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New Optical Disk That Holds 140GB
NoCashValue writes "There is an article on Wired News about a new optical disk that can hold up to 140GB of data on a disk the size of a CD ROM." Still pretty vaporouus, but they claim a demo is forthcoming at Comdex.
Just because they could make the media smaller and still hold a relatively obscene amount of data does not mean they can necessarily make the reader correspondingly smaller...
Even if you have a really small CD I doubt you could make a reader the size of a Palm (at least for any reasonable sum of money).
(Please note, this isn't an accusation of fraud or conspiracy; I'm just curious what an adequately convincing demo would be like)
The FMD/C technology is presently protected by over 70 Japanese, European, and US patents, approved and/or pending, dozens of priority establishing disclosures, and the exceptional know-how of an unprecedented group of physicists cooperating across the world.
To me, this means over 70 different royalties that consumers will have to pay when purchasing the media and readers. Suppose we'll have to pay higher pre-sale taxes on the readers for the government to distribute to copyright holders (since we can copy so much more copyrighted material)?
science is a religion
Seems kind of fishy, but I guess we'll see when the product comes out. :-)
Not for long. Hard disk capacity has been doubling every year for at least the last 5 years and it looks like that trend will continue. Here's what that looks like for the next 5 years:
2000: 80GB @ $300
2001: 160GB @ $300
2002: 320GB @ $300
2003: 640GB @ $300
2004: 1.3TB @ $300
2005: 2.5TB @ $300
These optical drives are going to need to come out pretty quick to ever match hard disk space and even then, they will probably be quickly left behind.
As for storage interconnect technologies, I wouldn't be surprised to see disks with native Infini-band interfaces by 2004. (Infini-band is the newest, just recently specified, mesh interconnect that is expected to replace PCI/PCI-X in the high-end).
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This 140 GB disc wouldn't by any chance be the
same technology described in this story?
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> These optical drives are going to need to come out pretty quick to ever match hard disk space
> and even then, they will probably be quickly left behind.
Well, you're probably right about that. History certainly would make you think so.
> I wouldn't be surprised to see disks with native Infini-band interfaces by 2004.
Never heard of that. Which means I must get off my behind and do some storage tech reading.
That is, it's not a Cool Idea being worked on by some small and unknown company anxiously seeking investors. It's not some guy in a Japanese garage with a flying car design, or some once-great game consol company desperately trying to hype up their next box before their upstart competitors snatch the limelight with some asshole in a coyote suit.
This disk tech has some real money and a technology sound enough to convince other companies to retool in order to produce the materials needed to go full steam ahead.
My question is this:
I need WAY more than 650 mbs of recordable disk storage. In my line of work, I fill many, many CDR's with hi-res graphics. And I know many other people who are also feeling the pinch.
But I wonder if we're actually going to get a useful consumer level recordable version of this new product. We haven't got a decent recordable DVD system, and with all the concerns of the MPAA, I wonder if this tech won't be shafted too. I have honest files I need to back up and move quickly between often changing companies, and it's stupid having to blow ten or more CDR's to do it. We NEED a standardized, inexpensive large format read/write system for PC's, and if the movie industry puts a choke hold on it, then I'll be about ready to start pulling my hair out. Or start lobbing bricks.
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The new disk of Ph.D. Pavel is like a regular CD but slightly thicker. It is 10 mm wide and it 120 mm in diameter; but it becomes a ... 10,000 layers and it has a recording capacity of 10,000 Gigabytes!
tridimensional optical memory, multi-layer, which means, more specifically, that one can record, at atomic level, on
An eloquent comparison which any expert can understand: if at the Library of the Romanian Academy, one should record the 1.6 million books and all the other printings, one should
need about 80,000 regular CDs; if everything is recorded on Hyper CD - ROM, then only five CDs are enough! This disk invented by the Romanian Pavel would have a longer lifetime,
at least 5,000 years, the stocked memory can never be lost - one knows that a magnetic CD loses the information after 2-5 years!
Heh, now talk about your hyperbole...
Yes, I'd love it if this were true too, but I highly highly doubt it (and even if so, not for years).
The site for Constellation 3D, the company producing the FMD drives, is http://www.c-3d.net/.
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Let's take it on good faith that this is not vaporware and will actually ship within the next 5 years--a fairly reasonable timeframe I think. That means that finally removable storage density has caught up with hard drives, and that it doesn't take 10-100 disks anymore to backup a modern HD.
This brings us to another important topic, data transfer rates. Most decent removable drives connect to IDE, SCSI, USB and parallel port. Forget the last two, they offer only convenience but no performance. Even with IDE and SCSI all current removable drives peak at way below their top rates. Let's assume a very optimistic 10MB/s (which is closer to HD transfer rates than removable drives) and do the math for a 140GB disk:
140GB * 1024MB/GB = 143,360MB
143,360MB / 10MB/s = 14,336s
14,336s / 3600s/h = ~3.98h
So it would take me about four hours to fill that disk with data. In a couple of years my main HD will be about that size, and it will take me 4h to do a full backup. For backups that might be somewhat tolerable, but these disks will be hawked as super floppies. Pop it in, drag that HDTV movie onto it, wait a couple of hours, remove it and run to your friend's house to play it. What's wrong with that scenario?
What I'm saying is that we're approaching storage densities where our current data transfer busses simply can't reasonably cope anymore. We really need gigabit level transfer rates, and media that can cope with that kind of read/write speed. I simply can't see sequential technology like HD and CD-ROM keeping up. We need either new materials that can write MUCH faster or new parallel access technologies that read/write multiple tracks at once. And the transfer technology that goes with that--maybe gigabit ethernet, 1.6Gb 1394 or who knows what.
