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New 100GB Optical Disk From Taiwan
Alt173 points to this article from Taiwan Economic News , excerpting: "The National Science Council (NSC) said Sunday that a local research team has successfully developed a new optical disc that can hold more than 100 gigabytes of information.
The research team was led by professor Tsai Ding-ping of National Taiwan University. The new disc can store 150 CDs of favorite songs or an equivalent of 20 DVDs, Tsai said.
By using "near-field" optical technology, the 100-gigabyte disc stores more than any other similar product in the world. The super-sized disc will be used at home to store large movie or music files, according to Tsai.
The near-field optical technology also allows the bits of information on a disc to be spaced closer together to increase the disc's storage capacity."
Commented today, "This is it. We're done. This will kill the movie and music industry just like the VHS tape, CD and DVD."
Senator Hollings responded, "We're asking China to invade Tawain today to stop this evil horde from joining the axis of evil."
Great. Now instead of an album costing $15.00, and containing one hit and 14 filler songs, the CD will cost $1,500.00 and contain one hit and 1499 filler songs.
The article is kinda skimpy on details. Vaporware? It would be nice to know how fast this drive is. Anyone by chance know?
Zip Disk size? Jaz? Laser Disc? LP? 45?
Theres only about 4 other better technologies.
FMD being the main one, currently FMD is being stalled by the RIAA and MPAA because of piracy concerns.
Holographic storage systems are better. (although these may cost alittle more)
Ram based storage systems
Even traditional harddrives.
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If someone could explain the concepts, it would be great. Cheers.
What fun. So will the quality of picture increase, or will they instead fill more of the disk with pointless guff like crappy menus, interviews with the man who cleans the shoes of the second team coach driver, etc? I know which one my money's on.
Grab.
100 GB is great, but if it is the size of the original Lazer Disks, or LPs, that might prevent it from taking off as a desired medium.
Who wants Pork Chops?
Now I need to buy at least two hard drives, just so I can fill this Optical disk to capacity!
They already have 160GB hard drives... why is this a big deal? It it a smaller form factor? Less power consumption? Faster?
Sheesh. Talk about yer light news articles...
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
The article failed to mention the most important use of this storage: all your porn on one disc!
Huh?
Can please somebody translate super-size in centimetres?
any idea what the i/o speeds of these optical disks are capable of? the article doesnt seem to mention it.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
The new disc can store 150 CDs of favorite songs or an equivalent of 20 DVDs, Tsai said.
What he forgot to mention was that, at present, the disc is roughly the size and thickness of a small kitchen table.
Because it's denser, think of how much more a scratch will suck on this thing... when are we going to need error correction on these?
------
"And may your days be long upon the earth."
What kind of bus would a drive that is, presumably,this blazing fast use? IDE almost certainly can't handle it. Is SCSI, Fibre Channel etc.. up to the task or will a new bus technology be required for these new optical drives?
Summary
Constellation 3D's technology implements the concept of the volumetric storage of information. Data is recorded on multiple layers located inside a disc or a card, as opposed to the single or double layer method available in compact discs, and DVDs.
The recording, reading and storing of the information is accomplished through the use of fluorescent materials embedded in pits and grooves in each of the layers. The fluorescent material emits radiation when excited by an external light source. The information is then decoded as modulations of the intensity and color of the emitted radiation.
Background
It has long been recognized within the data storage scientific community that, 2-dimensional storage carriers are insufficient for future generations of memory devices. Research efforts have therefore focused on ways to develop 3-dimensional storage including holographic techniques and multi-layer storage as illustrated below.
The concept of multi-layer reflective optical discs has been proposed by Philips and IBM, and has been demonstrated up to several layers. In fact, DVD is an implementation of this concept with two layers.
However for many layers, the coherent nature of the probing laser beam causes interference, scatter and intra-layer cross talk - the combination of which results in a signal that is degraded to unacceptable levels. In addition, reflective multi-layer discs encountered considerable technological difficulties in manufacturing of media commensurate with the formidable requirements for optical quality. For these reasons research efforts into multi-layer reflective technologies have been abandoned.
