The Need for Lots of Storage for On-Demand Applications

I read a great snapshot article in Baseline magazine. It spoke about the General Electric technologists making a breakthrough in digital storage. They're calling it "micro-holographic storage material". They claim it can store 500 GB of storage on a single DVD-size disk. The original story was found at TechSpot.com. The science behind it is fairly simple; optical media material allows increased amounts of light to be reflected by the holograms, thus allowing the decrease in size of the holograms. The micro-holographic players that GE hopes to introduce to the market will be backward compatible with current DVDs and CDs (that's a smart move). GE is also talking about $0.10 per gigabyte for storage with the new technology.

According to "How Stuff Works", there are two basic categories of holograms, transmission and reflection. Transmission holograms create a 3-D image when monochromatic light, or light that is all one wavelength, travels through them. Reflection holograms create a 3-D image when laser light or white light reflects off of their surface.

An interesting fact about holograms; if you tear a hologram in half, the original hologram is created on the two smaller pieces.

Considering the world of marketing is constantly shifting towards "1's and 0's', requirements for greater digital storage engines are going to be required. If GE can pull this off, we should see a variety of new applications being launched around BIG storage requirements.