James Delahunty
3 Feb 2005 21:30
Does hundreds of movies on just one optical disc sound interesting to you? Well a group known as the Holographic Versatile Disc Alliance want to do just that. Fuji Photo and CMC Magnentics are two of six companies, who have formed a consortium to promote HVD technology, which they say can be used to put 1TB of data onto just one disc. The consortium say that a HVD disc could hold about 200 standard DVD's, and transfer data at speeds 40 times that of DVD, about 1GB per second. HVD technology is probably still years off however.
HVD is seen more as a possible successor to HD-DVD and Blu-Ray technologies. Blu-Ray single layer discs can hold about 25GB of data but a Dual Layer Blu Ray disc could hold about 50GB of data. Meanwhile, single layer DVD discs can only hold about 4.7GB. The HVD alliance plans to pitch HVD technology at the entertainment industry and corporations. The technology behind HVD is based on holography technology from Japan's Optware, one of the six founders of the consortium.
Sony unveiled a home server with 1TB of storage for the Japanese market last year and advertised it as being able to record six television channels for five and half days straight, while only using half the full capacity. The organisation first wants to work on discs with lower capacity however, but still is talking about recordable discs that can hold up to 200GB of data. They are also talking about a read-only disc capable of holding 100GB of data.
Source:
News.com