Computers

Pioneer's 400 GB Blu-ray Disc

July 7, 2008 Pioneer has announced a 16-layer read-only optical disc with a capacity of 400 gigabytes which it will unveil at the International Symposium on Optical Memory and Optical Data Storage 2008 (ISOM/ODS2008) on July 13. The disk’s per-layer capacity is 25 gigabytes, which is the same as that of a Blu-ray Disc and this multilayer technology will also be applicable to multilayer recordable discs.

July 7, 2008 Pioneer has announced a 16-layer read-only optical disc with a capacity of 400 gigabytes which it will unveil at the International Symposium on Optical Memory and Optical Data Storage 2008 (ISOM/ODS2008) on July 13. The disk’s per-layer capacity is 25 gigabytes, which is the same as that of a Blu-ray Disc and this multilayer technology will also be applicable to multilayer recordable discs.

For multilayer optical discs, it has been difficult to obtain clear signals from each recording layer in a stable manner due to crosstalk from adjacent layers and transmission loss. Utilizing the optical disc production technology that it has developed in the DVD field, Pioneer solved these problems by, among other things, using a disc structure that can reduce crosstalk from adjacent layers, resulting in a 16-layer optical disc that can playback high-quality signals from every layer.

As for the read-out system, Pioneer achieved stability in the playback of recorded signals by employing a wide-range spherical aberration compensator and light-receiving element that can read out weak signals at a high signal-to-noise ratio in the optical pick-up mechanism. Since the optical specifications of the objective lens, such as NA (Numerical Aperture)*2, are the same as those for the existing BD discs, it is possible to maintain compatibility between the new 16-layer optical disc and the BD discs.

The 16-layer optical disc technology, capable of storing much more data than the conventional discs on one disc, will greatly reduce the number of discs to be used and therefore contribute to the conservation of resources.

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3 comments
Mr Stiffy
Dumb, Dumb, Dumb......
Unless it\'s like $5 a disk and people can use the for backing up their hard drives - it\'s never going to go any where.
NatalieEGH
Mr Stiffy, yes and no. Individuals may not be interested in 400 GB devices at $40-$200 a piece but businesses would be. I worked in the Securities business and we were required to keep all e-mail (including internal), customer phone conversations, and customer data files for 10 years. Each day we made hundreds of tapes and magneto-optical media. This would reduce such requirements by a factor of 8. This would reduce both on-site and off-site storage requirements. It would reduce the number of operations personnel required. Depending on data transfer rates and write times, it could also significantly decrease the production run time followed by database synchronization (usually the last step.).
Remember there is a big government and business world out there too. If you just go by what the home user is will purchase, close down IBM. I doubt if anyone is spending 10\'s to 100\'s of millions of dollars on their home system.
Michael Simpson
Think of the games you could put on there