Blu-ray optical discs were one of the great milestones in portable disc technology. They could hold 25 GB on a single layer disc and 50 GB, more than older versions of hard drives, on a dual-layer disc. Now that Blu-ray has been out for a year and the digital age is coming quickly, people are beginning to wonder what will the next disc format be, if any is to take the place of current ones already? Japanese company TDK introduced a new kind of optical disc about a week ago that literally would be like having 41 Blu-ray discs on one single disc. The disc itself can hold a terabyte of data on a crazy 16 layers of recording structure.
The crazy part about it is that this is a size of storage that most normal hard drives would have trouble competing with. Most 3.5” hard drives mainly get to about 1.5 TB of storage and a laptop’s 2.5” hard drive will typically reach the highest of 750 GB or in some rare cases only 1 TB. This would not only bring a whole new angle on watching over 40 movies on a single disc, but it will make taking massive amounts of information a very safe, easy, and transferable way of the future.
Now being this is merely an exhibit at a Japanese tech show, we obviously cannot expect to see this on any form of market to replace Blu-ray anytime soon. Not only would it be grossly overpriced for a 20 dollar movie, but there would also be a compatibility issue involved in the conversion. These discs can be read at the same speed as Blu-ray discs on the market today, but they are a dead stop for backwards compatibility due to their 2.5x thicker aspects. Also, not many people may be interested in going out and spending the money on a disc that would likely have nearly 500 GB of empty space. What on Earth would Hollywood do with all of that space on a single disc? Give each of the actors room for every tweet they ever made? Because I have a feeling that would only be the beginning.
So I do have to admit, when the price comes down, the players come out, and people find out what to do with all of that space, I will probably be one of the people in line for these wonderful new inventions of extremely movable media. That and I would just love to see them find a way to use 900 GB for interviews, cool features, and bonus content.
Ivana Isadora 