The concept of multi-layer, fluorescent cards/discs (FMD/C) is a unique breakthrough, solving the problems of signal degradation associated with current reflective optical disc technologies of CD and DVD.
As with a CD or DVD, data on the FMD layers is encoded on a substrate in a series of geometrical features or volumetric marks. Each layer will have a capacity approaching 4.7 Gigabytes (as in the case of DVD).
With FMD/C technology, each storage layer is coated with a transparent fluorescent material rather than the reflective metallic layer of a CD or DVD. When the laser beam hits a mark on a layer, fluorescent light is emitted. This emitted light has a different wavelength from the incident laser light - slightly shifted towards the red end of the light spectrum - and is incoherent in nature, in contrast to the reflected coherent light in current optical devices. The emitted light is not affected by data marks, and therefore transverses adjacent layers undisturbed.
In the read out system of the drive, the laser light is filtered out, so that only the information-bearing fluorescent light is detected. This reduces the effect of stray light and interference. Theoretical studies, confirmed by experimental results, have shown that in conventional reflection systems the signal quality degrades rapidly with the number of layers. In fluorescent read-out systems, on the other hand, the signal quality degrades much more slowly with each additional layer. Research has shown that media containing up to a hundred layers are currently feasible, thereby increasing the potential capacity of a single card or disk to hundreds of Gigabytes. Use of blue lasers would increase the capacity potential to over 1 Terabyte.
Some of the technological advantages of FMD/ FMC products include:
Increased Disc Capacity
Initially, the FMD disc will hold anywhere from 25 - 140 GB of data depending on market need. Eventually a terabyte of data on a single disc will be achievable.
Quick Parallel Access and Retrieval of Information
Reading from several layers at a time and multiple tracks at a time - nearly impossible using the reflective technology of a CD/DVD - is easily achieved in FMD. This will allow for retrieval speeds of up to 1 gigabit/second.
Media Tolerances
By using incoherent light to read data the FMD/FMC media will have far fewer restrictions in temperature range, vibration and air-cleanness during manufacturing.
Usage Flexibility
FMD/FMC presents a wide variety of potential media sizes and types (read only, write-able and re-writeable) for a broad range of applications.
Potential for Further Growth
The technology is young and will grow and evolve, providing a clear road map for the future of data storage.
The FMD/C technology is presently protected by over 116 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.
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They say that the disc is super sized. Any idea on how big that is? If it doesn't fit conveniently in the form fact of a PC, seems like it's not that great.
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Cool... Now when can I buy them and how much?
;)
Also will they be removable media?
Hmm... thinking to self... 3 disks for all the Fansubbed Anime I've be d/ling.
The super-sized disc will be used at home to store large movie or music files
Didn't we already go down this route with laser discs. I can't see it catching on until they can get the technology down to cd size.
The Pigeonhole Principle and Data Encoding -
Dr. Claude Shannon's dissertation on Information Theory in 1948 and his following work on run-length encoding confidently established the understanding that compression technologies are "all" predisposed to limitation. With this foundation behind us we can conclude that the effort to accelerate the transmission of information past the permutation load capacity of the binary system, and past the naturally occurring singular-bit-variances of nature can not be accomplished through compression. Rather, this problem can only be successfully resolved through the solution of what is commonly understood within the mathematical community as the "Pigeonhole Principle."
Given a number of pigeons within a sealed room that has a single hole, and which allows only one pigeon at a time to escape the room, how many unique markers are required to individually mark all of the pigeons as each escapes, one pigeon at a time?
After some time a person will reasonably conclude that: "One unique marker is required for each pigeon that flies through the hole, if there are one hundred pigeons in the group then the answer is one hundred markers".
