We've heard a lot of talk about the death of
optical media, but for inexpensive high-capacity storage, it's pretty hard to beat -- which is why the TeraDisc, from Israel's Mempile, look like it has such promise. Eschewing the reflectivity principles in current optical media entirely, the TeraDisc system uses light-sensitive molecules called
chromophores to create hologram-like matrices that can be used to store a full terabyte of data on a single disc using a red laser -- and Mempile says that an eventual transition to a blue laser system will enable storage capacities of up to 5TB. The company is hoping to get a prototype ready in 18 months, and plans to ship the first version a year after that, priced around $3,000 for the drive and $30-60 for a 600GB disc. No word on the price of those 1TB discs, but you can bet they won't be cheap.
Read - Mempile website
Read - In-depth article about TeraDisc at The Future of Things
[Thanks, Iddo]
posted August 23rd 2007 8:27AM
"eventual transition to a blue laser system will enable storage capacities of up to 5GB" -- you mean TB?
You have a typo there, i think you meant 5TB.
Interesting story non-the-less
"...an eventual transition to a blue laser system will enable storage capacities of up to 5GB."
Wow! 5GB, you say? Won't that be incredible!? A whole 5GB on one disc. We can all dream of the day when we have enough information to store on a 5GB disc ;)
Do u not mean "a blue laser system will enable storage capacities of up to 5TB"
"...but for inexpensive high-capacity storage..."
"...but you can bet they won't be cheap."
?
Anyone else remember Constellation 3D (c-3d.net) from about 8 years ago? Yeah, I think they promised 1TB transparent optical discs by 2001.... Too bad it never happened.
I remember Constellation 3D vividly. They were claiming to come out with FMD-ROM. This looks and sounds exactly like that. Constellation 3D was based in Israel too. I think this is the same thing rebadged. At that time, they claimed 100 GB. Upto 10 layers. 10 layers were possible because the wavelength of the emitting laser is different from the wavelength of the received data (fluorescent emission). Each layer could be tuned to a different wavelength laser. I hope this time out they are legit. I don't know why they failed the last time.
McHoffa,
Mempile is using the same technology as the failed 3d Constellation and
probably has alot of the same people involved.
yea how does that make sense?? if it's over $100 for a TB then it isn't cost competitive at all, considering in 2 years a TB hard drive will probably be $100
When I read that, I thought it said "Chronosphere" at first... Hmmm... I play too much Red Alert 2...
I'm sorry HD-DVD and BLURAY. The format war is over.
or it will just add another format to the already annoying format war. Obviously simply choosing a format based on storage size isn't the only deciding factor in the war or Bluray would have won already.
Great potential and I commend these guys.. but adding this as a 3rd option in the HD optical format war is gonna make basic consumers' heads spin (as if they werent already with all the propaganda spread about the formats).
the good thing about would be the red laser! Much cheaper than blue and more reliable, at least so far.
Yeah if this is true. why would anyone need HD or BR.. Both would be pointless.. Hmmmmmmmm i wonder if MS and sony will try and buy the technology and just shelf it.
SAY GOODBYE TO OUR BELOVED FORMAT WAR..
For those that say the format war is over, it isn't. Hollywood isn't going to back a successor now, before it has milked HDDVD and Blu-ray to death.
And then Dr. Evil will come in and squeel:
"Are those frickin' sharks with frickin' red laser beams attached to their frickin' heads"
Maybe we should get rid of blue ray now, just to prove that size is the only thing people care about in a new format, oh wait they want additional content also
damn, this would be nice. Imagine being able to store all your HD DVD/Blu Ray movies on one disc? As long as it was RW, then you could keep adding more movies to it.
acctually that's a really smart thought. i didn't even think of that. you wouldn't have to burn 1000gb's at once, you could just burn 8gb's here and there, maybe once a week, making these things PERFECT
Do you think that maybe the 600GB one actually is the terabyte one just that after all the error protection that's what's left?
Prototype in 18 months, actual retail units another 12 months after that.
