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DVDead? The Future of Memory is in Fluorescence!
Adas writes "We've slapped an article discussing and presenting something that could make your brand new 6X DVD-ROM drive blush in its bay. It's called FMD-ROM and is is slated to be ready for production before the end of this year. The 12mm (CD-ROM/DVD-ROM) disc version of this memory will store up to 140GB! In the future, we're looking at capacities of up to 1,4 _terabytes_ per disc, and transfer speeds of up to 1GB per second. Wipe the drool off your collar and read on here. "
This technology sounds fascinating, and I firmly believe that we'll keep being able to store more information more cheaply for a long time.
:)
But when can we expect this to happen? I didn't see a timeline or anything. Could someone who knows more about this technology speek up?
Sure, it'd be great if some new technology obviated the need for all this DVD madness, and it'd be wonderful if we didn't have to worry about commercial interests messing it all up. But how likely is that?
I was interested in buying an ORB drive, since they hold more than ZIP drives and are supposed to be pretty speedy. But I didn't, because I had a ZIP drive, and I didn't really need an ORB drive. I'll probably upgrade to a 30-40GB hard drive, and if I'm not storing full-motion video on it, I can't really conceive of needing much more right now. I'm sure the future will find a way to prove me wrong, though.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
"Hard disk drives are the fastest seekers of disc memory today, and speeds under 5Ms"...
Apparently they have very old hard drives with access times in the order of mega seconds!
Personally I thought that the article was very badly written. It had the tone of a second rate salesman - infact, it reminded me of spam.
Honestly. I don't want to wait for someone to release 140GB of data for me to read. I want to make it myself. An FMD-ROM does me no good, really. I'd have to by new equipment to read it, and no one's producing discs for it. But if I can make it, I will.
I am not going to try to fit my CD label information on that silly inner ring. If I write on the disk, isn't that going to ruin it?
Mm
I've looked into my crystal ball and found some comments that will be posted to slashdot the day those are announced:
The Register had a report back in last October, 05, of the same thing.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/991005-000013.html
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Apparently, Sony's tight control over the Beta format meant that they wouldn't allow porn to be pre-recorded on it. VHS had no restrictions. Which format succeeded? :)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The card idea sounds much more marketable. Forget flash memory, minidiscs, and CD's - these are inexpensive (relatively - they said something of about $10 to produce one), shock resistant (nearly no moving parts - I'm sure they could be made very resistant to all but the heaviest shocks), small, fast, and very big (1tb on a 50 layer card? wow!).
I could see having a wallet in my car full of these, with 'better than cd quality' sound (24 bit audio at something like 48k), uncompressed, and a car player that can hold and change 3 of them right there in the deck! (because the cards are so small).
Then there's the portable applications... notebooks, portables (like webpads), cameras, players, etc. that have a media that is quick, large, and small.
--onyx--
You know, come to think of it, a caddy system like I described is not needed, and more trouble than it's worth. As it is, you almost have to wreck cd's on purpose for them to be completely and irreversably unreadable.
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"Insert witty quote here."
This is quite correct. Many of the claims made were shady, and while the technology itself may be feasible after a lot of engineering, the article cited here is certainly a lot more questionable.
Logic errors picked at random, because I'm too tired to cut it to ribbons thoroughly right now:
Previous layers will still fluoresce as your UV beam shines through them - just not as brightly. However, they will fluoresce over a larger area, conserving total luminosity. Therefore, you'd better have extremely good selectivity in your readout optics if you don't want stray light mucking things up. Depend on the previous layer bits averaging out? Bet I can find special cases that still cause problems. Summary: This is not magically superior for layering.
The problems facing multi-layer pit surfaces are exactly the same as those facing multi-layer fluorescent surfaces as described above. No better, and no worse (well, a few implementation differences in error correction, but you get the idea).
Shady support. Wheels have been around for thousands of years. Does this mean that they are obsolete now that we have alternatives?
