Blu-ray and HD-DVD to unite

[BioHazard]

Sony and Toshiba join forces (http://www.ps3portal.com/?view=article&article=96&PHPSESSID=140709c9df47337c3cd123ea1e3317cc)

Sony didn't want to see another repeat of VHS vs Betamax, so they have decided to join forces with Toshiba to create a universal format that combines the strengths of both ( though it probably won't have as much storage space as blu-ray). This will be implemented in the ps3 as well.

[Spyd]

It'll be a pity if this results on lowering the capacity of the discs. I found 25Gb on the standard blu-ray discs extremely scarce.
I remember when the first CD-ROM drives started to appear. The hard disks were 40Mb, and you had a CD that had more than 15 times the capacity of your hard drive!
And I guess that this time with the new format will be similar... but the new medium will be 15 times smaller than the current hard drives http://forums.3drealms.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/frown.gif

[DudeMiester]

That's why a lot of people, myself included, believe that holographic media will blow away Blue-Ray and HD-DVD, as it starts off with inital capacities of 300GBs and will initally scale to 1.4TB.

[8IronBob]

Maybe for a HD-DVD RW, that may replace today's hard drives, so that way your games and other programs can be portable if you have more than one PC in the house. That's gonna rock when that happens. After all, with today's DL DVDs, you can take an old 8 GB HD and placethat whole HD onto a DVD+RW DL, if they make DL DVD+RWs as well as DL DVD+Rs. That may be the next phase, we'll have to wait this one out to see the true possibilities of what we can do with those.

[DudeMiester]

Seriously, sometimes I think you work at marketing department somewhere. As for holographic media, or the other optical disk technologies, they will not replace the HD. Hard drives have density comparible to holographic media, but more importantly they read/write a lot faster. Last I heard holographic media can do about 23MB/s read/write, whereas the latest hard drives are doing 60MB/s read/write.

[pec]

Holographic media? WTF?! http://forums.3drealms.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/eek.gif

Have I missed something?

[IwantMORE]

As far as I understand it the holographic disc's are like the holograms you get on magazines or stickers where you see different images from different angles.

This could be used to store info on a disc in many layers depending on the position of the laser. This combined with an increase in the number of levels of information stored per bit, i.e the move from binary storage to say 6-8 levels of data per bit, either by using colour or different signal strengths are the main areas of development at the moment.

Mainly it's a question of how presicely you can read info from as small an area as possible and how much info can you get from each bit you read.

One things for sure in a few years time we will be thinking TB's rather than GB's.

[pec]

^Ok, thanks for explaining that. Interesting stuff.

For a moment I thought being inside a sci-fi movie or s.th. I guess I watched too much Star Trek. http://forums.3drealms.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif http://forums.3drealms.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/dopefish.gif

[NutWrench]

I don't like the idea of trusting my data to easily scratched, spinning plastic disks. Especially 25 gigs worth. I'm really looking forward to solid state storage, like a non-volatile, high-speed version of flash memory.

[DudeMiester]

Well the basic way that holographic media work is they write the interferance pattern the laser onto the disk. If you look up how holograms are made, you'll see what I mean. By changing how the light interferes, you can create many interference patterns, each one having a different value. From this you can store the equilavent of 1000+ bits where before you could only store 1 bit. In addition to that, you can still have multipule layers.