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One Terabyte On a 12-inch^H^H^H^Hcm Disk
News for nerds writes: "At InterOpto'02 - international optoelectronics exhibition hold in Chiba, Japan - OPTWARE Co.Ltd. made up of ex-Sony engineers, demoed(in Japanese) 1-terabyte super-high speed optical disk system "T-VRD." It uses hologram and stores 1 terabyte data in a 12-cm-CD-size disc, with 100Mbps - 1Gbps transfer rate. Available in 2003 as 19-inch rackmount, 2005 for PC." Update: 07/16 18:33 GMT by T : Sorry, that's centimeters, not inches, which is of course even better ;)
Babelfish's rather loose translation:
From the past it is researched, applying the " hologram system ", the system which was developed. With hologram system of conventional type there was a problem in compatibility and the like of the existing media such as miniaturization and cost and DVD. With the technology which this time is announced, you say these weak points were overcome by using the same company individual " polarized light Cori near hologram technology " and so on.
Hologram technology until recently, using two object glasses, had the necessity to irradiate separate " reference beam " and " signal light ". You say with polarized light Cori near hologram technology these from one object glass the economical space, cost decrease is actualized by the fact that it makes lighting possible. In addition, we have assumed it can maintain also the compatibility of the DVD and the CD media.
I'm not sure if the translation is making it accurate or not, but it looks like this is indeed using holographic storage and not just holographic printing.
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If you had a terabyte of MP3s, you would have approximately 250,000 songs, if you assume an average song is 4MB. If there are approximately 12 songs on a CD, you would have to own 20,833 CDs.
If you had 1MB of video per minute, you could hold one million minutes of video. That comes out to 16666 hours of video. It would take you 694 days to watch every minute of that, or a little under 2 years!
Now, who has that much content? Hmm? Correct my math, if I messed up. I'm not feeling too good today...
Slashdot is a waste of time. I enjoy wasting time.
A local lab brought a prototype cube to my school a few years ago. You don't really need to worry about scratches as much as small vibrations causing dispersion of the bean as it travels through the 3-d space. Remember NextSetp on the discovery channel? They had a demo around 1996. It might be the same technology, just in disk form.
A terabyte is really not THAT much in some applications. For example at my work they have very large medical images (electronic X-ray images and so on). These have to be very detailed so they are big. Since this is also the biggest hospital of Europe there are lots of images coming in every day (several hundreds a day, I don't have exact figures) so this grows quickly indeed.
Keep in mind that a terabyte is only 1000 gigabyte. I have a digital video camera which I plan to connect to my future computer to work on video's. If you like to store huge movies on disk then this huge capacitity will get small very quickly indeed.
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No one needs a terabyte disk.
;)
Talk to the computer vision people. MPEG and JPEG compession work in part by throwing out a lot of information that the human vision system won't miss. Applying current machine vision algorithms to such data doesn't work at all well due to compression artifacts.
Consider the latest digitally-produced Star Wars episode. If that were stored in uncompressed form, it'd take about three terabytes. (Assuming 2k by 3k frames, 24 fps, and two hour running time.)
Nice troll, though
-- Alastair
A terabyte is roughly what, 100 dvd's? Hell, I own more movies than that, and I'm not even 30 yet. I'd love to not have to swap them just to watch.
Of course, by your line of thinking, a Commodore 64 suits everyone's needs: it has color, you can do programming, word processing, can get online, and even save your games on disks! Why would anyone need anything more?
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Here is what I can see for future increases in storage:
Petabyte: Store your entire DVD collection, CD collection, MP3 collection, all of your digital photo's from a lifetime, books, documents, etc.
Exabyte (1 million Terabytes): This amount of storage will be useful if you want to record in hig-quality digital video all of yor life from your wearable computer that you take everywhere. You will be abel to access every moment of your life, every conversation and play it back at anytime. The type of memory would also come in handy for storing large, highly detailed Virtual Worlds of your own creation. This is exactly where I see 100GHz machines coming in handy - the ability to render realistic virtual worlds on the fly.
www.enthea.org
At the time, they were touting the amazing density of optical technology. I guess they've made a little more progress since then.
Eh, what's the point of having that much storage space? Computer technology has pretty much advanced about as far as is necessary.
:-)
...
Nice to see you joining us on slashdot, Bill.
I still remember when you told us all we'd never need more than 640k of RAM. Still trying to live that one down, aren't you?
On a more serious note, until I can render my entire featurelength movie with full 3d animation effects in realtime I won't be satisfied.
Indeed, that is only equivelent to a 1x CD-RW or DVD-RW, so even real time won't be acceptable.