Analogy, as well as logic, is stretched a bit thin here. Data layout is similar, readout scheme is unrelated. FMD, by coincidence, would use very similar layouts in any spinning-disc devices (I have yet to see a convincing description of how they'd make a credit-card sized solid-state device with this technology).
Short version: Technology is mildly interesting but nothing spectacular. DVD technology has the same potential; neither is much easier to implement. Article itself is vapour, heavy on hype and short on actual thought.
The safe way of doing it is to put a cup of water inside the microwave. This provides a load for the magnetron.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
alright.. so it's based on returning flourescent light.
so what happens if you look at it under a blacklight? is it cool?
and do you get the same spectacular lightshow if you put it in a microwave as you did with a CD-ROM?
how can we expect to adopt this technology without clear answers to these questions?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
VHS stored 6 hours on a tape, Beta 4 and change.
This is your argument? I'm sorry, but that's a really stupid argument. So I can store 3 movies on one cassette instead of two (never mind the added hassle of fast-forwarding when I just want to watch the third one); that's not enough to outweigh far superior video and sound quality, not to mention a freeze-frame which looks like a photo, and adjustable slow-motion which is completely free of any interference lines; and that's on my Beta which I still own from 1985. Of course Hi-Fi stereo was already standard on Betas by then.
For most users, VHS was BETTER because that was the feature that mattered.
Is this an assumption? Or is it what you preferred? I think most people who observed the decline of Beta will agree that it was the flooding of the market with VHS recorders while Sony stupidly hung on to its patent which resulted in an ever-shrinking base of Beta users (proportionately), which in turn led to fewer movie studios releasing their movies in Beta; there was also an interesting phenomenon where most retailers spouted extreme amounts of FUD along the lines of "You don't want to buy Beta, it's on its way out and will probably be dead in a year", leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy, which nonetheless took a lot longer than a year.
What's next? You're going to tell me that the Mac is better, too?
A far better analogy is MP3 vs. CD Audio:
'What's next You're going to tell me that CD Audio is better than MP3?' Ummmm... sure. It's just that MP3 allows up to 10 times as much music in the same space. Imagine if MP3 only gave you a 3 to 2 compression ratio; not too impressive right? I think we can safely assume MP3 would be a non-issue if that were the case.
GET A LIFE!
Thanks, I have one already. Can I get you one perhaps?
Chris
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
MEMS (Micro Eletromechanical Systems).
I belive this is the project you are looking for: 10 Gbyte Personal Multimedia MEMS ROM Data Storage Card.
There is a fun index of projects here.
The article mentions transfer speeds of 1 gb/s, which I don't believe, actually. What is driving this? There is nothing inherent in the technology that makes me thing of how this is possible; by having 8 layers, for example, one can multiply a CD's transfer speed by 8;
So if they can push CD transfers to something like 100 mb/s, I'll believe that this FCD can be pushed to 1 gb/s...
Actually, I can think of some nifty tricks one could try, but then it wouldn't be backwards compatible with CDs...
There's nothing saying that a 'pit' in the FCD needs only store one bit of info; each pit could, for example, store 2 bits of info, intensity and phase.
So I shine a laser at a pit, and get back 2 bits of info; it can be reflected at intensity 0 or intensity 1, as well as be returned in the same phase, or opposite phase as the original laser. 4 different signals can be returned, which can be mapped onto a 2 bit value.
Then, with 8 layers, I can get 16 times the throughput of a similar CD, which is still only going to be 97.6 mb/s... Great, but nowhere near 1 gb/s!
Any other ideas?
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
So I got to thinking that one could also encode chirality into the 'pit'.
I dunno if phase can actually be encoded; anyone with a better grounding in optics able to correct me?
Anyway, intensity can be encoded via size of a pit.
Can phase be encoded by the depth of the pit? Changes of a quarter wavelength will change what phase bounces back; it can either constructively interfere or destructively interfere with the original beam... that might work.
