Future of Optical Removable Storage

When mankind looks beyond the future horizon, there is always a demand to make a technological leap. In most of the applications, lights are still replacing magnetics in term of storing and reproduction tecnologies. Magnetic storage devices will soon become obsolete due to the dimension limitation of physical recording area. Beyond the future horizon, the combination of light and quantum techonolgies will take advantage of both spatial and temporal properties to create extremely high capacity storage media.

In the reproduction technologies, todays so called Full HD - Full High Definition (1920x1080, 7.1 audio reproduction, 24fps) will soon become obsolete by the new technology of UHDV - Ultra High Definition Video (7680×4320, 22.2 audio reproduction, 60fps) [1]. The UHDV prototype format currently proposed by NHK (Japan), BBC (UK/GB), and RAI (Italy). Thus the certainty of this technology will stand in the test of time is unpredictable since human is keep looking to far beyond future in reproduction technology that incorporates materialisation of reproduced holographic images, which will incorporate both spatial and temporal properties in light and quantum technologies. Even the sound reproduction is treated equally as well in both spatial and temporal domains.

The data size of UHDV [2] is about 194GB/min for uncompressed footage with 22.2 audio channels. If the MPEG-2 compression is used, the UHDV data size will somewhat 6GB/min. This means that the future high-definition recordings require extremely high capacity storage media.

As February 2006 [3], there are 19 prestigeous companies forming a Holographic Versetile Disc (HVD) forum to incorporate holographic properties in storage media, enable data storing up to 3.9TB (theoritically). The technique is to record the data in three-dimension compares with conventional consumer optical storage media that store the data in two-dimension.

However, the technology will never stop. The 50TB or up to 240TB optical storage is emerging at the horizon, called Protein Coated Disc (PCD) [4]. Although the current work is theoritically developed by Professor Venkatesan Renugopalakrishnan, PCD gives breaktrhough in extremely high capacity optical storage technologies. The PCD incorporate light-sensitive protein from genetically altered microbe. The challenge is to store data in various light response of the light-sensitive protein.

In comparison, the following are the list of 120mm optical storage media:
- Compact Disc
Digital Audio, Data, Kodak PhotoCD, Phillips CD-I, HDCD, and VideoCD
80min of uncompressed audio (44.1KHz, 16 bit) or 700MB data
- DVD
DVD Video, DVD Audio, SACD
4.7GB Single Layer, or 9.4GB Dual Layer
- HD-DVD
Video
15GB Single Layer, or 30GB Dual Layer
- BluRay
Video or data
25GB Single Layer, or 50GB Dual Layer
- HVD
Video or data
3.9TB
- PCD
Video or data
50TB or up to 240TB

In conclusion, audio and video recordings and reproductions technology never stop and always try to break the furthest horizons. No matter how theoritically the technology will be, it will always be consumerised, and the life expectancies of current technologies will always be shorter. Both consumers and producers will always be shaped from time to time to cope with the new technologies in the edge of the known horizons. Those who already collected VCD will change to DVD, to BluRay, and more to come.

Sincerely,
the iNatural contributors
inatural_spprt@yahoo.com

[1] Wikipedia contributors. Super Hi-Vision [Internet]. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; 2008 Oct 15, 22:09 UTC [cited 2008 Oct 23]. Available from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Super_Hi-Vision&oldid=245537479

[2] NationMaster contributors. Ultra High Definition Video [Internet]. NationMaster [cited 2008 Oct 24]. Available from:
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Ultra-High-Definition-Video

[3] Wikipedia contributors. Holographic Versatile Disc [Internet]. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; 2008 Oct 18, 22:10 UTC [cited 2008 Oct 23]. Available from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Holographic_Versatile_Disc&oldid=246168732

[4] Wikipedia contributors. Protein-coated disc [Internet]. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; 2008 Oct 13, 20:54 UTC [cited 2008 Oct 23]. Available from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Protein-coated_disc&oldid=245075018