February 3, 2005 2:47 PM PST
Group aims to drastically up disc storage
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Sony's home server stores 1 terabyte
October 5, 2004
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.
Michiko Nagai of CNET Japan contributed to this story from Tokyo.
See more CNET content tagged:
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rewritable data storage like hard drives.
Their data storage capacity and bandwidth will leave WORM drive Optware in the dust.
Colossal Storage Corp. is the company and you can read about their technology at
http://www.physorg.com/news785.html
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1635265,00.asp
http://www.nanonewsnet.com/index.php?module=pagesetter&func=viewpub&tid=4&pid=6
http://colossalstorage.net
Somehow the companies pushing hardware technology need to side with the consumer to preserve home recording rights or they will find themselves without a customer base as anyone inclined to record will be imprisoned and those happy to take what the media companies shove down their throats will have no use for recording hardware.
To me, this is non-news.
Others may want to use that storage space to put a great deal of printed material on it (there's a great deal that's considered public domain) so it can be searched as a type of large reference database.
Far easier, I'm certain, than trying to page through stacks of dusty books in your collection to a reference about some type of repressed technology, or whatnot, don't you think?
Me, I'm waiting for that learning machine in the first Matrix movie. You'd NEVER get my butt out of that chair! I'd be trying to see how much of a datafeed sponge I could become. LOL
- CyberWoLfman
I think thats kind of the whole point. The only reason information about it is circulating the public sector at the moment is the "coolness factor" of having that much storage on a single disk.
As with most all new technologies it will be tailored and marketed to companies first for that very use: large scale backup. If it becomes popular and there is a consumer demand for it in the public sector then it could fan out. But this technology is definately only going to be used in the business sector to begin with and may never reach the average consumer (much like robotic tape libraries, reel-to-reel optical and the like).
In the future, these types of disks will have a severe drop in market share. Even bigger will be when the HDD is phased out. Who needs a HDD when you can use RAM, especially RAM that can retain it's info even AFTER power is turned off, making a computer that turns on at the flick of the mouse. Due to the fast trasfer speeds, and no need to warm the HDD up, we are talking about zero load times, improved heat capacity, better power management, less noise, and the ability to achieve computers far beyond those of today, with technoligy that is already here.
However, for the sake of the argument, lets not consider RAM, only ROM, the idea behind these massive disks if first, great that these disks can store an amazing amount of memory, first, this more or less says that the HDD is obsolite anyways, at least the HDD in its current form, I mean please, $400 for 500 gig, when you say that these 1-2 tera disks come out. There is no need, obviously the HDD industry has to hop on the bandwagon, something they are I am sure already trying to do, though at a slower pace.
A holo HDD would, I have to admit, make the HDD larger then we would ever need by far AT THIS TIME, I'm not saying we can drop all research for HDD, but seriously, the largest program you can install is like 5 gig, you got a terabyte of space, great, what are you going to do with it? What are you going to do with a disk like that? Nothing, unless you plan on buying like 20 HDTV vids on it at once, which is absolutly stupid, or you pirite it. Two options.
people in here. There're several very good
reasons to have high capacity removable media
available.
1. Small businesses need high cap removable
media to back up their online systems. So they
only have 50MB of incremental data and 40 GB of
total data to back up. They don't see the need
to spend thousands on tape changers and tapes,
nor do they see the need to spend thousands on
hiring someone full-time to manage such a
system, nor do they trust outside business on
the internet to store their business data.
Cycling through 2-4 rewritable HVDs for monthly
or quarterly full backups would suit most
businesses just fine. And cycling through 3-4
DVD RWs for weekly incrementals would also suit
them. (Yes, I am prepared for the flamers to
attack me because this isn't the ideal, perfect
backup and archival scheme; it'll be clear
they've never worked for or owned a small
business.)
2. Home computer users cannot and will not
afford tape changers and others, nor will they
spend the time to sit in front of their computer
waiting to change disks. A large cap HVD would
let them start a backup and go off and do other
things.
3. Semi-professional videographers need a lot
more capacity than is immediately obvious. I
have a mere 100GB of diesel event videos and
images; some of the videos are 10GB-30GB in
size. It would be nice to have small, removable
media to store and organize them.
4. Did you know that the bitmap image for a
semi-trailer wrap needs 27 DVDs to store it?
Graphics shops would love to have small media to
store such things, without having to spend a day
or two getting the images off the computer so
they can do other work, and putting the images
back on so the trailer can be rewrapped after a
repair.
If y'all knew more about how information
technology is used in commerce today, y'all'd
realize that there are many more valid reasons
to have 100GB-1TB removable media available,
just for commerce alone.
Should I delve into education, medicine and
research? Where scanning electron microscopes
take lots of high-res images that need to be
stored? Where doctors would like to have the
full 3D imagery of an MRI scan, instead of
single pictures? Where professors can
individually store large research datasets for
courses and put them up just-in-time? These
fields could certainly make use of high-res
removable media.
And how about geological research? And space
research? More industries that can use lots of
removable media.
A Hollywood HD movie using 45GB? Big deal.
That's a tiny dataset compared to those of other
industries.
You know, if you overnight 100GB of data using
FedEx, that works out to about 5GB/hour, or
around 11 Mb/s. So unless you're wealthy, or a
big business, or a research institute, FedExNet
is faster than Internet, and will be for quite
some time.
No, contrary to some opinions in here, there is
an honest and legitimate need for large,
inexpensive removable media. Today. Not in 2050.