There was a rumor for some time now, that a large capacity disc will be developed, but nothing on-topic has proven so yet. Now, Hitachi-Maxell is planning to organize a showcase this week, and present to the open public their new 300GB holographic CD’s. It does seem like this is Science-Fiction, but I can assure you it’s not.

We are all asking ourselves what would be the advantages and disadvantages of this removable media. Within advantages, I could mention the transfer rate of 20MB/s, the high capacity and the multitude of operations that could be fulfilled with the help of it, like large amounts of backups, uncompressed media (movies and audio) that could be easily edited later, and many many more.

Disadvantages? The price, of course. It’s expected that one holographic disc will cost somewhere between $100 and $125, and the optical drive that will be able to operate them will go up to $15.000! And wait, there’s more for the future. In 2008, InPhase plans a second-generation 800GB rewritable optical disc with data transfer rates of about 80MBbps, with plans to expand its capacity to 1.6TB by 2010.

Amazing. What do you think about the high capacity disks? Share your opinion with us by leaving a comment behind.

Posted in Hardware by Bogdan Boghiu