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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."
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.
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."
I wonder if Sen. Hollings will have a heart attack when he hears about this? Likely not, his bosses at Disney will, but he can be assured of funding from the media industry in it's useless fight against progress.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
My first assumption when I read "super-sized" was that it was in reference to the disc's _capacity_, not its physical dimensions.
Duh.
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
I would be very surprised if there were a sufficient market for this sort of scenario to occur. You are talking about people essentially ditching their entire DVD collection and switching over to some high definition version of DVD. I agree that high definition TV is pretty awesome. However, DVD is pretty darned good (much better than broadcast quality). And I have lots of DVDs and don't plan on replacing them. Also, the price of HDTVs will have to come down a lot. If think DVD is already too entrenched for a new high definition medium. By the time the new medium actually comes out and HDTVs become reasonably affordable, the battle will be over.
My main fear about a new format is that it gives the studios renewed control - they are not likely to make the same mistake twice (re allowing DeCSS to happen). If one of the manufacturers of dvd equipment had not gotten careless with the encryption technology, is there any reason to believe that we would be able to rip DVDs today?Also, given the incredible stupidity with which the media companies have adopted the internet as a business channel, I wouldn't be too surprised if they tried to create any new high def media in the same vain as DIVX, where you constantly have to pay to play. The market dynamics that caused CC's version to fail would not be present, since the studios would control the content no matter the form (DIVX had to compete with unlimited DVDs of the same movies).
Just look at the failure ( perhaps I speak too soon ) of attempts at producing higher quality audio than CD and turning them into standards. For 90% of the world on 95% of the world's audio equipment going beyond CDs is a waste of money.
Finally, for all their hopes and dreams, people can't just decree a new standard, these things take a lot of time before they take off. DVDs took about 5 years to catch on.
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?"
Funny, I didn't see the word removable anywhere in the article. The article didn't have many details at all, that was my point. All it said was that it was an "optical disc" and it could store 100GB of data. Is it removable? How big is it? Does it even interface with a PC? Is it rewritable? See my point - the article gives no decent information.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
People do not pay for movies and skip bootlegs because of some quality expectation. It is mostly due to: