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Tech news: Google has filed to raise as much as that will restrict how quickly data can be written onto disks and then retrieved--about 1,000 times faster than today's state-of-the-art data storage devices.
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I think you are confusing bit rate with physical speed. The speed you retrieve information from a laser disc is not the speed of light. I know because I have done research in optical memories. The speed at which you can retrieve info from a cd depends on how fast the cd is spinning. CD's have a diffraction gratting imprinted on them. The laser is focused onto a spot on the cd. A 1 would correspond to a place on the disk that is raised i.e. not etched. Here you would get a strong reflection back. The pits of the diffraction grating correspond to a zero. There will be no reflection back to the detector in that case.
The wavelength of light in a cd rom is typically in the near IR which corresponds to 385 THz. The fastest I've ever heard fiber optics researchers sending a single stream of data over a fiber interface is 160 Gb/s. So we have a long way to go to even catch up with the carrier frequency light itself.
Holographic data storage was supposed to have massively parrallel data read out thereby getting very high data transfer rates not to mention the large memory densities. Too bad that field was ultra hyped...I used to work in that field.
I have a laser disc player; I wish that it could read stuff at the speed of light. Do you know how much fun it is to have a movie on 3 12" discs instead of 1 4.5" disc? Also, I still have not found a SCSI or IDE laser disc player to hook to my computer; they all seem to have those strange S-video connectors. Also, the speed of light measures distance over time, not bits over time. Jokes on the meaning of laser disc aside, Wutzo has a point about their coming up with a better, faster way to do things. However, I don't think that optical discs will replace hard drives. I would guess that it will be something more like flash ram or nanotechnology.
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Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Apr 2002
Speed Limit
Cool, they discovered a speed limit.
The speed limit here referec to magnetic discs. I assume that if this limit is reached there will be a better technology than magnetic discs. The speed you can retrive information from a laser disc is plain lightspeed. This speed limit was discovered by Einstein & Co a 100 years ago. No big news here.