Hey!  I say today that Blu-ray may be 100GB, OK?  While I clearly have no business attempting tech-poetry, my interest was piqued when I learned that Sharp has developed a laser that, when used in conjunction with theoretical triple and quad-layer Blu-ray disks, could increase the storage capacity of that medium up to 100GB.

Existing Blu-ray disks can store a maximum of 25GB per layer and are available with up to two layers for a total of 50GB of overall storage.  Since existing Blu-ray laser technology doesn’t allow the laser to focus on more than two layers of a disk, that number of layers is the limit by which the media is manufactured.  But now, Sharp has developed and is considering mass production of a blue-violet semiconductor laser that has the ability to read and write on up to four disk layers, essentially doubling existing Blu-ray disk capacities.  Unfortunately, specifications for triple and quad-layer Blu-ray disks have not been set, so production of these higher order disks is uncertain (although TDK did demo quad-layer disks way back in 2006).

Blu-ray disks containing high definition movies are great, but its hard to really see a place for disk based media in the future.  With flash drive capacities already in excess of 100GB and their prices falling fast, the convenience of Blu-ray as a backup or other re-writable media doesn’t really make much sense.  Even as a container for entertainment content, disks are slowly succumbing to the convenience and ease of streaming media offered by OnDemand services and companies like Netflix.  So answering the question as to whether we’ll ever actually see 100GB Blu-ray disks, despite the technological feasibility, is very unclear.