Then one can also encode chirality into the pit, as well, so that the light gets reflected as either right or left handed... thus we can actually get 3 bits of info into 1 CD sized pit; That still gets us, with an 8 layer disc, 3 bytes of data at a time, or only about 200mb/s throughput.
I guess FCD pits can be smaller than CD pits, because they actively flouresce? This affects the areal density, but it seems I can't think of any real way to increase the throughput beyond 200 mb/s...
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
I dunno about the layer selection problem you mentioned.
If each layer flouresces at a different frequency, such that all layers flouresce at once, you get a single beam that is the sum/product/total of every layer. All that needs be done is that the piece of hardware reading the beam demultiplex it into component signals; a decent prism will split it into it's respective signals, to be read(in parallel). You would not select one layer at a time, then, but all n layers at once!
So a 40x CD becomes 320x, read, because you can read 8 bits at once, rather than 1 bit at a time.
Notice this is not nearly as simple using pits, because one can not encode frequency selection in a passive medium; phase, maybe, and polarity, but not frequency.
And I agree that there is no need to reinvent the wheel
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Some of what is mentioned in the article makes sense, and a lot of it really is just hype and excitement.
For example, if you get a nine layer disc that flouresces at 9 different frequencies, one laser could then do a read on a byte + some sort of parity at once; feed the combined signal into a fast enough demodulator, and you can effectively increase the speed of the drive by a factor of 8 over the current top of the line; a 40x CD becomes a 320x FCD. That's about 46.8 mb/s, on the assumption that the hardware demodulator can keep up with the data stream. A 5 layer disc of the same type would only be 23.4 mb/s, but that's still plenty =)
This, however, saturates the SCSI bus, excepting for the fastest/widest standards, I think.
However, this isn't all that great, as the author expects. Latency/seek on the disk would be the same, so even if you can stream data at this tremendous rate, except for linear reads, as in music, movies, or copying, it wouldn't be all that useful(any more than standard CDs and DVDs)
It is to note, however, that I can't see how one could make a writeable version of this technology; Would one need an N laser system, one for each layer? Or would we have to wait for semiconductor lasers that could adapt and change it's own active frequency based on current or voltage?
Anyway, all the FCD proposes is to apply towards CDs what has already been done for HDs; by placing disks in parallel, increase the speed of read or write, ala RAID, though in this case because it is optic, you can crowd all the data into one channel(fibre optic) until it needs to be demodulated or something...
Or am I missing something else?
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Then we will have DVD-like cartel all over again. Mark my words. With such a technological risk, they must have applied for lots of patents for FCD.
Hasdi
I remember reading somewhere that cd's only have a lifetime of about 10 years, and cdrw's only 4-5 years. This kinda worries me since I have cd's that are getting near 10 years old... Does this technology offer anything to improve this? Of course, wherever I heard this (and for the life of me I can't remember where...) could have been competely inaccurate, so feel free to correct me...
The URL for the info is: http://www.c-3d.net/tech.htm
Here is a choice section that tells what has actually been achieved:
3.1.4) Results
10 layer disks with CD density have been demonstrated (650 Mbyte per layer). The above mentioned requirements have been fulfilled:
-Splat
140 GB translates into
...
28 movies (~5 gb each)
28,672 mp3's (~5 mb each)
2,446,677 jpegs (~60k each)
That's an aweful lot of nudie
I had a Sony CD-ROM at a previous job that apparently worked just like this!
Seriously though, despite the current DVD bullshit, this (the FMD, I mean) does not make much sense at this time.
There is a fairly large base of DVD players in the homes of consumers (I have one, but I haven't used it in about a month, for fairly obvious reasons).
Basically, we *have* to get the DVD people to play nice or we're pretty much screwed. Good luck getting a more open format in...
A case would probably triple the price of a CD.