I am keeping an eye on Norsam's storage. Uses an electron beam instead of a laser, and an electron microscope to read the pits. 200GB per 5 inch disk; 10 of these stack in a cube, and then a wall mount of 30 cubes. 60 terabytes. mmmmm. Obviously these would not be form home use. These are still in vapor, but Norsam has some cool stuff they are doing now. They use licensed LANL tech to do nanotyping and create permanent analog storage discs that are read with an electron scope.
Nice big optical storage. Now we can rest assured that the install image for Windows "Whistler" will still fit on one disc. :)
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DVD killer? No... in order to get studios to agree to support a format, they want there fingers in it, a la DVD, given CSS, Macrovision and region coding, yet this time they will tighten their hold even further if they can.
As for the 5" (actually spec'd as 12cm, 5" is close enough), the DVD consortium deliberately chose CD size so that they can use and convert existing machinery and infrastructure. They at one time hoped to use CD jewel cases I think, but gladly the keepcases prevailed.
I still consider this vapor. The company's sample FMD in their web site's picture appear to be the protective clear blanks that you get at the end of CD-R spindles. I don't know if flourecents can have a quick enough response time to be usable as a compact storage medium, or be manipulated at a such compact level. They are welcome to disprove me, but in 5 years they will be competing with other technologies as well, assuming this is real.
I don't know about that. This is still a spinning medium and access time with non-solid state devices will always suck. Given the density of this, and the spin rate(12x (eventual) max for CD-based technologies), you could persume some massive bandwidth (probably harddrive speeds) However, RAM is a moving target, and things like 1T-SRAM (SRAM that only uses one transistor) are offering SRAM-type speed at densities approaching regular RAM (128mbit chips) I don't think we'll ever get rid of RAM, it simply makes too much sense.
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It's been in the "real soon now" stage for a while. I'd like to see some progress (not everything, but something demonstrating they're closer). Perhaps if they really do have something at Comdex that'll be cool, I'll certainly stop by to see it.
Be impressed with the technological feat.
Ignore it for the next six months (or in Daikatana's case, three years)
When the subject gets out of the vaporware stage, become amazed again; even more so than before since it actually exists.
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What will it be called anyway? OAS-ROM (Obscene Amounts of Storage Read Only Memory)?
Or maybe MS-ROM, because this'll probably be the only thing big enough to hold a full installation of Windows 2010.
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The FMD stuff has been around for a while. /. before, too. Basically, its a clear CD where the pits flouresce when the laser hits them. I can't remember, but their webpage I think said 30 layers.
It's been listed on
Here's the link for the ClearCard:
http://www.constellation3 d.c om/products.html#clearcard
Unless this product seems viable in a general consumer market this company won't take off. Making just a smaller form of storage in my opinion would be more useful.
:)
Using like mini FMD-ROMs for units such as Palm pilots and digital cameras would be amazing.
Yes the article mentions something similiar but it seems to only be hinting towards smaller discs.
This way you could have a full bootable linux system on this tiny disc that you insert into your Palm and boot off of. Then you could do one of those mandrake full installs of 2gigs+
An article HEREInfoworld details a 10-Terabyte Optical Disc. The inventor of the disc says that it may become commercially available in a year (it was stated in oct).
An important part of this disc is that it is very stable -- instability occurs only after 5,000 years.
might be old hat in 5 yrs. Details here.
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Or asking for deposits to get on a waiting list to be able to buy it.
Remember the company that was mentioned here twice with the Turbo prop, retinal scanning flying pack?
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And I had only just finished up setting up an optical-laser-writing-to-clear-packing-tape jukebox you mentioned a month or two ago.
Now you're telling me the lastest cool thing is this???
I'm telling you, it costs a lot to be on the bleeding edge... sigh...
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Why do I have the feeling that Iv'e seen this before...... http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/02/12/042420 7&mode=nested
I haven't looked rediculously hard, but I can't find any mention of how fast this thing is supposed to be. Anyone know?
What we really need is a storage medium that can access fast enough to where access time isn't really an issue, and then we can simply do away with ram, once we can have a solid state storage that accesses faster than RAM does today. That will be a very big technilogical step, IMHO.
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That is a good point. Will access to all excellent recordable mega-giga-storage devices be indefinitely delayed by those entertainment bozo's?
Theres a reasonable Byte article on these things here. These things sounds like DVD killers, assuming they're practical. They hold more, they're just as speedy, and they could be made at a good price.
But.. they're 5 inches across still. When are we going to get something smaller? Why not stick 30Gb on a 2 inch disc? That'd be a killer for portables.
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No doubt it will have to be a specially configured drive for the OAS-ROM (using an acronym given in a post below). Hopefully, it will be possible for it to read DVDs and CDs as well, but I'm not holding my breath on that one. Functionality is nice, but the hardware industry seems to enjoy making us buy as many different toys as possible.
It begs the question, how big are towers going to get for End Users? With this tech, you could have a tower with drive bays for 3.5" disks, ZIP disks, CDs, DVDs, and this new one. If this keeps up, the silly thing is going to either be taller then I am, or it will go double-wide.
Of course, that assumes that all of those methods of storing data stay around. If this new media is not vapourware and it takes off, I could really see current CD drives being dropped. And with a few more years, I don't think we'll be seeing 3.5" drives either.
Just my 2 shekels.
Kierthos
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The latest figures are in the region of 10.8 TB for a device of that size - more than four times the original value.
According to Mike Downey, head of Cavendish Management Resource, which is handling the commercial issues associated with the technology, the research also applies to DVD style storage media, "That figure has also been revised upwards: to 245GB on a single sided device," he said.
It sounds like I should put off buying a new 20 gig HD.
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