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."

Comments

100 GB? Laughable! :)

[jukal]

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.

Re:What kind of bus?

[Jobe_br]

what makes you think that IDE can't handle? IDE, as much as SCSI, is a line-level protocol. Fibre channel, as much as firewire/usb is more of a connection medium/protocol, as it has the option to use SCSI as its actuall communication protocol. The limitations of YOUR IDE subsystem are likely from your IDE controller's bus speed, 33MHz, 66MHz, etc.

Furthermore, this article isn't talking *at all* about a drive mechanism, but rather a technology for the media. The media may be extraordinarily large, but the access to it may be slow, think tape drives - as they've gotten larger, sure, storing to them has gotten somewhat faster, but it still takes a few hours to fill up a 40GB/80GB tape.

This technology article is more concerned about talking about the expansion of how much data can be stored on one piece of media rather than how that data would be accessed, what applications that access speed would lend itself to, etc. The above post on FMC technology talks about speed-ups from using multiple lasers, each reading different tracks/layers - this would speed up access, otherwise, your only option is to spin a disk faster, which has certain practical limits.

Some more detailed articles on the subject

[S-prime]

The Taipei Times

http://www.taipeitimes.com/news/2002/05/17/story /0 000136369

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/introductio n. htm