Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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."
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.
"super-size" means that it holds an amazing number of french fries.
Can please somebody translate super-size in centimetres?
'Le size grande'
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
No link or mention of the original source of the above information.
It is therefore in violation of copyright law and should be removed accordingly.
Jack Valenti? Is that you? Eiser? Hollings?
I only ask because so few people are capable of that leap of logic from "I don't know anything" to "it is a copyright violation".
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
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.
... "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."
I used a screwdriver, worked pretty well.
sic transit gloria mundi
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
In France it's called a CD Royale...
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
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.