Pat's Posts: Super-dooper storage is on its way!!!

Those clever clogs at G.E corporation have made a break-through in optical storage technologies that could see the equivalent data of 100 DVDs able to be stored on a single disk, rendering Blu-Ray as quaint and obsolete as a 5.25″ floppy disk.Whilst the breakthrough has yet to make it out of G.E’s labs and be mass produced, indications are that things are looking distinctly  promising for it to eventually be mass-produced at affordable prices.

The the secret sauce for this promising feat comes in the form of holographic storage. Holographic media not only stores only 3-D images but can also be used to store shedloads of digital data as well. Data is encoded as complex light patterns which act like microscopic mirrors that reflect patterns which can then be retrieved and deciphered. Whilst traditional DVD and Blu-Ray media store data as a pattern of pits and bumps on their surface Holographic storage can use the width,  depth and breadth of the disk to store data at a significantly higher density.

Whilst the original concept of using holographic storage to store data was first thought up way back in the swinging 60s, the complexities and costs associated with the technology has seen recent holographic storage technologies limited it to specialised market niches with particularly big cheque books. Enter stage left, the boffins from G.E. who, according to analysts have adopted a different approach by using smaller, less complex holograms, making it significantly cheaper to mass produce.

Assuming G.E. have indeed cracked 3-D holographic storage,  shiny drinks coaster like optical media could soon hold a whopping 500 gigabytes of data, which translates into a single disk holoding more Mp3 goodness than I care to count, not to mention every episode of Dancing with Desert Island Survivor Lost ever made and then some. Personally I can’t wait.