Yes, physical media is losing relevance in our day to day lives with the rise of streaming technologies and flash storage. Coming in a DVD-sized form factor, this new technology won’t change that declining trend. But this micro-holographic technology is intended for long term archival purposes. Something, that if properly taken care of, will keep its data intact for a hundred years.
Here’s the gist of the technology as explained by Peter Lorraine, who manages the Optical Research unit at GE: The disc is a polycarbonate material with millions of the micro-holograms stamped onto the disc. When the light source—whose beam is the same wavelength as that of a Blu-ray drive— hits the disc, it erases the necessary amount of holograms to represent the data its recording. Theoretically, consumer drives in the future could be backwards compatible with the Blu-ray format.
The burn speeds are considerably faster than they were during the initial GE announcement two years ago. GE attributes this to a 100x increase in the sensitivity of the holograms, making the recording process more power efficient. But instead of just using less power, they upped the rate at which data is written onto the disc. According to Lorraine, they’re seeing write speeds around 4-5 MB/s, which puts it on par with a Blu-ray disc.
Granted, those write speeds mean it would probably take at least a day to fill up a 500GB disc, but Lorraine mentioned that since its initial use will be for archival purposes, there could be specialised drives with multiple write heads. And in time, the technology will certainly get faster.
What does this mean for the average techie? Maybe nothing. Maybe in a few years, you’ll stash all your photos, videos, and music on a single disc without fear of it wearing out, corrupting, or dying in a matter of years. It’s also possible that the technology could be reappropriated into other forms of data storage, but nobody at GE has even begun to think that far ahead. [GE]
Daryl
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 7:38 AMUp to now, photographs and the printed word was stored on paper.
One wonders if the data stored over the last 20 years could be read by historians 50 or more years from now.
I suppose jpegs might be safe but RAW photos were proprietry except for the Adobe standard.
There’s some group in the US who is dedicated to storing public domain works as ASCII text which is a simple format.
Will Word docs be readable in 50 years?
Also magnetic media will probably decay over time (I blame cosmic rays and such) and CDs suffer from a disease which causes the material to bubble or craze.
Generally the metallic coatings will survive but the deterioration was noticed on the colored disks such as the blue and purple ones.
Today’s media makers don’t know if their products will last for 20 years.
photos printed on paper don’t last as long as silver halide paper. My efforts over the years mostly faded over time except for the photos kept in an album.
So the worry is that we may be living in a dark age where digital information may not be readible in 50 years.
TSH
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 10:40 AMTaiyo Yuden claims its discs are good for 100 years if archived properly. I have no reason to doubt their honesty, but of course only time will tell :–]. Disc rot is real, but like all things if you take care of your media it can last a long time.
I don’t know about photo paper and such. Canon claims that photos printed with it’s ChromaLife ink (with Canon paper, of course) will maintain their vibrancy for 100 years if archived properly. Once again, time will tell!
One thing that is overlooked is that it’s not just the media that has to survive: devices capable of reading it have to survive as well – or at least the technical specifications of such devices so that the data can be read. Consider the 8″ floppy disk: magnetic media issues aside, I can’t imagine there’d be too many 8″ disk drives around today!
Looking around at how little of our information would survive a 100, 200, 1000 year “dark age” makes me wonder whether humanity has reached this level of technical sophistication before and we’re actually living in a post-post-apocalyptic world.
Ash
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 11:08 AM4 to 5MB per second write speed? Isnt that kinda slow? It’d take ages to transfer a 4.7GB DVD to this thing.