In our three dimensional world we can visualize an example. If we were to take a three-dimensional cube and collapse it into a two-dimensional edge, and then again reduce it into a one-dimensional point, and believe that we are going to successfully recover either the square or cube from the single edge, we would be sorely mistaken.
This three-dimensional world limitation can however be resolved in higher dimensional space. In higher, multi-dimensional projective theory, it is possible to create string nodes that describe significant components of simultaneously identically yet different mathematical entities. Within this space it is possible and is not a theoretical impossibility to create a point that is simultaneously a square and also a cube. In our example all three substantially exist as unique entities yet are linked together. This simultaneous yet differentiated occurrence is the foundation of ZeoSync's Relational Differentiation Encoding(TM) (RDE(TM)) technology. This proprietary methodology is capable of intentionally introducing a multi-dimensional patterning so that the nodes of a target binary string simultaneously and/or substantially occupy the space of a Low Kolmogorov Complexity construct. The difference between these occurrences is so small that we will have for all intents and purposes successfully encoded lossy universal compression. The limitation to this Pigeonhole Principle circumvention is that the multi-dimensional space can never be super saturated, and that all of the pigeons can not be simultaneously present at which point our multi-dimensional circumvention of the pigeonhole problem breaks down.
Basically its a multidimesional compression, compresses down to 1. Does it work? I havent tested it but it makes sense in theory if you know geometry.
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Fit all my anime, games, warez, hentai, moviez, and pr0n on 3 disks... I'll wait for the RW drive @ around $200 and the disks for $20 before I buy though.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
the MPAA and RIAA will buy up this tech and close it down by encrypting it like data play.
:-)
think of what CDs will look like... I guess we will have to buy the while album again
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Yes, it would be a big deal to be able to backup my entire HD or all my CDs on a single CD-sized disc (though the article makes no mention of the size I'm assuming it's the same size as a CD/DVD). Come to think of it, the article really doesn't mention much of anything. Almost the entire article is quoted in Alt173's post.
How bout good old equivalence units like # of floppies or # of pages of text or # of encyclopaedia britannicas?
Frankly, this is too cool, however, I'm beginning to wonder where this'll end. Yes, I remember thinking that the 5 Meg hard disk I bought for the DecMate II that my family had was "all I would ever need, ever", but for personal use, I wonder what good 100 Gig is good for except having a HUGE music collection.
With data compression getting better and better, and disks getting bigger and bigger, and everything getting cheaper, I think the next big thing is large volume back up media.
Until writable DVD's come along, there isn't even a usable, cheap way to do a backup of my 80 Gig hard disk as it is. Right now, it'd take a stack of 100 CD-RW's to do it, and about a year or so. It seems the only practical solution is to buy two (or more) identical hard disks and then set up a RAID-1 arrangement.
What I'm interested in is a fast, cheap way to back up my shiny new 100 Gig optical drive. Until then, forget it.
The Dopester
"Yes, I'm a Karma Whore, but I'm doing it to pay my way through school."
That's all well and good, but more importantly, how many libraries of congress can I fit on it?
[This isn't a fantasy the dark fiber capacity is presently enough to do this it's just the last mile issues that are preventing it.]
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
"640K ought to be enough for anyone" - Bill Gates, 1980 But seriously, 100 GB on one optical thingie is a crapload of space... Like ten times my HD size =)
But some us will require multiple of these discs
...the ultimate bootlegging medium, from the ultimate bootlegging country.
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
A Beowulf cluster of these! Wouldn't an Anglian bard in the vicinity of Northumbria be pleased! (thank you Jeeves!)
Its about time, now I can put my entire p0rn collecti..... i mean my 120 GB Hard Disk on 2 100GB optical discs. Sweet.
FMD can store about a terrabyte.
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Who gives a crap. There's tons of "new tech" being developed every day.
Let me know when I can buy it in the store. Other than that, it's all the same talk talk talk...
Invest in C3d, This company, and Zeosync.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
See 10 Terabyte 3.5" disk drive, here is your PDF. It might not be here yet, but it falls in the category of "optical" anyway. Also see this, they have existing demos.
