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Triple-Density CD-RW From TDK & Friends
Houndogk writes: "I came across this reading the news of the day at Tomshardware. This [article] talks about a new generation of CD-RW that promise to be 3x as fast and have 3x the capacity as current drives. It is also expected to scale to 4x and 5x." From the article: "[T]he premise of ML technology is the use of gray-scale disc encoding, with 3 bits per spot giving eight shades of gray. Under a microscope, the disc surface appears as a continuous blending of light to dark shading, versus the traditional disc appearance of either dark or bright spots." And what happens when we go to 24 bits per spot? ;) This announcement seems to partly answer GeoffM's quest for dual- or quad-density CD-Rs, and handily top Sony's moves to double-density.
My first concern when reading this article was "what happens to the data as the plastic ages?".
Does the data change if the plastic starts to darken or yellow? Could make for some interesting aat data recovery. ("Well, you just have to subtract one from every byte".)
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
Analog means infinitely variable values: in other words, decimal values.
Digital means discrete values: in other words, only certain values are permissible.
Tri-state is digital: there are only three possible values, and there are no in-between values.
There are some excellent arguments to be made for using digital technology that goes beyond simple on/off. Easier to build fuzzy-logic devices, f'rinstance. Two tri-states provide more than twice what you get from two binary states, without requiring twice the circuit complexity, and the savings increase exponentially the greater the number of sensors/indicators/controls needed.
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
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binary digit ==> "bit"
ternary digit ==> "tit"
Now we can have "megatits", "tit compression schemes" (= corsets?), "parity tits", "titwise logical operators", "tit rotation", "tit buckets", and "128 tit encryption".
"big endian" and "little endian" will remain unchanged.
If your interests run toward utility rather than purience, you can notice that 8 tits (a "tyte"?) will store 3^8 = 6561 distinct values.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
No, instead of 1 bit (2 states) you store 3 bits (8 states). So that gives you three times as many bits, hence three times the capacity. But to encode 3 bits, you have to be able to produce (and later read) 8 gray levels.
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
In reality, one of the selling points of CDRWs is that they can be played on almost any regular CD-ROM (although some cheap players certainly have problems reading CDRWs). At this point, these CDs seem to be in a race with DVDRWs (which will have more density than even 3xCDRWs). Especially damming for this technology is that you will need a special player (the burner) to read the discs one you make them.
I read the internet for the articles.
I thought the point of 1 bit per spot, also known as "digital", was to reduce the amounts of errors. Now they want to go back to storing data analog?
This sounds like that story in which RAM was made that could store 4 values instead of 2 by using the same technology described here.
That didn't make it. Will this?
Sanjuro
do we really have a need for this drive?
more specifically, do we really have a WANT for this drive? before you call me -1 troll, ust consider this...
there are a number of possible endings the removable media story could have from this:
1) everybody buys these, and they become standard. media prices plummet, everybody is happy.
2) there becomes a "standards-war" between these drives and all of the other removable media types, prices get slashed, and the consumer has no real standard, but prices are cheaper as each company tries to out-do the other.
3) there becomes a "standards-war" between these drives and all of the other removable media types, and because nobody is buying enough of any one type of drive, there is no standard, and prices are higher because of production costs.
4) Not enough people will buy the drive, so it will die quickly. The few people that do own them will have to pay high prices for the discs, and they won't be able to give them to anybody else, as maybe 5 people will have them.
sorry if it sounds like FUD, but that's all i think when i see new removable media...
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
I found absolutely nothing in Google with the word "chlarodium" in it. It looks like you're BSing us with the intent of karma-whoring.
I hereby declare Shenanigans on you unless you can fess up with a reference or a spelling correction.
Increasing the bit depth from one bit(2^1= 2 shades of gray) to three bits(2^3 8 shades)increases the complexity of the read and write process. More error correction would have to be present on these discs, and although at the same rotational speed these discs have three times the data rate(3x density increase), we can run into problems. Our current burners have enough time at 1/4 of the complexity of these discs. When burning current discs, 52% intensity is rounded to 100%, and 49% is rounded to 0%(in a perfect world). With 8 shades we can't do this, and would have to slow down the burning process to insure accuracy, and on an IDE bus(consumer equipment) couldn't supply 3x the bitrate of current burners anyway(anyone ever had buffer-underruns). So we would have to decrease the burn rate to that of current burners because of bus-throuput(SCSI doesn't have this problem), and decrease it further for accuracy. Reads still get pulled off a little faster, but seek time would stay the same. I would say 2x faster sequential reads and .5x burns in this "faster" technology.