

General Electric Develops a 500GB Optical Disc - shard
http://www.physorg.com/news160061435.html

======
ShabbyDoo
By the time this gets to market, won't I carry a one TB thumb drive in my
pocket? They apparently haven't heard the Gretsky quote about "skating to
where the puck is going to be."

More generally, it seems that the "USB disk" abstraction layer allows
innovation in storage without the pain of hardware standards adoption. I
understand using this disk for consumer-ish stuff as a means of enforcing
copyright via hardware, but why would commercial users care?

~~~
irrelative
Well, GE is certainly interested in the copyright enforcement ideas behind
this media, but there are still commercial uses.

I suspect that a fairly common use for commercial users would be medical
imaging storage -- huge amounts of data, but rarely accessed. A few other
pluses for medical applications: hospitals care about volumetric density so
that they don't have to store giant piles of USB keys; they don't want to have
to maintain electronics on a per-disc basis so harddrives aren't the best
solution.

Just a thought, but GE usually markets towards industries with technological
applications rather than computer technologies themselves.

~~~
ShabbyDoo
Is flash memory a good long-term backup medium? I have no idea if it degrades
over time. It seems that one could design a flash-based "modular media system"
(sorry, I have no better words) that would be as dense today as this GE
optical disk but have the advantage of sizing up in the future. Say, 500 gigs
per unit today, 1 TB a year from now, etc. So, density could improve without
changing out media readers. Think about any camera flash card and the
density/price improvements.

Also, what if the requirement of 1Mx+ re-writability was removed? It's not
like the hospital will re-use the media that many times if its purpose is
long-term storage. What other requirements could be removed to improve
density, cost, etc. ?

------
Hoff
Nothing against GE or any other vendor doing R&D work here, but call me back
when the format reaches mass market numbers and traction, and when the media
longevity and reliability and pricing are all better known.

The numbers of optical and magneto-optical and tape other (now) dead-end
drives and drive formats are legion.

Even once-popular formats can get into trouble here. There are organizations
that make their living rolling their critical data from one of these now-weird
and now-archaic formats to another and more current format. And there's the
occasional success with a particularly unusual format that gets publicized:

[http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-
lunar22...](http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-
lunar22-2009mar22,0,1783495,full.story)

------
gojomo
If it takes 5-6 years for these to be productized, magnetic hard drives may be
to 10TB/$100 by then. So these could be DOA.

