What will be the future of DVDs?
We are already adopting Blu-Ray and HD-DVD formats. Storage space for hard-drives has reached the terabyte (TB) mark. So what else is new? There's a limit to how much data you can store on a disk. I doubt that the magnetic and optical data storage that we use today would continue to exist in the future.
Well, what about flash-drives? They are solid-state, silicone-based storage but there's also a limit to this technology. Every year, your flash-drives (pen/thumb-drives) can store almost twice as much as they were the previous year. This can't go on forever, because Moore's Law isn't sustainable as believed.
Holographics: The next step
Envision the day where all data will be stored in crystals/crystalline materials. In the future, we will need to store data of times past for times ahead, lots of it. CD's and DVD's will rot, data formats will become unreadable, new technologies are needed.
Holographic crystals can store up to 200 DVD's worth of information for up to 1000 years as digits or as microscopic images. Data could be etched into these small crystals using a highly-tuned precision laser.
How it works?
Magnetic and optical data storage works by having individual bits being stored as distinct changes on the (2D) surface of the recording medium. This only records information a bit at a time in a linear fashion.
Holographic data storage records information throughout the (3D) volume of the medium. This enables it to record multiple images in the same area utilizing light at different angles. Holographic storage is capable of reading and writing millions of bits in parallel, giving faster data transfer rates.
See also:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-NllWcgrFg
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