News.Com ran a story earlier this month about a consortium of companies promoting a holographic storage solution called HVD. According to News.Com, the holographic discs could replace Blu-Ray and HD DVD discs eventually and they . . .
. . . will let consumers conceivably put a terabyte (1TB) of data onto a single optical disc.
A TB-size disc would certainly compress movie collections. The consortium said an HVD disc could hold as much data as 200 standard DVDs and transfer data at over 1 gigabyte per second, or 40 times faster than a DVD
Note that the author of the piece is doing a bait-and-switch here. A standard movie DVD is a dual layer disc, so you’re only going to get about 125 movies in 1TB of space. Still, they can deliver these 1TB discs anytime — I can fill them.
Currently I burn about about 50 DVDs per week (and that excludes all of the DVDs I burn for clients at the office). Unfortunately, 4.3 gigabytes just isn’t what it used to be. It takes me 15 (and growing) of those just to burn my weekly data file backups.