Tech & Biz

Holographic Storage: GE Develops 500GB DVD

by Jordan Yerman | April 27, 2009 at 01:58 pm

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General Electric Global Research has made great strides in holographic storage technology, squeezing 500GB onto one regular-sized DVD.

That's more eight times the capacity of my old-school laptop's hard drive... and ten times the capacity of a Blu-ray disc.

So should you hold out on buying that new Blu-ray player? I'd say "yes", but not just because of the numbers above... not only will holographic storage capacity increase, but direct digital delivery (Hulu, Netflix, etc) will also get more efficient and more popular. Some have already done away with a physical media player for their home entertainment systems, and that trend will surely continue to develop.

By the way, holographic storage is the arrangement of bits of info on top of one another, as oppposed to storing them in sequence (i.e. optical or magnetic storage).

By comparison, the highest capacity Blu-ray discs can store up to 50GB of data, while the most common type of DVD holds less than 9GB of information. GE's eventual goal is to store up to 1 TB of data on the new disc format.

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Erik Larson

at 15:23 on April 27th, 2009

It's amazing how storage capacity is expanding at an exponential rate- like processing power. And even bigger stuff is going on in the labs with carbon nanotubes...

Stuff like this works off a little of the karmic debt GE has earned by war profiteering and bilking the taxpayer

Edmund Jenks

at 18:41 on April 27th, 2009

If only GE would stick to this as opposed to working (powered by media giant NBC/Universal) to saddle our country with a cap & trade strategy that transfers taxpayer money to their bottom line in the form of subsidized projects.