Blu-Ray: The Disk of the Future is Here

Blu-Ray will soon be a thing of the past. This seems to be an outlandish statement but is a fact none-the-less. Research at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia is leading toward the new age of DVDs and Blu-Ray Disks.

The DVD took a while to completely replace the videocassette. In fact in a few years the videocassette will be a thing of ancient history to the younger people. They may have never even seen one except those few home videos grandma has. Next, comes the Blu-Ray Disk, this expanded the size of a DVD by many times moving from 8.5 GB of space on a dual layer DVD to even 30 GB dual layer HD DVD to a whopping 50 GB dual layer Blu-Ray disk. This new disk, only single layer, will hold approximately 1.6 terabytes (TB) of data.

The new disk uses the concept of Blu-Ray using blue light waves instead of the normal DVDs red. However, the difference is that it uses the entire spectrum or a large part of it. This allows multiple bytes of data to be stored in the same exact spot but be read differently. This is what allows the disk to have so much more space. The increased amount of space is quite an extreme. It does come with a price though.

The cost at first will be extremely expensive for a burner and the disks. However, when the cost comes down imagine what they could fit on one disk. How advanced and long could video games get? If they can make a disk more than 100 times the space where will the future lead us? Imagine being able to back-up all your hard drives on one re-writable disk up to 1.6 TB.

Some of the largest affordable hard drives are just 2 TB. With just two of these disks you could back up your hard drive and entire movie collection. This would eliminate the need for all of those disks. It could even make the use of DVD players obsolete. Computers could replace the TV. This is the last technology needed to do this entirely. Digital downloads could be the only thing we would need because you would not need to worry about a hard drive failure that deletes all of your data. This will be the thing to take over the DVD as the DVD replaced the videocassette.

The CD could be made smaller to the mini-disks. This would make the need for storage less. In a book that would hold 25 Cd's normally you could fit 100. The number of songs you could fit on there would be enormous. Imagine your artists whole discography on one small disk. Granted making the disk too small would be impractical. However, making the disk smaller to a point would not be such a bad idea.

This disk will write the future of of technology. We could easily expand hand held devices because of the amount of storage you could fit on a UMD for the PSP. We could make games that would last someone a year. We could make the graphics even better. Think about the possibilities all those SciFi movies might become reality. The future is here and it is brewing at places like Swinburn University.

http://scitech.blogs.cnn.com/2009/06/23/beyond-blu-ray-2000-movies-on-one-disc/
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7245/full/nature08053.html