General Electric Develops a 500GB Optical Disc | Hacker News Reader

General Electric Develops a 500GB Optical Disc

physorg.com

10 pointsshard5 comments

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?

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.

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. ?

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...

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.

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