Sure, it's just a prototype for now, but we can't help but feel a bit smitten with any drive capable of playing 100GB of data off a single 4-layer optical disc. The BD camp was also touting 200GB, 8-layer discs as they have since 2004 (at least) while showing off the components that will usher in 8x performance (double-that of existing commercial gear) in a more realistic timeframe. When that might be exactly, no one's willing to say.

We're not sure what's going on with Sony, but it looks like they've also loosed a 100GB HDR-SR8 Handycam everywhere but the US. That's 38-hours of LP-mode recording, kids when the camcorder ships in July. Europeans and Canadians at least, will have dibs on the SR8 in addition to the same 1080i goodness loosed in The States: the crazy small HDR-CX7, the 40GB HDR-SR5, and the 60GB HDR-SR7. Other than the bigger disk, the SR8 is feature identical to the SR7. So what gives Sony? Of course, we've seen our Canadian brethren receive special treatment from Sony before. Anyway, next time you cross the Detroit border for smokes and teenage drinking, don't forget to pick up a few US$1670 SR8s for your pals at Engadget. Thanks.

[Via LetsGoDigital]

Read -- Canada
Read -- Europe

Ok, so we did mention that the oh-so-thrilling "100GB" overlay supposedly seen in the mysterious PowerPoint slide at Korea's X06 seemed a bit out of place, and now we're hearing from Microsoft itself that it's probably too good to be true. Correspondence with the console's creator has elicited comments dubbing the announcement "misleading" and "not reflective of an official announcement of any kind," but it curiously failed to give an outright proclamation citing the photo as burlesquely. Nevertheless, the company claims it has "nothing to announce with regard to a larger hard drive" at this precise moment in time, but it certainly didn't go out of its way to slam this proverbial door shut.

If you've been hankerin' for a bit more room to stash pr0n Xbox Live downloads and other various medias on your 360, and you're not so keen on squeezing in a backup solution or dealing with a frumpy external drive, it looks like you're in luck. Microsoft just announced a 100GB hard drive for the Xbox 360 at their little X06 shindig in Korea, and the drive should be making its way to shelves -- at least in Korea -- by March of '07. There's no info on price yet, or really much info at all, but when has a PowerPoint slide full of Korean characters and lame-fonted "100 GB" overlays ever steered you wrong?

[Thanks, Michael R]

Panasonic says that its new 4-layer 100GB Blu-ray discs are so durable that you'll be able to retrieve the data in 100 years' time (which reminds us a lot of the claims they originally made about CDs, as one may recall). The company has been at work for the last few years making use of "tellurium suboxide palladium-doped phase-change recording films" (or Te-O-Pd, for those in the know) to improve the capacity of its Blu-ray discs. But the company has now achieved what appears to be the optimal ratio for durability and size: a 100GB disc that will last you a century. Of course, a few months ago Panasonic scientists completed a research paper showing a disc-making technique that kicked that timeframe up to 500 years, but could only hold 50GB of data. So that may indicate that if you have 1GB that you really need to be preserved for the next several thousand years, you may want to get some serious cash together and give Panasonic a ring. Of course, all of these developments assume that firstly in 100 years Blu-ray readers will have won the format war, and secondly, will still be around.

Read - TechOn
Read - Proceedings of SPIE

Even though the fastest Blu-ray burner you can buy today maxes out at just a 2x write speed, media manufacturer TDK is already looking towards a wonderful future filled with 4x and faster drives writing 200+GB of data to 8-layer discs. Now that they're gotten the capacity part down, the company is hard at work on discs that won't take five hours to burn, and the first fruit of this labor -- a 25GB platter rated at 6x -- was recently unveiled at Japan's Eighth Data Storage Expo -- although don't expect it to hit stores until next year. They were also showing off that 100GB quad-layer BD-R we heard about awhile back but never got the chance to peep, so make sure to follow the Read link to check out that plus many more exciting shots from what we hear was a pretty happening storage conference.

[Via HDBeat]