Disc-ology with up and coming New Technology
Disc Technology
The next big thing in optical storage is based on a technology named Blu Ray. The disc's are physically not any larger then the present CD/DVD disc's. The real difference between the CD/DVD laser is that the CD/DVD laser is in the red color range and a longer frequency and the Blu Ray laser is in the blue/Ultraviolet range and short frequency. Red lasers being in the longer frequency make a wider pit in the recording material/dye and therefore have to have longer spacing between the pits and spirals to insure proper recording. The blue laser on the other hand is a short frequency and makes short and closer pits, shorter distance means more data storage in the same given area. The storage on a CD is 620MB to 700MB. The DVD is 4.7GB single sided or 9.4 double sided. The newer Blu Ray technology is capable of 27GB's of storage on a single layered Blu Ray Disc (BD) or 54GB's for a double layered disc. What this means is that a person can view 2 hours of high definition video or 13 hours of standard definition video. The double layered Blu Ray Disc will be able to store 54GB of data or video, this will give a person 4.5 hours of viewing of high definition or 20 hours of standard definition. So rather then having to collect a series of discs to see your favorite TV series, you may very well need only to have to buy one disc for the collection.
However, how does 1 terabyte sound? 472 hours of video? Still only the size of a CD/DVD disc? Well that is all very well a possibility with a new method of optical storage called Multiplexed Optical Data Storage or MODS. This new method is being developed by Physicists at the Imperial College London, by the name of Peter Török, lecturer at the Imperial College London, as well as the Institute of Microtechnology, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. The discs are expected to cost the same to produce (pre recorded) as it is for the current DVD discs. The new disc format will be a double sided, double layered disc, with the ability to store up to 250GB per layer, which translates to 1 terabyte of storage. This means that the disc will hold approximately 10 times more then the Blu Ray discs. Which by the by the Blu Ray is to be released sometime in the fourth quarter of 2005. The MODS type of disc is not expected to be out much before 2010 or 2015. In Japan they are already using the Blu Ray disc format, the reason is that out of all of the countries in the world Japan is the has the most people using HDTV. Therefore there is a need in Japan to have a high capacity format for viewing HDTV on disc.
Well that is about it on the new disc formats that are coming up for us.
Rick, Rick's Web Factory
P.S.
If I am encouraged by people that want more information, I can go into more technical details on the newer disc technologies. Just contact me through any of the contact forms, I get to read them all anyway!