I hope that the burning rates will be higher than the actual CD-ROM burning speeds, because at 8x, it takes about 24 hours to burn 100GB!
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent - Salvor Hardin
This sounds like Terastor NFM technology.
I realize that this is much larger than any commercially available removable media, but we have to ask ourselves one question: does size really matter?
Save it for a Slashback at least. This is a front page story?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
The article said it has about the same capacity as a recent article on holographic storage: http://sci.newsfactor.com/perl/story/17174.html
But what about its speed?
I thought they were selling DVD burners for around $800 about a year back...
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
The good news:
Most of us could write all the contents of our hard drives to disk and wouldn't fill one of these up.
The bad news:
A current 24x CD burner writes at 3600 KB/sec. Writing one of these disks at that speed would take 7.7 hours.
-- Adam
Forget the 100GB, I'm more facsinated that the guy's name is Ding-ping.
Lots of talk here about how this could be the "ultimate bootlegging product." On the other hand, if the movie industry is smart, this could be the "ultimate bootleg killer."
The movie studios are very nervous about internet piracy, but there's a good reason why the vast majority see movies in theatres and rent or purchase DVDs instead of acquiring bootleg VCDs. The simple truth is that low bitrate videos suck. They have motion artifacts. They have substandard audio.
They don't meet our quality expectations. A DVD is vastly superior. So is a 35mm print in a theatre. That's why Spiderman and Clones made over a hundred million dollars each in their first weekends, in spite of the fact that vastly inferior bootlegs were available "for free" on the internet.
As the electronics industry begins to retool their equipment from CDR manufacture to DVD-R manufacture, the movie industry is going to run into the same problem as the music industry -- they are going to be selling a $15.00 product that can be trivially copied perfectly onto a $1.00 piece of media. Over the next decade or so, as internet bandwidth increases, we will begin to see file-sharing of actual DVD images.
How can the movie industry make file-sharing of DVD images undesirable?
The answer is by providing something much, much better. Current "digital movies", as projected in theatres, provide a vastly superior image to DVD, and require approximately 70-100 gigabytes of storage space. The movie industry should be preparing to transition away from DVD to a new "super DVD" format that offers at least HDTV resolution, and most importantly, a big, whomping data rate that is completely impractical for internet streaming, and completely impractical for copying to DVD without downgrading the video quality.
Such a technology, available for the home, would quickly relegate DVD-quality recordings into the "low end" of video, at the same time that the price barrier on DVD-recording equipment falls through the cellar.
The industry should also realize that copy protection is worthless. It will always be broken, and the longer it goes unbroken, the more severe the market effect once it is broken. The real solution to the piracy problem of inferior bootleg recordings is the age-old tactic of the salesman. Offer a vastly better product, and your customers will follow.
These advancements are quite outstanding. That goes without saying. What I am left wondering now (offtopic?) is with the advancements in large capacitiy drives both fixed and removable, what advances have they made in cataloging the contents?
I would think this more an issue in the case here where media is removable... "Where is that disk with the watever on it?" If it is anything like my desk, it is probably under a coffee mug or something.
But seriously, what kind of tools are there, if any, for such a situation?
"If you're not failing every now and again, it's a sign you're not doing anything very innovative." -- Woody Allen
... "single to noise ratio"
The CD full of junk that you buy to get that one song that you _really_ like.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
I think it's hilarious how you could substitute a few words in your post above, to be having the same problem seven years ago.
80 Gig HD --> 2 Gig HD
writeable DVD --> CDR
100 CD-RW's --> 100 floppies
Until writable CD's come along, there isn't even a usable, cheap way to do a backup of my 2 Gig hard disk as it is. Right now, it'd take a stack of 100 floppies to do it, and about a year or so. It seems the only practical solution is to buy two (or more) identical hard disks...
