Pioneer gives BD room to grow with 20-layer 500GB disc

By Ari Allyn-Feuer | Published: August 06, 2008 - 07:39AM CT Pioneer has announced demonstrations of Blu-Ray discs with 20 layers, capable of storing 500GB of data on a single disc. Commercial players and discs are currently confined to two layers. The multilayer rush began with video DVDs. Each DVD data layer holds only 4.7GB, making storing a complete movie at high quality impossible. Resolving this had drives reading two layers of data from a disc, the second layer underneath the first, with reading lasers passing through the translucent first layer to reach the second. The technology was expensive, and did not come to consumer drives for a number of years after its wide deployment in commercial movie pressing. Multilayer CDs were never commercially released. Blu-Ray has had dual-layer availability since its inception, but... [read full story]