drives, you could just hang them on a huge N way USB tree hub, bet it would suck though pretty quick. CF and SD cards are just not meant to be that fast or reliable, only cheap.
As for the hard disk market, I wouldn’t take any lessons from them at all, they did everything wrong over and over except deliver cheap bits, but thats another story.
There is a natural pyramid order going from L1 cache to L2, L3 SRAM, out to main store DRAM, then to SSD drives, hard drives, flash media, optical store CD, DVD. The pyramid is likely to stay with us for a long time in one form or another. We always needs speed and quantity but usually not together, physics makes having them together difficult and expensive.
These things eventually find there way into the consumer or prosumer arena. So, what is the shelf life? How about reliability? What would the cost of one be?
Honestly- I don’t even like blu-ray, this seems to me to be more of the same nonsense. If I’m wrong or I’ve stepped on any toes I apologize in advance.
in other news, GE announces a 16 track tape player and 1.25″ floppy disk..
i see little future in high-capacity removable media in the mainstream.
You guys are missing one giant plus for optical media. Shelf life. The disks are fairly resilient short of scratching, and in a dark enclosure, should last a long long time. On the other hand, drives and SD cards are susceptible to EM radiation, shock, static, and age. What is the shelf life of the moving parts within a hard drive? How long will SD last before the bits start flipping due to time?
…SD cards and other similar flash memory based devices have a limited number of read/write cycles whereas an optical disc does not. No cigar.