I'm not saying that what these guys have accomplished is impossible but I wouldn't be surprised if what they are trying to accomplish is impossible.
Maybe someone can calculate this. How long until I can fit every major movie (or album) in one year on a disk at the current growth rate? How long until I can fit every movie (or song) ever made on a disc? It can't be long at this rate it seems. How much would the discs be worth?
You can read the May 17 report from the Taipei Times here: http://www.taipeitimes.com/news/2002/05/17/story/0 000136369
"Whenever the cause of the people is entrusted to professors, it is lost." ~ V.I. Lenin
Lets just hope these people license/copyright this under good intentions and hope that the corporate pigs don't get their trotters on it to ban all forms of write-enabled drive. Knowing the MPAA/RIAA they will want this thing locked down tight - i don't blame them, but really, its none of their goddam business. DVD is, lets face it, a crap product, its not that much bigger than a CD (compared to CD vs. 1.44 floppy) CD is still around because its the biggest media that can be cheaply and easily written to, and almost certain to have a drive capable of reading it on the target computer. We need a good cheap media.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
just when we ALL get DVD they come out with another technology to waste our money on. I will just stick with cassetes and VHS until all this damn inovation ceases!
The new disc can store 150 CDs of favorite songs or an equivalent of 20 DVDs, Tsai said.
This equates to roughly 67,700 floppy disks, yet they still haven't found a way to get that 25-year-old piece of technology out of my machine.
we're getting closer to having an uncompressed digital video media. You could fit slightly less than an hour of uncompressed video at 640x480, 30 fps on one of these. yay!
Yeah, 150 CDs of full bit-rate, uncompressed data stream. that's 1500 CDs worth of MP3s. That's a far more relevant metric.
Kevin Fox
here. Though I like the fact it will be re-writable, I doubt that it will play in DVD players.
Sounds great, but a research lab doesn't help us today. Does anyone know what the current maximum size for a commercially available optical drive is? I know some people who would love to be able to archive 30gig data segments onto a single medium, but I don't know of any that go that large (and no tape, it has to be front-line storage).
..It's called a bookshelf. It stores everything, CDs, DVDs, tapes. No, it's not technological, but it works for me.
$cat
Researchers develop new super-sized disc
The Taipei Times
y /0 000136369
o n. htm
http://www.taipeitimes.com/news/2002/05/17/stor
Bell Labs: Info on the technology itself.
http://www.bell-labs.com/new/gallery/bits.html
Homepage of Dr. Tsai's research group (contains Chinese characters)
http://pnstl.phys.ntu.edu.tw/english/introducti
-- Your local friendly mad scientist-in-training
Read to learn.
Learn to read.
HTH.
HAND.
Start your own crappy banner-ad-funded weblog "news" site if you want to read stuff you find interesting, or figure out how to set your slashdot preferences. You could call it dickbag.org.
Either way, shut up!
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I think if what the Taiwanese developed does become practical reality, there may be already one possible use of this type of optical disc: the storage medium for digital projection systems used in movie theaters.
Remember, from what I've heard Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones needs about 300 GB of disk storage for playback through a theater-quality DLP projector; instead of a large number of hard disks we could reduce all that to a single optical disc of 300 mm in diameter using this new optical disc process.
So, instead of lugging six 35-pound reels of 35 mm film for a two hour movie, you only need a 2-pound 300 mm optical disc; given our considerable experience in mastering and duplicating optical discs it'll be way cheaper to duplicate and ship 8,000 to 10,000 optical disc copies of a movie intended for theatrical projection than to duplicate and ship 8,000 to 10,000 35 mm film prints.
...for an *end* product that's not going to be edited again. A 500kb jpeg looks better than a 500kb png, at least for a photo. Likewise a 500mb mpeg will look better than a 500mb huffyuv avi (capturing codec, lossless).
Of course a 1:1 lossless copy is the best you can do, but if you have to choose between resolution and lossiness (and you do), you're better off with a DivX at 640x480 than a lossless codec at 80x60...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I remember less than a year ago that one popular arguement was 'nobody has the space to store that much decrypted data anyway, DeCSS will not be a problem.'
