There are lots of interesting pints being raised.
I'm sure in the future this technology will become cheaper. Just like hwo CD wrtiting and the DVD writing hardware and software started off expensive when it first came out but now can easily be picked up for less than £100.
It's true that CDs scratch easily and do tend to snap but I'm sure that with discs with that much capacity they will develop a way of protecting them, or have discs made from a new substance that isn't prone to scratching or breaking under light pressures.
And I'm sure in the future we'll need all the capacity we can get. I remember when hard-drives were 5gigs and software would only take up about 200megs - 500megs. Now a single game could fill that whole hard drive up and still would need more space. True it only seems to be games that require so much space and with the new generation of graphics, audio technology and physics the amount of game data is only going to increase. Although I guess 300Gb is a bit overkill but I'm sure sometime in the future that about of space will seem like nothing.
Although these things could probably be used for security. Having one disc to store all the security camera recordings for a day would make it easier to store than say 200 DVDs of recordings. Or making they can be used to store recordings from those satelites that are scanning space for extraterrestial signals or storing data produced by super computers. Whatever the case is I doubt these things will be put into public for a decade or more but they probably are useful to big companies who need to store large amounts of data quicklyh and easily.

being fairly new product in the market this will understandably be expensive, what's good here is that we are seeing the finish product already which means in the near future once more and more manufacturer embraces this technology this will become cheaper and cheaper which in the long run will be good for all the consumers.

I'll drink to that.

In order for a game to take up 300 Gb, there would have to be some kind of revolutionary new content technology that would be able to fill it. Currently, games are around 3Gb to 5Gb and take years to make (modelling and texturing takes a long time). Unless there is some kind of technology that can automatically create content for games, production time, but creating so much content that it would take some 300Gb, game developers will never spend the 20-some years of content creation it would take to make a 300Gb game. Look at the detail in upcoming games such as Oblivion, which will probably be around 5Gb or so, and it's only been in production for a few years.

Now, if something like the holodecks seen in Star Trek were created (which I doubt), then the detail and amount of data required may make 300Gb disks necessary, but until then, these disks are just a monument; they are not practically useful by today's standards (unless one wants to backup a gigantic database).

Let's make a bet: in 1989 Test driver just sized 300KB ---- [ 10 years later ] -----> Need for speed high stakes (road challenge) sized like 300 Mb in hard disc installation ------[ 6 years later ] ------> Need for speed most wanted, 3 GB of HD space, ...... that means that in less than 6 years its quite possible to found games of 30-45 GB so, in 15 years 300 GB will be insufficient..... LOL!!! technology is on its best moments,!!!

I like them ... nice thing ... but I would prefer 500 Hard drive than those cds :

The prices for new technologies are always astronomically high at first. I am sure that if enough time goes into the development of this technology, new methods of building it will be discovered and that will help bring the production costs down. Interesting to see how much data we are capable to store on disks in the future..

I personally think it's a nice new idea, having CD's that are capable of storing this amount of data, as technology is always increasing and more disk space is required.

However, I can see the down side aswell. Scratching a CD, damaging or somehow else managing to stop a disk from working is just too easy in my opinion. If the company or user pays a lot of money for their reader and writer, they want to be sure that it will last a while and not go outdated in hurry, therefore I don't think this is necessary yet.

I reckon they should concentrate on items similar to USB pen drives, as opposed to compact disks. At the end of the day, it's harder to break a USB pen than a CD. The transfer speed is probably also quicker on the USB port, as it supports the extremely fast transfer speed.

This is just my opinion on this new amount of Disk space on a CD. Cheapest method at the moment, is to buy a lot of hard drive disk space, which is just as effective and faster. I reckon they should concentrate on these or the USB pens. I would say floppies, but these are old now and are prone to damage. Plus, because of their workings, it's only possible to have a very minute amount of data held.

Thanks for sharing this with us. Always nice to know how well technology is doing in the improvement process!

This post has been edited by sportytalk: Mar 7 2006, 07:28 PM

well you failed to mention in your posts (well if you did sorry about that i just scimmed the posts) once you used the disk you cannot override it and add more stuff to it (unless you can and Im outdated somewhere) you would need alot of stuff to put on that disk in order to maximize its usefulness. But yeah over time cd do wear down even if properly taken care of, but at that $20k price range it will takea few years for that to go but by then a better and cheaper version comes out as well.

Wow...

300GB is a lot man, I wonder how they are doing it.

300 gb is allot! lol, i mean that could be enough to last me a lifetime >_< i wouldn't have any use for one of them..unless i want to back up all of my programs etc... but i would have no use for it i thiink 300 gb is a ton of space personaly that i would never need....but just one disk could do me good for a LONG time! unless i wanted more than one etc..im curious how many minutes of music it can hold though.i could burn all my songs on there yeah right...