Ritek has decided to resume the production of DataPlay discs. Beginning with both a 500MB and a 750MB disc by the end of the year and a 1GB disc in 2005. Even though the discs were cost effective to produce, there were not any economical players. Below are some comments from CEO Gordon Yeh while at the eMEX Suzhou show.
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Ritek has designed a power-efficient DataPlay drive that can be connected via USB, and the company expects to offer it in an NT$5,000-8,000 (US$148-236) price range, Yeh indicated. Applications for the device include such portable consumer items as MP3 players and audio recorders, indicated Yeh. DataPlay media could be used in various storage devices, Yeh added. |
The DataPlay disc is very small as we can see in the image above, about the size of a postage stamp. This tiny disc, will hold some 500MB of data and even a couple years back, could have been produced for as little as $5 dollars. As you could imagine, the technology won "Best of Show" in CES 2001. It has now been improved to utilise the common "FAT" file system. Any device using a DataPlay drive would be recognized as a USB Mass Storage device when connected to a PC. They will work on Windows, Apple and Linux systems without the need for special device drivers, just like a flash memory card or thumb drives.
Dataplay discs also feature a disc-based security system that can limit the number of generations of copies permitted and can even specify an expiration date for the data. Pretty fancy, but in todays market I think we can see that this would be an attractive media for labels. You may read the article in it's entirety at DigiTimes.
Source: DigiTimes