Oh well. Move on to another weak arguement, I guess.
"makes sense in theory if you know geometry?????" maybe if you understand geometry but not if you understand compression. here is an explanation of how compression really works. the article starts off on the right foot by bringing up the pigeonhole principle and bitspace:
according to the pigeonhole principle, to represent an arbitrary string of n bits, you need n bits. think about it, there are 2^n possible configurations of n bits so you absolutely have to be able to express 2^n possible pieces of data. that should be fairly clear.
so traditional lossless compression really works by rearranging these representations of the 2^n bits such that you can use shorter representations for things that you expect to see more frequently (based on patterns or perhaps just plain statistical frequency). (at this point, maybe look up basic huffman coding as an example of statistical compression techniques)
getting back to the zeosync thing, though:
the article then continues on by asserting that you cannot get back higher dimensional data from lower dimensions, but that you can get lower dimensional data from higher dimensions. this is true. however, it's not for free.
in a higher dimension, you actually have an infinite number of mappings for the same lower dimensional piece of data. for instance, the two dimensional point (1, 2) can be equally well represented as (1, 2, 0) or (1, 2, 192). developing a one to one mapping of a higher dimensional space to a lower dimensional space completely defeats the purpose of a higher dimensional space being used, since at that point a 2 dimensional representation will be identical to the three dimensional representation in terms of useful information.
now they claim they have a relational differentiation encoding technique that can represent a point that is both a square and a cube. this is not a big deal. let's say a 2 dimensional square (2, 2) is mapped into 3 dimensions. for example, we can choose to map it as (2, 2, 0) or (2, 2, 2). note that (2, 2, 2) is a cube, just as they predicted! wow!
somehow they claim that this ability will result in some savings when compressing, but the real problem is that (2, 2, 2) takes more space to store than (2, 2) and it is also now ambiguous what it means. you'd need to tack on another piece of information like how many dimensions to interpret the result as.
so in summary, at best, they are breaking even with the straight 2 dimensional representation of the data and at worst they are requiring additional space by using higher dimensions.
(yes, i know no one will read this post probably, but still, these zeosync guys were trying to convince people that their techniques would work by means of throwing around buzzwords. that's inexcusable but fairly typical of vaporware. they're trying to take advantage of the fact that it's unintuitive to think in dimensions higher than 3, so people will be less able to shoot them down.)
What you're saying is like saying that RIAA should stop mp3 copying by releasing the vastly superior "Audio CD" and relegate mp3s to the "low end" of audio. Wake up and smell the coffee.
Ever notice how DVD audio never took off? Have you been around, say, South East Asia lately? Most people watch VCDs on 20" or less television sets. DVD isn't taking off even with rampant, cheap, good quality pirated DVDs sold openly because people can't see the difference. I'm reasonably sure that the only reason DVDs have taken off like a big boom outside the videophile arena, is the convienience of a disc compared to a tape, which is why I swear the HD-VHS will fail miserably.
Note that most normal people don't want to spend the $10000 they need for a system that will give cinema-quality movies at home, and for very sensible reasons, cost-vs-benefit and the socialness of going to movies being two of them. I can easily see and hear the difference between a DivX and a "self-made" DVD (pirate digitalization from original movie rolls) and a real DVD. But my wallet also sees the difference.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Because they could.
Why is somebody building humonguous drives that can store more data than I would be able to absorb in my entire waking lifetime? Will they sell me one? Maybe not or maybe two (you got to have backup.)
Why is somebody building humonguous drives that can store more data than a small to average average business will generate in its entire corporate lifetime? Same reasoning.
Its got nothing to do with me, or you. They do it because they CAN.
All of scientific progress is based on "... ?" and all technological progress is based on "... !", the debris left by the answers.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Why is this 'redundant'? I was replying to a comment and I was the first person to do so!
