Meeting Tomorrow's Storage Needs with Blue Ray Discs

Twentieth century storage capacity is quickly falling behind twenty-first century storage requirements. A standard DVD could hold up to 4.7 Gb of data, and traditional, magnetic hard drives have just recently reach a capacity of 1 Tb (1000 Gigabytes). However, DVD's are incapable of storing high definition video (for longer than just a few minutes at least), so we need a type of disc that can hold entire high definition movies in just one disc. If you calculate just the video requirements, DVD's play 480p video, which is 640x480 pixels for a total of 307,200 pixels. However, high definition video is 1080p (1920x1080 or 2,073,600 pixels), which is nearly 7x the number of pixels on screen at any given time. Add in digital audio and other special features, and you soon see the need for increased storage capacity. With a Blue ray disc, you can meet your storage needs into the next decade.

Record Data or Play It

Blue ray disc players began shipping in notebook and desktop computers at several hundred dollars a piece. That's about the price you could expect to pay for a stand alone Blue ray disc player for your home theater, but these drives fit into your computer and allow you to also burn content onto Blue ray discs. As physical media goes, Blue ray is the way to go for unparalleled capacity and transfer speed (although future technologies such as holographic discs are expected to reach several Terabytes in size in the next decade or so). Nearly 70% of new movies are being released on Blue ray discs, much more than are being released on Blue ray's rival format, HD-DVD, and you can now purchase blank Blue ray discs to record your own content.

When it comes to seeing everything in high definition, you need to go with Blue ray discs. No other disc will allow you to record up to 50 Gb of data, and you'll get the biggest selection of movies to choose from (and soon you'll be able to get even more as HD-DVD is expected to become obsolete in the next year or two). Ultimately, Blue ray is the perfect format for the consumer looking to fulfill their mobile data storage needs, and future firmware updates will unlock new features that haven't quite matured yet. It doesn't matter if you're looking to record movies, music, or photos – Blue ray will help you fulfill your needs. Along with incredibly fast flash memory drives, Blue ray discs will help you meet the data storage needs of the next decade.