RIAA doesn't quadruple the price of cheapbytes cds.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That is pretty damn fast. I am working on an Fibre Channel adapter and I know that blows any single port FC adapter on the market out of the water. Also, that kind of speed is going to need a tight driver so that it doesn't just suck up all the processor. I wonder how many I/Os per second per processor percentage they can get? What about megabytes per second per processor percentage? This is the real question. It is one thing to be fast but it is another to be able to run well. For example, some EIDE drives are nearly as fast as slow SCSI drives, but EIDE controllers require much more host cpu power.
-- soldack
This thing makes a lot of claims at their site. This article then goes crazy with it. Their site claims that it is possible to make things with this technology that could go at 1 gigabyte per second. I say perhaps. Maybe. But probably not. This thing is vapor ware and the author of this article is totally irresponsible, if not unethical, in hyping this thing. The greatest thing since WWW opened shop? Please! He then goes on to take the someday numbers from the company's site and assume that this technology that is different from CD-ROMs will increase in performance at the same rate as CD-ROMs. He ignores the issues of a controller and a BUS for this thing. PCI sure isn't going to do it. Perhaps one of its successors will handle it. Oh...and we will use it instead of RAM. Sure. Perhaps it will also be used for primary cache on the processor? Give me a break!
If I want big and portable, I will go with DVD. If I want big and fast, I will go with a RAID over Fibre Channel. Only if I wanted vapor would I go with this!
-- soldack
Computer components have been getter faster and faster. This may be the start of truly pervasive computing...pervasive in the sense that it will be everywhere, unnoticeable, and unexceptional. All the rules blur, then change when computing is implicitly and immediately accessible to everyone and everything, everywhere, any time. Think of electricity. First it was a novelty, powering the useful light bulb. But soon, when it became pervasive, huge new fields and inventions sprung up because of it. The time between articles proclaiming a new technology or discovery, and its application, get smaller and smaller. This might be the real thing (tm), the nodal point. We might now be starting to take our first step into Neuromancer or the Matrix.
Or this could just be another step in the mundane march of progress...what do I know?
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I seriously doubt it. I've guessed that the amount of data on the Internet is more like the petabyte range.
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Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
When this technology was first publicly disclosed a year ago or so, I talked to several people at C3D and questioned them about the 1 giga*byte* rates described on their home pages. (Search past threads for my handle and C3D). Since this bandwidth was as fast as RAM and an even bigger breakthrough than the capacity jump I was intrigued and highly skeptical.
You're right that they get one factor of 10-100x from the extra layers. Disk bandwidth grows essentially linearly with the number of layers. But the other factor of 10-100x comes from another technique (and there's a catch.) They can split the laser beam into multiple beams and read the results with a CCD-like sensor array for parallel read capability. Cool. This is described somewhat in the white paper on their website, if I recall correctly. The big catch is that this parallel-read capability does not occur with the high-capacity round spinning disks, but only occurs with the smaller flash-card form factor devices that don't rotate (and have simple rectangular regions for data, I suspect).
Unfortunately this suggests a technology with a very small market niche. For starters, most I/O busses actually run at slower speeds, creating somewhat of a disconnect until Intel's PCI and PCI-X successor "Infiniband" comes out in 2002 or whenever... And what good are 1 GByte/sec read rates when they're for a flash-card device that only holds 10 GB?
--LP
P.S. Read-write was also a serious technical challenge requiring significantly different materials when I talked to them ~9 months ago. Keep your eye out for progress on that.
AND
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/12/01/133232.shtm
Must... find... new... material... sleep.. overpowering ... reason... I .. never... sleep... damnit...
Why is it good stuff gets mentioned once (if ever) and vapourware gets repeated over and over and over again? Is it wishfull thinking?
www.mp3.com/Undocumented
That's a good point. You can definitely notice the difference between 30 and 60fps. 60fps rocks!
:P
Total myth, I can see the difference between 30 and 60 straight away...so much smoother, looks much more life like, and much easier on the eyes.
Of course, you could always read this article :)
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No Zen is good zen