Sony Develops Powerful Laser for 1TB Optical Disc

Cool, I guess. I just hope they're not planning to use it on PS4... they need to go all digital.

Cool, but I'd be surprised if this comes out anytime soon... but for it to compete with large hard drives it needs to come out soon enough. I wouldn't be surprised if it was going to be used in the PS4.

Looks like my sharks will finally get that upgrade they have been asking for.
Seriously though. 100w@1Ghz is friggin impressive.

I can imagine putting a disc in the machine, pressing burn and it fires straight though the bottom of the PC, through the floorboards and blasts a hole 60 feet into the ground.

i'll just go ahead and put my PC on cruise control while i burn 1TB of my music onto a disc..I'll see you all in a couple of weeks!

I want sharks with Sony "lasers" attached to their freakin heads.

I think he meant go digital DISTRIBUTION.

i suspect 90% of the people buying this will use it for their pron collection

Sweet, so now i need to keep my Optical Disc Drive in mind when getting a new power supply.....100Watts?!

When you said "powerful laser", I thought more in the bounds of burning through things, but damn, 100Watts is still damn powerful. I hope it doesnt burn my regular old CD's.

They should leaves disc with the p4, rather they go digital or not. They should make the discs are of something cool with the new tech. A disc holding 1tb of info might be worth the money if extra cost assorted into it with a new material. Cause still havent heard anything about the lifecycle of a Blu-ray disc yet, or ive just forgot.

1w laser can damage/burn things, so wouldn't 100w damage the hard drive it was put in, on top of that how hot would those HDD's run? answer these questions and i'll say A+ provided all is good.

I would like 1TB optical now, I suspect when these come out though that I will be wishing they stored more....

In other news: Sony 1TB optical writable disks are now on sale @ newegg for the low price of $495 ea.

What real value have optical drives these days? I prefer flash memory for storage nowadays, hardware with moving parts always fail at some point.

Note that 100W is the PEAK power. The average power of the laser will be much less than 100W.

So, while Blu-Ray is sufficient for most of us, it would be nice to see an uncompressed 1:1 format, or at least a far less compressed format. An hour of uncompressed 1080p video can take up around 500GB. So what we see on Blu Ray is 20:1 compression, at best. Hopefully such a "videophile format" won't be relegated to obscurity like the SACD format... That would be the "Holy Grail" of video formats, as far as home theater is concerned.

Yeah, there is the 4K video format (4096x2304), but unless you are sitting 5 feet from a 120" screen, you likely won't see the difference.

It seems a little excessive... You have to wonder about the costs involved as 100 watts is not a feasible wattage for an optical drive in a PC. Can you imagine plugging in a PCI-e 6-pin connecter into your Blu-Ray player?

I do not understand why they need 100W laser. In telecom they propagate 10Gb/s channels through the fiber with launch power around 1mW, and there is enough power to detect it after 100km of the fiber, where the power is 100 times less.

May be they need it for fast Write functionality, but definitely not for read.

Those commenting on how these will compare to current Hard Drives, or even how they will be incorporated into HDD's have it wrong. Optical media has always been a companion to HDD's. Remember the r/w speed of optical is still slower than that of a HDD. So Optical media is more for multimedia applications (like movies), or for long term data backups. I have 1TB in my livingroom HTPC and when I do backups I can only backup my pics and documents. imagine if I had enough space 1 optical disk to backup all of the seasons of various shows I have saved as well. Sure I could do this with an external HD, but I don't want to be buying and storing multiple External HDD's each time I fill up my DVR. getting a new CD would be perfect for that.

this could be awesome, but price needs to be closer to earth or it will take a long time to be adopted by the masses.

I still only have a few BD movies because most of them are still way too expensive. to me no movie is worth over 10 dollars no matter what media is on.

and I still buy most of movies around 7 dollars average when I can.
(even my small BD collection I have paid around 7 to 10 dollars)

WTB: water block for my optical drive.

seriously, I doubt that 100W is reached more than fractions of a second at a time resulting in a lot of heat, but low total power consumption.

Good to see Jeremy Clarkson is in charge of laser development for Sony.

More Power!

i'm still a bit concerned about the ' perhaps for a more automated process' part. Does this mean we get a free Sony technician with each TB disc player? Where are we supposed to keep them? what do they eat?

WTF?! I don't understand how they plan to use this. You don't need that much power for a reader or burner.

So, um...damn. We're gunna end up with uhh...60 TB hard drives? I think the current highest is 3 TB, so 20 times that. Wow. Not saying we actually need that much storage but they'd better develop a technology that accesses (reads/writes) that drive in comparable speeds to today's 500 GB drives or even faster. I would like to one day be able to write 60 TB to a drive in the same amount of time as it takes us to write 500 GB to a drive now.

Now you'll see optical drives coming with power supply recommendations :-)

Don't we all want to get away from external storage with moving parts? Another spinning disc solution just seems redundant and archaic. Surely some company (IBM?) is working on optical (holographic?) or flash-like storage? Anybody got any updated info about that?