$350 for a 1TB drive right now: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145167
In 2.5 years, 1TB drive will be $100. The only benefit here is if the disks are cheaper than quoted in the article, and if they last longer on a shelf than a HD. $3k for the drive + $100 per 1TB disk is still a hefty premium, though if storage space is tight I can understand.
But yeah, this isn't competing on price.
The technology is very new so iam sure they cant predict the cost. And that cost would be lowered as the technology become mainstream.
But i still want my 1TB DISK or at least 300-500GB
screw HD and BR for not giving us a viable ioption for DATA yet. WTF who cares about movies WE ALL WANT DATA DAMNIT.
I'm pretty interested in the read/write speeds of these optical discs. What good is 1TB of storage, if it's only accessible with USB 1.1-like speeds?
Yawn. Yet another optical storage technology that will never be mainstream.
I look forward to watching movies from these disks on my SED and/or OLED TV.
- Jasen.
I think instead of creating more formats, we should instead focus on making bigger and bigger DVDs and drives for our increased storage needs. I can imagine it now; the year 2010, and Sony releases the new 1 meter-radius DVD, with a storage capacity of 2.3 TB
With slow read/write speeds, these high end optical formats are just not the way to go. I don't want to wait 30 minutes just so my 80GB music library can load. Instead of focusing on all these optical formats (like Blu-ray, HD-DVD, this format, and the other formats out there), they would be focusing on ways to decrease hard drive prices and to get greater capacities. I purchased a 500GB external hard drive for $100 the other day, that is a pretty good purchase. They had a 1TB drive there as well but it had a $350 price tag. That drive should have been $150-$200. So they should stop focusing on optical formats and just focus on hard drive/flash drive storage capacities. The day when a affordable notebook is released with a 160GB flash drive and when we have affordable 20TB hard drives is the day when I will finally be happy. No more format war, just download your content and go.
Kudos and good observation. I don't understand why the rest of you are debating over media sizes and HD vs. Blu when a PC or receiver is just going to scale down the transfer speeds to the point where regular use just isn't practical.
I'm sorry, but no. The reason that people want to put things on a thing like DVD's and HD-DVD's is because they are more permanent than hard drives. Think about it: a hard drive has a problem.... you have to send it away to be fixed. DVD's and HD-DVD's have almost NONE of those problems as long as you treat them well.
wow, people are acctually compalning about a 1tb disc or comparing it to blue-ray/hd-dvd?
what are you guys n00bs? I call n00b. who the hell complains about soemthing a few hundred times higher in capacity. ya, discs might cost $30 at the start. wow, surprise, it's not like best buy is selling blue ray discs for $30 right now, or that one dvd-r's came out years ago they cost $30. n00bs.
imagine a few years after release walking in and buying a 25pack of 1tb disks for $12.99. that's wicked.
as for blue-ray dvd or a 3rd format... blue-ray and hd dvd already lost, people download, I for one am only lookign at disks now as a storage media for divx/xvid media, I coudl care less about buying a movie at bestbuy. either downloading legally or illigally, either way I'll be downloading but not bothering with which 'format" is better. codecs are the only format I'm interested in and my computer+xbox play em all.
oh dear, add a single scratch to the disc and you've instantly lost 1,400+ movies or dare i say it, 260,000 mp3s! gosh if i ever get one of these, i'm treating it like diamond dust in its own vacuum controlled room.
This is.. mm.. the fourth or is it the fifth '1TB optical disk' or very high capacity optical disk that's been announced in the past 7 years and so far... none of them have made it to production.
Call me when they have something on the shelves I can buy. :)
would really love to see something like this win over blu-ray/hd dvd. would teach the big guys for not agreeing to a standard.
You know. If it is glowing green like in the picture, and has holograms in it, I will buy it, no matter if it costs 100$ or not.
I look forward to Inphase, Mempile, Optware and others bringing out their
holographic storage technology. They are still far off the mark as far as
infinite read / write random seeking data storage like Colossal Storage who is
still working on its test bed proof of concept and should be out around 2010.
http://colossalstorage.net
will they rewritable?