GE holographic disc lands 'Coolest Technology' award

GE’s holographic disc technology continues to draw notice in tech circles. Tech blog Gizmodo just spent some time at GE Global Research kicking the tires on the breakthrough, which will allow 100 DVDs to be stored on a single hologoraphic disc. And the research is generating buzz across Asia as the 2 million-circulation magazine China Business News Weekly just named it “Coolest Technology of 2009.” As Gizmodo writers John Herrman and Matt Buchanan note: “The secret sauce is the material the disc is made out of, and how it reacts to light. On a broader level, where GE’s holographic storage differs from the other major approach to holographic storage … is that it uses even tinier micro holograms that store less data per individual hologram, but more in aggregate."

Packs a wallop: As the Gizmodo team writes: “This work table is deep inside the labyrinthine complex that is GE’s Global Research Lab, 550 acres of big machines and big brains, in the hinterlands of Niskayuna, New York. It’s where the company that brought us 30 Rock invents the future of energy, aviation, healthcare, and dozens of other mega-industries, including, as it turns out, data storage.”

In April 2009, GE researchers successfully demonstrated a huge step forward in mass storage technology with micro-holographic storage material that can support 500 gigabytes of storage capacity in a standard DVD-size disc. This is equal to the capacity of 20 single-layer Blu-ray discs, 100 DVDs or the hard drive for a large desktop computer. As GE’s Brian Lawrence writes on the GE Global Research blog: “Holographic Storage sounds like something you might find on Star Trek, but in fact it has actually been around a while. The first papers on holographic storage were published in 1963, and people have been working on it ever since. Unlike the optical storage technologies that we are all used to (CDs and DVDs), which store information in one or two layers in the disc, holographic storage uses the entire volume to store the data.” Click here to read his full explanation of how laser beams read the information on the disc.

As Gizmodo notes, GE’s technology is “designed to fit in with the current optical media infrastructure, meaning it’ll be cheaper and easier to roll out than some radically different tech. That is, the discs are the same physical size and shape as CDs and DVDs, and they use a laser that’s very similar to Blu-ray’s, even using the same wavelength. On a hardware level, it just uses a slightly different optical element, but the rest basically comes down to software/firmware, meaning you might still be able to play your Blu-ray discs in a holographic storage drive.”

Meanwhile, the “Coolest Technology” nod in China marks the second year-in-a-row that GE has won. GE’s “Digital Heart” technology, in which GE scientists in Shanghai created a virtual model of the human heart that could one day enable the non-invasive diagnosis and treatment of cardiac disease, was named coolest technology of 2008

Next gen: GE has been working on holographic storage technology for over six years. Besides pushing the limits of storage capacity, GE researchers also developed new technology that uses plastic-based holographic materials to more securely store information. The new material could store 3-D images of a person’s face, record their fingerprints and even create unique animations.

* Read “The Future of Storage” on Gizmodo
* See Gizmodo’s image gallery shot at GE Global Research
* Watch a video on GE Reports: “GE unveils holographic disc breakthrough”
* Read a blog post by Brian Lawrence, who manages GE’s holographic project
* Read a blog post by Yongwei Sun in our lab in China
* Read more GE Global Research stories on GE Reports