Jump to content
The Inquirer-Home

Sony working in the labs on another monster

What the makers of Blu Ray did next
Monday, 3 March 2008, 10:59

SONY BOFFINS have been working in the labs, late some nights, and their eyes beheld some frightful sights. Well, frightful to their rivals.

Because they’ve crudely cobbled together another monster. This basic technology for a next-generation hard disk (as the Nikkei.net describes it) can store One terabit of porn (or any other data) per square inch. That’s five times the density of existing hard disks! So your notebook could store 150 hours of high-definition video.

Having won the hard fought format war with Toshiba over next-generation DVDs (hip hip, Blu Ray!) Sony won’t change its strategy on Blu-ray disc optical media any time soon.

But storage capacity is a beast that needs constantly feeding. If you don’t keep finding new ways to expand it, it’ll turn on you and smash up your laboratory. Metaphorically speaking. Toshiba has already promised to develop a high capacity flash media storage product to satisfy our endless need for storage.

But how good is this new invention? It’s a basic technique for writing data based on magneto-optical hybrid recording. Data bits are written to disk medium using laser light concentrated on an almost microscopic area of disc. So it makes traditional storage more efficient. Blimey, is that it?

We could have thought of that.

They plan further developments – Oh, OK, fair enough, we couldn’t do that – to fine tune the reading and writing of data to disks.

Sony is looking for a development partner on this one. µ

Share this:

Comments
MD

that's how minidiscs work isn't it? curie temperature and all that...

posted by : dcdc, 03 March 2008 Complain about this comment
Pr0n

I always thought that a few terabytes of data is plenty for pron. But obviously I have not been watching it in HD as my learned friend suggest in his article.

touché.

posted by : Someone Special, 03 March 2008 Complain about this comment
meh....

Sony will figure out a way to add DRM too it and turn a great invention in to a class action suit where Sony winds up loosing billions of dollars. It's the "sony way."

posted by : Axiomatic, 03 March 2008 Complain about this comment
I know a partner!

They will probably partner up with Toshiba.

posted by : Steve-O, 03 March 2008 Complain about this comment
150 hours? Please, I thought you guys were smarter.

The compression algorithm used on Bluray discs is the suckage. Today's BUDGET drives, at about 300GB, could store 350-400 hours easily, and I think that's lowballing it.

posted by : Jason Goatcher, 08 March 2008 Complain about this comment
Advertisement
Subscribe to the INQ Newsletter
Sign-up for the INQBot weekly newsletter
Click here to sign up Existing user
Advertisement
INQ Poll

Browsers

Who will win the next round of browser wars?