Does it say that because of the storage capacity, or the physical dimensions. I took it to mean the storage capacity.
If it is bigger, who really cares.
How much would an 8 inch DVD hold?
yes, of course there are. But it's not funny to insult them, now is it?
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
i first got wind of this at media.jimmymclean.com
there is a lenthy article there about it.
life, the universe and everything? = 42
The new disc can store 150 CDs of favorite songs or an equivalent of 20 DVDs, Tsai said.
So I can't use this disc to store vast quantities of Celine Dion music? Excellent!
Any more information on this Favorite Song Determination technology?
"[T]he single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom." -- Barry Goldwater
The closest thing I've ever seen is magneto-optical, and that hasn't taken off at all.
Instead, what we have is random-read, serial-write media like CD-R that requires that you build a filesystem image in memory or on a hard disk before you write it out to CD (or DVD).
But what I'd really like to see is removable media with the same read/write characteristics as a hard disk (so that I can create and use a filesystem on it) but which is much more "permanent" (like CD-R).
So why are we currently only getting one but not the other? Why can't we get both in the same package?
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
if you check pricewatch, you'll find that you can find a pretty nice cd burner for less than $75.00 (name brand 24x write 10x rewrite - including shipping). that's a little less than your $240.00 estimate.
you probably shouldn't have read this.
For several years, I followed the progress of Terastor, which was developing magneto-optical disk drive technologies and products using near-field, crescent recording, and evanescent coupling technologies. They kept promising to bring a 10GB and later a 20GB drive to market for under $600 and $1000, respectively. Unfortunately, it appears they did not succeed in finding a way to bring the technology to the consumer from the laboratory, as they kept revising their release dates for three years.
Now, they are licensing their IP. They claim over 90 patents related to optical recording and storage technologies. It is likely that the researchers from this article have expanded on this work, but the question still remains: can they get it into mass production somehow?
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
IIRC, a fully packed DVD can hold 17 GB. Unless this new media can hold more than 300 GB I don't think it can hold the contents of 20 packed DVDs.
I agree. Remember when everyone predicted Broadband at home 2 years ago? Ya, right. No way in hell 5 years from now fiber will be in every home. You should have said "Every rich person's home" then maybe I would say "Probably." I would predict that fiber is going to be replaced by WiFi networks. Much cheaper than digging trenches everywhere. Plus easier to upgrade and/or replace with new crap. In 5 years, this tech will be cheaper. Not sure about more secure but cheaper.
My assumption is that this media is double-sided with higher density than a DVD.
My question is this: Given that the disk is almost clear, and that we have little to no information on the method by which the data is read and written, wouldn't applying any sort of label to the disk have negative adverse effects on the ability of the drive to read its contents?
In addition, when they say "The 100-gigabyte disc is larger than any other similar product in the world," they must surely be speaking of physical size, not capacity, correct?
-braxton
Man, I'm sure Hong Kong vendors will come up with a nice package using this tech, whether or not Valenti does! =D
I get that as technology improves and dvd-r will be out on the market cheaper with the mediums, movies gets burnt just like the music cd and hurt the industry.
But there is 1 point (nothing good for us) may save the movie industry from taking the same course as the music industry to some extent.
The lack of compatibility between all dvd-r, dvd-ram and all the other dvd writing standard makes the consumers hard to copy a dvd movie, and that may supress some of the loss to movie industry, thanks to those who messed up the dvd standard.
You see the problem with such a disk is it's inability to be written to more than once. By the time the damn thing wrote 100GBs of data to the disk, the media would have been leaped over by new technology!
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
I can say I actually made a few bucks on their fluctuating valuation. They're now delisted. (Note that delisted != bankrupt, just that they ceased to meet NASDAQ's minimum requirements to let them borrow money from the public via stock offerings.)
But seriously, the RIAA/MPAA has not been the major block to their success. As of this year, they even had a major studio (Universal, I believe) looking into the technology, potentially even for the next DVD standard.
