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

i/o speeds?

[jeffy124]

any idea what the i/o speeds of these optical disks are capable of? the article doesnt seem to mention it.

Big disks... and backups.

[ldopa1]

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.

Re:Gift to the movie industry from heaven.

[sien]

The problem with this is that the quality of DVDs is so high anyway that they are beyond the quality of most televisions at the moment.

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.

Re:Why was this even posted?

[gosand]

Um... because it's removable?

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.

Re:Gift to the movie industry from heaven.

[killmenow]

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.

People do not pay for movies and skip bootlegs because of some quality expectation. It is mostly due to:

1. They don't know about it. I can't tell you how surprised so many people I know are when I wave that little CD at them and say, "Hey, guess what this is?" Most folks aren't geeks who d/l movies off the Internet not because of quality, but because they're not geeks.
2. Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. People who do know about it often wonder...can't they track that? Won't I get in trouble? People don't like getting into trouble. And not many of them know how to d/l a movie that's in SVCD format, burn it, and watch it on their TV, so they're uncertain as to whether it's even worth it.
3. Most people actually think d/l-ing bootlegs is wrong! ... I know, it's a shocker.