The Terabyte DVD
from the just-in-case-you-need-a-bit-of-space... dept
Running out of digital storage space? It looks like the latest breakthroughs are going to make sure that storage space isn’t a huge problem for many going forward. The latest in optical disc technology is a disc the size of a DVD, but which holds a terabyte of data — which means your entire movie collection could probably sit on one disc. The article notes this should hold 472 hours worth of “broadcast quality” video — or “all 350 episodes of The Simpsons or each of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s 178 episodes with room to spare.” Of course, some are saying that the age of content on plastic discs is ending, as smaller rewritable USB drives will take over (assuming of course, everyone doesn’t overreact and ban all USB drives following today’s story about the potential security threats they present).
Comments on “The Terabyte DVD”
Making the technology promises pay
Quite frankly, it is this kind of technology that tells me that we need to slow down our capability/appetite to use more and more storage space and start to make good on the promises of digital technology. By this, I mean using less resources to store information. For example, the promise of ebooks was supposed to reduce the number of paper books being printed. Instead, the reverse happened. As soon as we have bigger hard drives, as soon as we have VCDs, we come up with DVDs and reasons to continue use up more space. I have a couple thousand CDDVDs, representing a lot of plastic with noxious chemicals that in a couple of years will be obsolete, and by some measures, useless because it will have deteriorated to the point that the data will be lost. I’d love to have a “small” binder of a few discs to hold all of the stuff I’ve saved. When will the level of data hunger level off so we can realize the promise?
Between 2010 and 2015? They won't make it.
Didn’t the gang at Optware say they can get their 200GB Holographic Versatile Discs in consumer hands by 2007? (meaning people could afford them in 2008, of course…) And didn’t they also say that they’re working toward a terabyte on one disc before 2010?
Then again, considering that Blu-Ray is at least two years from critical mass, maybe this news is just another one of those technological breakthroughs that we’ll report on now and never actually see. Thank you, drive through…