Their problems have been entirely related to cash flow (bring up a price chart for CDDD, if you still can- investors fled during the collapse of the 'bubble,' and there's even a rumor about a really rich SOB losing his margin account, leading to the huge selloff last year), and their engineering has been further hindered by the situations in Israel, and the current state of US-Russia relations. Unfortunately, this means that despite the multibit read tech, their demonstrations haven't broken any speed barriers yet (IIRC, their last demo was reading at about 2.5MB/s; I could be quite off, so check the press releases).
They still have some VC money (and a renewed funding agreement), but it's definitely a case of a good company losing due to a bad market. Hopefully they'll pull through and have some hardware to show before all this new stuff totally eclipses their tech. I'm a fan of alternative storage (viz the magneto-optical drive in my machine), and the fluorescent tech promises to be a bit more scratch-resistant than competing ideas (a big concern to me personally, as I'm the type who leaves all his CDs stacked next to the stereo.)...
...and I'm just posting AC to keep my Slash-addiction in check. No conspiracy at work, honest.
The article doesn't seem too revealing about how the technology works, but if it's something similar to a CD, does that mean that the tinyist scratch will cause massive data loss? On a CD, little scratches aren't so bad, but comparitively, a tiny scratch on a CD would be...what, 150 times worse on this (ie. a deep gouge)? Something to think about... If it's too sensitive to scratches, mabye it won't be as useful as they hope/think.
Already, I make it a standard practice of mine to take movies ripped from many DVDs and put them onto a single disk. If I had a DVD burner, that proccess would be much simpler. I would much rather have all my movies on a single disk than many disks with wasted space. There is loss in quality as they are recompressed, but for many things: I dont give a shit. The industry is constantly wasting money now to bring out "enhanced" or "restored" versions of movies. I dont want that. For a shitty TV Show, or something which had shitty visuals to begin with, did you know that rather than these 2 shows per disc shit, you could have had the whole series and not even notice?
Larger storage space is just that: larger storage space. I dont want to Pirate Movies, I just want to watch them in a format I dont consider stupid.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
That means absolutely nothing to me... for I am just a helpless know-nothing American. Please announce your new storage products in Library-of-Congress terms, otherwise I have nothing to base it against. ;)
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
DUDE! My mom used to make the best chicken vindaloo, this recipe is pretty good too though.
And I was holding my breath for those Flurescent Multilayered disks...
Asf
Jerk.
the webpage on writable 3d volume holographic optical storage on the page says that a "ALL IN ONE" data storage device solution is on the horizon. www.colossalstorage.net
You might want to check out my site for news similar to this (inc. this story).
It's vaporware just like every other story on new removable storage media featured on /. I want to see one of these discs as well as a working prototype before I believe anymore.
a few years back i saw an article which defines a similar technology to this http://www.c-3d.net/ uses a technology not disimilar to that of dvd, but has 30+ closely spaced layers, allowing for up to 147 gigabytes on a 12cm disk. to me a "super-sized disk" suggests to me a laser disk sized behemoth, scary stuff. "...disc stores more than any other similar product in the world" there's C-3d right there!
After seeing the pic in the Taipei Times link I was totally disapointed. I was giving the first article the benefit of the doubt that they mean super sized in terms of data, not amount of plastic. Who do they think they are making album sized media? I get pissed off at Japanese optical media manufacturers for dragging their feet on bring the newer lasers to market quicker and such, but at least they stick to the standard CD size.
It's particularly silly to see this being pushed on the island of Taiwan that entered the PC market which is now the backbone of its economy with power supplies and standardized case designs. I could understand if this was coming from Brazil or some other country trying to usurp the low end peripherals market by forcing a new form factor, but Taiwan? I don't get it.
I would have been more impressed with a 20Gig disc the size of a CD. This product is obviously strictly experimental because it's ignoring some of the most obvious market realities as anyone who looks at the picture can quickly conclude.