Two years ago , GE announced they were work on aprototype form of storagethat used micro - holographic technology swot 500 GB onto an optical disk . Now they ’re capable to write data point onto those discs at speeds tantamount to a Blu - ray burner .
https://gizmodo.com/ge-makes-holographic-storage-breakthrough-for-cheap-er-5229492
Yes , physical media is losing relevance in our Clarence Day to twenty-four hours lives with the rise of cyclosis technologies and jiffy storage . come in a DVD - sized manakin factor , this new engineering wo n’t change that slump drift . But this micro - holographic applied science is intended for long term archival purposes . Something , that if the right way take aid of , will keep its data entire for a hundred years .
Here ’s the marrow of the technology as explained by Peter Lorraine , who deal the Optical Research unit at GE : The disc is a polycarbonate material with millions of the micro - holograph boss onto the disc . When the lightheaded germ — whose beam is the same wavelength as that of a Blu - ray movement — hit the disk , it erases the necessary amount of holograms to represent the data its transcription . Theoretically , consumer drives in the future could be backwards compatible with the Blu - ray format .
The tan speed are well fast than they were during the initial GE declaration two years ago . GE attributes this to a 100x increment in the predisposition of the hologram , making the recording process more magnate efficient . But or else of just using less exponent , they upped the rate at which data is write onto the magnetic disk . According to Lorraine , they ’re take in write speeds around 4 - 5 MB / s , which puts it on par with a Blu - ray platter .
Granted , those write speeds mean it would probably take at least a day to fill up a 500 GB disk , but Lorraine mentioned that since its initial role will be for archival purposes , there could be specialized drives with multiple write promontory . And in time , the technology will sure as shooting get quicker .
What does this mean for the modal techie ? Maybe nothing . possibly in a few year , you ’ll stash all your photos , videos , and music on a single disc without veneration of it wearing out , corrupting , or dying in a topic of age . It ’s also possible that the technology could be reappropriated into other forms of datum storage , but nobody at GE has even begun to think that far ahead . [ GE ]
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