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Thread: Will Holographic Versatile Disc Ever Become a Reality?

  1. #1
    The User DemonDragonJ's Avatar
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    Default Will Holographic Versatile Disc Ever Become a Reality?

    Several years ago, there was news about holographic versatile disc (HVD), a new optical disc format that could potentially be the successor to blu-ray disc, just as blu-ray disc is the successor to DVD. Previous optical disc formats store data in the form of microscopic pits on the surface of the disc, but HVD stores data throughout the entire structure of the disc and also uses a different type of laser than what previous formats use, allowing for greater storage capacities; blu-ray discs can typically store from 25 to 50 gigabytes of data, but an HVD can store several hundred gigabytes, or even theoretically as much as several terabytes of data, making them very appealing for storing large amounts of data.

    However, this format seems to have been largely forgotten, today, and never became popular, as it was expected to. Why is that? Is it too expensive to become widespread? Was it simply not able to compete with the rising popularity of flash memory and online streaming? What does everyone else here have to say on this subject?
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  2. #2
    The floppy drive is no longer obsolete. AmEv's Avatar
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    Default Re: Will Holographic Versatile Disc Ever Become a Reality?

    I'm suddenly reminded about the Hitchhiker's Guide movie....
    Two years. They were great. Let's make the next ones even better!

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    Anodized. Again. Konrad's Avatar
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    Default Re: Will Holographic Versatile Disc Ever Become a Reality?

    Disc formats are already becoming somewhat obsolete. Audio CD, DVD, and Blu-Ray are still everywhere but I think it's obvious they're all getting replaced by digital streaming and solid-state storage. Blu-Ray currently offers the highest speed and storage density of the discs but SSD speeds and HDD capacities keep steadily narrowing the price gap. Music and photos and movies and raw data are all far more potable across USB devices, people increasingly want to port such data onto phones and laptops and other mobile devices which aren't equipped with large clunky ODDs, people increasingly use huge cheap HDDs or huge cheap cloud storage for off-device backup/archive purposes.

    While this HVD format (or something else bigger and better than Blu-Ray) might indeed become the next de-facto standard everybody plugs into their TVs and computers, I don't really see it being such a big thing. And no doubt HDD manufacturers will quickly adopt some sort of magnificent unbelievable holographically-layered magnetic technology into their products once the merits of such a technology prove viable, so again the current media price/performance/density hierarchy will remain largely undisturbed. I think these HVDs (or whatever) might gain ground only if they could be robust and cheap and fast enough to fill the niche between SSDs and HDDs, or if they could be dense and sturdy and low-power enough to become standard equipment on small-form-factor devices like smartphones. They would necessarily involve moving parts and optical mechanisms which impose limits on miniaturization and power efficiencies and data throughput ... so I honestly don't think we're going to see them gain a lot of ground vs SSDs and HDDs (which keep on getting faster and denser along curves akin to Moore's Law) ... how can any kind of physically-spinning disc possibly compare vs raw flash memory storage or superdense magnetic storage?

    Besides, Sony invested a lot into ramming Blu-Ray down our throats - they entirely circumvented the (then faster and denser and cheaper and generally better) HD DVD format and deliberately created a "format war" against the HD DVD Technology Promoters Group, in short they wanted to make mo money than everyone else so they forced the issue and gambled against the entire industry (and won, as it turns out, since HD DVD is now defunct). So I seriously doubt we'll see anything newer and better take a chunk out of Blu-Ray dominance until/unless it is another Sony initiative.
    My mind says Technic, but my body says Duplo.

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    Yuk it up Monkey Boy! Airbozo's Avatar
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    Default Re: Will Holographic Versatile Disc Ever Become a Reality?

    Konrad hit the nail on the head with respect to flash storage. It is going to be cheaper than spinning rust pretty soon and with NVMe already starting to dominate in the Data Center for speed and reliability, the cost is coming down a lot faster and the speed is already better than anything except local memory (and there are several products in development that use the memory bus for flash type drives). Even at movie theatres, they no longer use traditional media (films or HDD's) to transfer movies and instead are opting for digital downloads via secure networks. There was talk of using flash for this, but that got nixed because of theft and piracy concerns (There are still some discussions on this due to network speeds and transmission errors). Sometimes great ideas get leapfrogged due to competition and time to market constraints. This may be one of those ideas.
    "...Dumb all over, A little ugly on the side... "...Frank Zappa...

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