Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, Mempile

Obsolete gains a new Poster Child?

By Joshua S. Hill

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

We've mentioned before the race for supremacy in the digital medium war between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. Well it looks as if both of those are going to be shown the door, with Israeli born Mempile claiming that they will soon break the Terabyte storage limit, and have discs the same size as a DVD or CD on shelves in 2 to 3 years.

Blu-Ray currently claims a maximum storage of 50 GB for its discs, making them the leader when specifications are written down on paper. But with the HD-DVD players inching closer and closer to the magical $200 barrier that will allow them to be sold as an option to low and average income families, the game might not be won on paper.

Mempile have announced that they have managed to store a total of 800 GB on a disc that is made of material which is highly responsive to two-photon writing and reading. The feat is made possible by employing 200 5GB layers, each one only five microns apart, allowing for an incredible amount of storage.

The question is thus raised though, for whom will this benefit? Journalistic endeavor is at the heart of the reporting of this story, with everyone claiming a successor for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD has been found before anyone has even won. However, the statistics of what could be stored on such a disc come in to play right about now.

On a 1TB disc, you could store:

212 DVD-quality movies

250,000 MP3 files

1,000,000 large Word documents

Ask yourself this question, how many movies do you want on a disc you buy from a store?

That's right, and unless something incredible happens in the movie industry, you're not going to find a studio that is going to allow for all their movies to be placed on a disc and be sold for $19.99.

This new discovery though is just what the tech industry needs, with neither of the current formats allowing for any significant storage increase. So if a hard digital medium is needed in the next 5 years for storage alone, then this is definitely going to be a competitor for that market.

Of course, there are those of us who do not believe that hard storage will be a feasible solution for the future, and are relying on over-the-air streaming and internet storage to be the next medium that captures everyone's attention until the Star Trek --like crystal storage comes along.

(http://www.tech.co.uk/home-entertainment/hi-fi-and-audio/other-playback-and-recording-formats/news/how-to-fit-1tb-of-data-on-one-cd-sized-disc?articleid=1665250963&source=rss)