Techalyzer

The Holo-Disc is one of the most talked about gadgets in the country right now. It can store 100 DVDs worth of data and it will last for the next 100 years.  This optical wonder is by General Electric. It stores as much as twenty Blu-Ray disks. In total that means it can hold about 500 gigabytes of information.  This is an enormous stride forward when it comes to the saving of digital information.

The technology behind this is genius. Inventors of the Hol-Disc were able to create this data density by embedding microscopic holographic patterns in plastic that is sensitive to light. When the disc is read by a laser beam then the information is retrieved. Each disc contains smaller holograms that contain the information as well. The tiny microholograms are like mirrors that reflect the signal for the data storage of the individual files stored on it.

The discs we use today are made of metal with pits in it which is not as effective as these new plastic disks. Unlike plastic which is an inert carrier in which the information can be embedded, metal surfaces are more fragile. The information literally sits on the surface of the disc so that there is less room for it. This also means that the information that is etched on the surface wears out sooner.  The good news is that the manufacturing process itself is similar to the current one for metal so the price for these new Holo-Discs should not be that high.

Don’t think that you will be able to access this information immediately. These products are not available until 2012.  They will work with current player technology but at first the products will be targeted to big organizations and companies like insurance companies, government and the medical system.

Of course this type of storage is immensely preferable to the old style magnetic tape that is currently storing a lot of data in the big financial and medical institutions. The life span of that storage system is currently only about twenty years and there are a lot of enormous institutions out there that badly need all of their archives and information stored to a better system. Holo-discs are the obvious answer. 

These new discs last a century.  General Electric is obviously going to clean up financially once these discs are in place to replace all that magnetic tape that is slowly rotting in these institutions.  By the way it takes CDs and Blu-Ray discs about a decade to break down as their upper layer corrodes.

For the ordinary guy this means that you can squeeze about 100 movies easily on one disk. This is going to save a lot of us a lot of shelf space.

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