You thought Blu Ray had a lot of capacity..

[Stuart C]

Try 500GB (soon to be 1TB) of storage on a standard HD-DVD or Blu ray disc.

Apparently it can be achieved using a slight change in recording technique..

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07...a_rugular_dvd/

[Graham M]

Blimey!

[Chris]

Nice ... presumably a new generation of consumer players would be required in order to do this though. I've not even contemplated buying a blu-ray or HD machine yet (in fact I don't even own a DVD player, aside from the one in my PS2).

[Stuart C]

You probably would, and, TBH, I doubt consumer DVD (even Hi Def) would ever need that much. They are pitching the idea at corporations who may find it helpful for archiving and backups.

Of course, some of our members might find it handy for some of the terrabytes of (ahem) Linux ISOs they have accumulated.

[Chris]

Originally Posted by Stuart C

You probably would, and, TBH, I doubt consumer DVD (even Hi Def) would ever need that much. They are pitching the idea at corporations who may find it helpful for archiving and backups.

Of course, some of our members might find it handy for some of the terrabytes of (ahem) Linux ISOs they have accumulated.

Possibly ... although those sorts of comments always remind me of Bill Gates saying he couldn't see why a PC would need more than 640K of memory ... or IBM forecasting a worldwide market for 2 or 3 computers (or whatever it was).

Build it, and they will come.

[David F]

its just trust that much data to 1 disc.I would want to have 5 copies of said disc to have confidence that my data is safe and just imagine how long thats gotta burn for. Imagine the buffer requirements??? imagine burning it for what 2 or 3 hours then it crashes

[Gareth]

Originally Posted by Chris T

Possibly ... although those sorts of comments always remind me of Bill Gates saying he couldn't see why a PC would need more than 640K of memory ... or IBM forecasting a worldwide market for 2 or 3 computers (or whatever it was).

Build it, and they will come.

The Bill Gates mis-quote is something that annoys me.

For anyone that's interested, here's what Bill said.

Originally Posted by Bill Gates

"So that's a 1 MB address space. And in that original design I took the upper 340k and decided that a certain amount should be for video memory, a certain amount for the ROM and I/O, and that left 640k for general purpose memory. And that leads to today's situation where people talk about the 640k memory barrier; the limit of how much memory you can put to these machines. I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. <audience laughing>. That is, a move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't - it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem."

Now, bear in mind that this talk was made in 1989 about something that happened in 1981... it's easy to look back at the subject matter 25 years later, and laugh at how niaive they were. However, in '81 PCs weren't even in many offices let alone every home.

Let's cut Bill Gates some slack.... he might have said some stupid things in the past, but saying that 640k of memory is all anyone is ever going to need isn't one of them.

ps - for anyone that's interested, you can download an MP3 of the actual presentation here.... although be warned that it is boring

[Chris]

Originally Posted by Gareth

<snip> although be warned that it is boring

Probably why the misconception persists ...

[Safeman]

LMAO Holly Shoot thats insane

[Damien]

Wont this annoy early adopters?

[jtwn]

Try 3.9TB.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc

[Chris]

Originally Posted by Damien

Wont this annoy early adopters?

No, it'll be ages before this gets into a consumer player.

And besides, I thought the early adopters were the ones with cash to splash about and a love for gadgets? They'll love the excuse to buy one, surely?

[Uncle Peter]

Lordy lord, don't scratch the disc then... ordinary DVDs are sensitive enough to little scratches and bits of grime. I'd want to see that sort of capacity media in a protective shell a la minidisc.

[deathtrap3000]

I would think that these will be the standard for the next hd era and just before we move onto Holographic Versatile Disc (for Ultra High Definition).

[Stuart C]

Originally Posted by jtwn

Try 3.9TB.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc

HVD has been around for ages. While it's storage is impressive, this technology has the advantage that it uses discs that are readily (and relatively cheaply) available.