Pioneer Unveil 400GB Optical Disk
Japanese electronics manufacturer Pioneer unveiled a new 400GB optical disk on Monday ? that?s enough to hold most peoples hard drives. One downside though ? its not re-writable.
The crafty chaps at Pioneer created the worlds first 16 layer disk, with each layer holding a massive 25GB. Sadly do to the read-only aspect, the information on it can?t be modified, but it is 16 times bigger than the storage on a typical Blu-ray disk.
?The development of multilayer optical discs has been slowed down by the difficulty manufacturers have encountered when they try to obtain a clear, stable signal from each recording layer,? Pioneer explained. The say that crosstalk from adjacent layers and transmission loss are to blame.
Using optical disk production technology developed for DVDs, Pioneer said it solved these issues and created a structure on the disk that avoids crosstalk from adjacent layers, resulting in this 16-layer optical disk that can play back high-quality signals from each layer.
According to Pioneer, the disks are usable on a Blu-ray disk player, and they say they could be used by game and movie studios as a way to push even more content on to disk.
Pioneer will present the details of its research at the International Symposium on Optical Memory and Optical Data Storage 2008, which begins July 13 in Hawaii.
“I don’t think this is a game changer,” Joshua Martin, a Yankee Group analyst, told TechNewsWorld. ?The industry has not yet reached capacity points on Blu-ray discs that would necessitate an expansion, at least not in the consumer space.
“It may be a different story in the business world, in the enterprise space,” he noted.
However, when it comes to putting movies on a disc, “there is still an inherent value in having a multidisc set. Until that perception of value goes away, having one disc could be a bit of a detriment for a manufacturer,” Martin said.
For example, if a movie studio was able to provide enough content to fill up a disc that size, what if the consumer lost or damaged the disc? “Then the consumer would have lost an entire television series or season of a show,” he pointed out.
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