Addendum

HVD

In December 2004, six firms - CMC Magnetics Corporation, Fuji Photo Film Co., Ltd., Nippon Paint Co., Ltd., Optware, Pulstec Industrial Co., Ltd. and Toagosei Co., Ltd. - formed the HVD Alliance to support the Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD). ECMA International is considering adopting HVD as a standard.

HVD discs are expected to hold from 100 GB to one 1,000 GB (one teraByte) of data, with an insane data transfer rate of 1 GBit/s. Optware, which is leading the development effort, doesn't use a single laser beam to read data. Instead, it splits the beam into 1 million narrower beams to read whole pages of data at once.

Optware's holographic recording technology stores data on the media discs in the form of laser interference fringes. This writes data in three dimensions and allows for one million bits of information to be stored in each data "dot."

Even more impressive, HVD can read and write at the same time, something optical discs can't do. Also, HVD discs don't need to spin like DVD discs, since the laser moves and scans rather than being held in place and having the disc spin under it. This is why the data rate is so high. To increase their data rate, CD and DVD drives have to spin faster, but there's a limit to how fast a disc can be rotated before it literally flies apart. That's why CD-ROM maxed out at 52X speed. That's simply not an issue with HVD, where the laser moves instead of the media.

However, it will be 2007 at the earliest before HVD sees the light of day, and then the drives will fetch $3,000. It may end up becoming an option for computing as a means of backup and mass storage. Stay tuned.

Yet ANOTHER DVD Format

Back in the early part of the decade, there was a startup called Constellation 3D working on a fluorescent disc that could potentially hold one teraByte of data. The company proved one of the many victims in the dot bomb implosion.

Out of their ashes came D Data , which is producing the Digital Multilayer Disc, or DMD. Much of the DMD technology is based on the Fluorescent Multilayer Disc (FMD) from Constellation 3D.

D Data plans to introduce a red laser disc that's compatible with existing decks but supports up to six layer discs instead of the usual two. Initially, it supported 15 GB of storage with 36 Mb/s throughput, but the company is promising 30 GB of storage this year.

The DMD disc appears to be totally clear, like those plastic protective covers put on the tops of blank CD-R spindles. The reason is that while the DMD uses pits like regular DVDs, the pits are coated with a transparent fluorescent material. Once encoded and coated with the fluorescent composition, the individual layers are then bonded together to yield a single optical disc with multiple layers. Because the layers are transparent, the signal-to-noise ratio is kept down, something that has always dogged attempts to make more than a dual layer disc.

However, like FMD before it, DMD doesn't seem to have much industry support. No studios have lined up to support it, and D Data's Web site hasn't been updated in months.