14 DAY TRIAL // The Israel-based Mempile company is going to demonstrate a new medium to hold half a terabyte of data on a DVD disc that is made of a special polymer. The company also claims that they will manage to produce TeraDisc DVDs, able to hold one Terabyte of data in the next few years. This promise is likely to set a new revolution in the storage business, since backups can be stored on optical media at a small fraction of the price of spinning disk and tape.
The high-definition disks we are using today can store no more than 50 GB of data (the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats). The TeraDisc DVD can easily hold up to 250,000 high-resolution photos or MP3s, or about 40 times the content of a HD-DVD, or 115 DVD movies. This is a ridiculous amount of data at the moment, given that the largest hard-drive has barely reached this capacity, but Tom Coughlin, a storage analyst at Coughlin Associates said that over the next 10 years, both consumer HD products will increase more than 10 times their current resolution.
"If HD now is 25GB, you can easily have something that's 300GB or larger in the future. So I think we've not reached the limits of resolution that people want in their entertainment devices," Coughlin said.
Mempile's technology will ask for special recorders, that are estimated to sell at prices between $3,000 and $4,000. The company hopes to perfect their technology and get a 700GB platter until 2011. It is estimated to sell for about $30.
According to Erez, the HD-DVD technology reflects the laser ray back and causes a slight deterioration in the read signal, which produces some background noise. Their clear substrate approach gives a cleaner and more efficient signal. "We have no noise in looking at the 200th layer or the second layer or the 10th," Erez said.
Another interesting optical storage technology is developed by Plasmon PLC, that uses Blu-Ray's blue-laser approach. Their technology is called Ultra-Density Optical (UDO) and can write up to 60GB on a proprietary DVD format platter for corporate data archive use. Their automated libraries can store terabytes of data on multiple platters. The company has plans of developing 240GB platters in the near future.