New disc to store hundreds of movies!

Six leading technology companies have formed a consortium to make an optical disc that could store a few hundred movies.

Six leading technology companies have formed a consortium to make an optical disc that could store a few hundred movies.

The Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD) Alliance, which includes Fuji Photo and CMC Magnetics, will let consumers conceivably put a terabyte (1TB) of data on to a single optical disc, reports Cnet news.com.

The consortium said an HVD disc could hold as much data as 200 standard DVDs and transfer data at over one gigabit a second, or 40 times faster than a DVD.

HVD is a possible successor to technologies such as Blu-ray and HD DVD. Single layer Blu-ray discs hold about 25GB of data while dual layer discs hold 50GB. Ordinary DVD discs hold about 4.7GB.

HVD technology will be pitched at corporations and the entertainment market, the HVD Alliance said.

The technology behind HVD is based on holography technology from Japan's Optware, one of the six founders of the consortium. A technical committee was formed in December to flesh out HVD standards.

Sony unveiled a home server with 1TB of storage for the Japanese market last year. Half the capacity would be enough to record six channels of TV for five and a half days non-stop, Sony said.

The consortium, however, is looking at first developing discs with lower capacities. The first assignments of the technical committee involve coming up with standards for a 200GB recordable disc and a 100GB read-only disc.

--Indo-Asian News Service

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