Traditional Blu-ray discs today offer 25GB on a single layer or 50GB on a dual layer disc. Since then, companies have continued to try and raise the bar higher, with Pioneer seemingly leading the pack.
Less than once month after introducing a 16 layer 400GB optical disc, Pioneer recently introduced a new 500GB version. The new 500GB disc has 25GB of storage room on each layer, with 25 total layers on the disc. So many layers can be placed on one disc because researchers placed layers of different thickness upon one another.
A 500GB will be able to hold multiple movies recorded in 1080p, more than 8,000 hours of music files, and 250 different video games. The Blu-ray format has become the "de facto next generation storage system" for the gaming, movie and PC industries, Pioneer officials said.
The disc is still in early research phase, but Pioneer hopes to launch an actual product between 2010 and 2012. Furthermore, Pioneer officials are talking with members of the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) to try and get the new standard accepted by the BDA.
Now that you have access to the 500GB discs, you'll need something that is able to burn Blu-ray discs at a rate faster than 8x. The discs could be especially helpful once HD streaming becomes commonplace in consumers' homes.
great, now i can lose 500gb of data in one scratch. oh glory!
Whens the 26 layer 525GB disc coming out? Will I need a new drive for it?
Not considering what the price of this disc will be (when it comes out in a consumer recordable format at a reasonable burn rate,) it may be very useful for archival purposes (again assuming the dye or whatever will be used does not degrade too fast.) You could back up things in triplicate or more and save tons of space in your CD wallet or DVD folders 
But again...price, durability, and reasonable write rates will be what determine the rate at which this or any new optical format is adopted. Go capacity GO !!!
I highly doubt it will ever be released in a recordable format. They have enough trouble producing decent double/dual layer DVD recordable media.
"... The new 500GB disc has 25GB of storage room on each layer, with 25 total layers on the disc. ... " Using "old" math, 25 total layers times 25 GB of storage per layer, would have made it a 625 GB disk.
@compuser
Look at the 4.7 gig SL discs and they only truely hold 4.36 at the most. Same goes for HDD's too they are short of what they really are.
@ Dr.Who
No doc; they are short of what we are promised they are suppose to be. ;-)
Dr. Who: The disparity is there because there are generally two standards used to calculate capacity. Some companies use 1000 MB to equal 1 GB while others use roughly 1024. That said, this article said the disk has 25 layers and each layer has 25 GB of storage room, so the disk must have a total capacity of 625 GB (25 x 25 = 625). The stated capacity per layer (25 GB) times the stated number of layers (25) will always equal the stated size of the disk, and 25 x 25 does not equal 500. 
So how does that differ then from 4.7 gig single layer as stated but can only use 4.36 max? Don't give me that story 1000 = a gig or 1024 = a gig the same can and I bet applies here on BluRay as well.
The article is mistaken. It should be 20 layers of 25GB so total 500GB.
Original article pioneer.eu/eur/content/press/news/500GB_Bluray.html
Of course it does! The actual capacity a user experiences with ANY storage device on a computer is going to be different than the devices stated capacity because of the 1000/1024 thing, different cluster/sector sizes on the disk due to formatting differences of various operating systems (FAT, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, ...), etc. Anyway, back to the article, even though I'm not sure why I'm bothering with another reply - maybe you will learn something. My point was this: The writer of the article said the disk has 25 layers. He also said EACH layer has a STORAGE CAPACITY OF 25 GB. If there are 25 layers and EACH layer holds 25 GB of data (again, this is the author's stated capacity of each layer), it's a 625 GB disk (not 500), since 25 x 25 = 625. The author obviously made a mistake on one (or more) of the stats for the disk. If it's acually a 500 GB disk as the author said, there either must be fewer than 25 layers on the disk or each layer only has 20 GB of storage capacity.
This is off topic now, but it seems like there is a lot of confusion about size disparity...
So, HDD (and DVDs, but not CDs) and who knows what else, are advertised with the lausy convention of using SI prefixes, which 3 decimal orders of magnitude (10^3 = 1000) apart from each other. With computers though, sizes are usually displayed with the convention that prefixes should be 10 binary orders of magnitude (2^10 = 1024) apart... This is pretty insignificant when talking about bytes and kilobytes, but when we get ot GB, things change, and it is really the suck with TB.
Your 1TB drive really has ~10^12 bytes, which, after being devided by 2^40 is only 0.9095TiB, or when divided by 2^30 -- 931GiB.
Really, the easiest thing to do was just use google and type
625 * 10^9 bytes to GB
... obviously, the article has a typo.
When\'s the 2 layer going to hit newegg?
Top news
Our Community messages
Happy Birthday to you alias_neo 
r_saotome thank you for your reaction in the news section. 
SkyIslandHiker just logged in, Good to see you back!