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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.
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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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.
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."
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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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.
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."
...the ultimate bootlegging medium, from the ultimate bootlegging country.
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
FMD can store about a terrabyte.
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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
Save it for a Slashback at least. This is a front page story?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
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.
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.
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...
Am I the only one that finds the comparisons to CD burners a bit lacking in perspective? For one thing, its not like they are taking a current CD and stacking it vertically until it can hold 100GB. Instead, they're going to increase the density and add a few layers to it. More density = more bits per disc rotation. A 24x CD Burner would burn 3.6MB a second, but a DVD at the same rotation would be like 3.6MB x 8 because the density is higher.
What Im saying is that a single layer version of one of these disks would get filled just as quickly as itd take to fill a CD (huge leap in the amount of data, though...), it might take twice as long if it has 2 layers.. and so on. Who knows, it depends on how the burning technology works.
My point is that the data rate of a CD is going to be incredibly slow compared to the data rate of one of these disks as long as the data density is higher. So stop comparing it to CD Burners. It is sort of like saying that an airplane would be many times slower than a car because it's so much heavier.
"Derp de derp."
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.
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
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).
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
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
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".
v ide by 9.67 (two
divisions)N ow we have a number less
than 9.67)
r
iclandquist.pdf [edc.org]
-
integer [google.com]
The simple answer is to get the female pigeons pregnant. The more complex answer comes with non-integer decimal bases. You can get more than a 100 pigeons worth of pigeons if they are stored in decimal base 9.67 in place of base 10.
100 pigeons in base 9.67 = 106.4723296077... to infinity.
How to calculate non-integer decimal conversions:
(Note that because the numbers past the decimal add to the absolute base value - base 9, which has numbers 0 to 8, will in base 9.67 have the numbers 0 to 9 because the values past the decimal point add +1 to the overall number range)
Converting 100 (base 10) to (base 9.67)
Take the number 100
Divide by 9.67 (one division)
=10.341261633919338159255429162358
Di
=1.0694169218117205955796720953834
(
First value is 1
Subtract the integer value (-1)
Multiply by 9.67
=0.67126163391933815925542916235781
Second value is 0
Subtract 0
Multiply by 9.67
=6.4911
Third value is 6
Subtract 6
Multiply by 9.67
=4.748937
First value beyond the decimal point is 4
(wash rinse repeat)
(Changing it to another base is slightly more complex, but is the same basic routine. I cannot use RADIX conversion to do this quickly for non-integer decimal bases)
Since you are increasing the number of digits past the decimal point you are making an infinite transcendental number (except in certain cases as Eric Landquist discovered).
http://www2.edc.org/makingmath/studentWork/misc/e
(Subtract the space Slashdot plops on the word "ericlandquist.pdf" for the link to work.)
Or
http://www.google.com/search?q=eric+landquist+non
(Subtract the space Slashdot plops in the word "non-integer" for the link to work correctly.)
Quoting:
Another joy about continuing a project like this is that you know what has worked in previous years, so you are better able to find and prove interesting re-sults faster. My biggest joy that senior year was the discovery of a set of positive irrational bases that produced similar results as before: integers with finite repre-sentations and rationals with repeating representations in these bases. I quickly found and proved several patterns with this family, which is the set of all numbers (m + n^(.5)) where (m - 1)^2 < n <(m + 1)^2. This formed the bulk of my senior year research.
"Face it, a nation that maintains a 72% approval rating on George W. Bush is a nation with a very loose grip on reality.
"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.
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.
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.
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
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.
The technology is being stalled so it can be used in the next DVD technology.
Thank you for proving my point.
By stalled, the RIAA and MPAA forcing them to close the technology so only they can use it via contracts, and working on copy protections so it can be used for the next dvd.
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"isn't the data rate of a floppy drive likewise going to be incredibly slow compared to the data rate of a CD drive? "
A floppy drive is incredibly slow compared to the data rate of a CD Drive.
"why would anyone claim an advance in storage technology *without* substantial improvements over standard speeds as well as density."
That is what I was saying. Several people were saying 'oh at a cd burning rate, itll take 24 hours to burn a 100 gig disk'. So I responded with 'DuH! Itll be faster than a CD burner!'
I think you're making the same point I am, even though you are arguin with me.
To be honest, though, since you are an AC I dont expect you to respond. I dont know why I bothered to. *grumbles about AC's not being notified when they are responded to*
"Derp de derp."