Which means, until I can render my entire featurlength movie in 1 second and ship it out to all my friends and relatives in another second, I won't be satisfied.
But wait! I want to do that featurelength movie in HDTV 1080p format. Actually, since most of my friends have 1200p capability, I'd like to be able to render in 1920x1200 30 fps, 48bit color in under a second.
Well, movie making was fun, but now I prefer fully immersive virtual reality, at resolutions sufficient that the human eye can't tell the images aren't real. While realtime was initially fast enough for this rendering (no matter how fast I turn my head!), I find I want to render my worlds much more quickly than that to support multiple presences, so I can meet friends in my virtual world. So, until I can render all 3-d objects down to the molecular level in my entire, vast virtual world, in under a second, I won't be satisfied.
But wait! I'd like to
1 Terabyte sounds like a lot now, but I suspect we will find it to be very limited a few short years after it comes out. Human creativity is an amazing thing, and tends to push the boundries of whatever technical limits are placed upon it. I see no sign of this changing anytime soon, or of human creativity having come close to reaching some ephemeral "limit."
We won't be using the same computers in 20 years that we are today. Well, maybe some of the less flexible of us will be, but our children certainly won't be, and those of us more willing to keep up with a changing world likely won't be either.
Unless, of course, Hollywood is given veto power over all new technologies, in which case our children will be using computers more akin to the old IBM PC/XT my parents used back in the 80's, rather than what we're using today, but that is a tangent for another day.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
It was Lockheed Martin that was using Imperial units.
NASA however apparently failed to read Lockheed Martins' code.
Not including pictures, the answer is about .05 LOC per disk, or about 20 of these 1TB disks for the entire text of the collection.
For added perspective, the Internet Archive lists a number of other comparisons to their over 100 Terabytes of web pages dating from 1996.
Finally, in 2000 the "How Much Information?" project attempted to estimate the total amount of information produced in all major mediums: from books to TV to the Internet to photos to x-rays and more. Based on their data (from a few years ago), every American musical recording produced each year could fit on a couple of these new 1TB disks (compressed) and every new DVD could probably fit on about a dozen. The Internet is harder to estimate, due to hidden content (databases, dynamic pages) but they estimated the "surface" web to be 25-50 Terabytes and total "web-connected documents" to be as high as 7,500 Terabytes!
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In email from Bill Gates he denies the quote, but instead of offering up context for its origin or any explanation of why the quote originated, he waxes on about memory limitations. He even claims credit ("I and many others have said") for "Moore's Law", though he uses a mildly modified form of the assertion (1 extra bit every 2 years).
As rebuttals go, it's pretty weak. I'd love to hear from the original citer on when/where it was quoted from.
I was amused by the Johnny Mnemonic movie, in which Keanu Reeve's head would explode if he didn't get the 320GB of data out of it (Johhy's capacity was only 160GB, or 'leakage' would occur). Given how far into the future it was supposed to take place, that amount seemed pretty small. Johnny's 'futuristic' capacity looks ever more ludicrous with each new jump in real-world capacity.
Well, aside from the fact that 12.5MB/sec is probably what people actually get from UDMA133, such a terabyte disk could be a very good application for WORM drives in systems that need permanant on-line storage of everything. Isn't this a feature of Plan 9?
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Its remarkable to me how unimaginative this community is at times. Terabytes are nothing to use even with today's technology.
This is barely enough to start cracking the doors to the real future of computers. With this, you may be able to store a few seconds of fully immersive video. I'm talking the kind of stuff that gives you limit of human sight resolution for anything beyond arm's length no matter what direction you look in. Add this storage to flight simulator technology that notes your head position and dynamically reproduces the right resolutions across your field of vision using 210 degree goggles, and you've got an experience in the making.
Another technology that would soak it up in seconds would be life recording. I've got a fairly poor memory and generally forget completely almost anything beyond three years ago. I'd LOVE to be able to wear a device that records my every moment in 360 degrees with fully directional audio. But, really, the recording technologies, including storage, won't be the most difficult part of the development. The really tough part will be the technology to search the database. It will need to be able to interpret everything seen and heard in order to be able to replay what I'd like without my having to remember times and places. Furthermore, it would need to do so in near real time as the only time that it might have to "catch up" would be when I slept...actually, I'd probably won't much of that time recorded too. Expand that to recording not only my personal experience but anything occurring anywhere on any property that I own in full 3D realistic resolution and bringing things to my attention that I've told it too and the task is at least 30 years of technology away (2^^30 * current storage capacities + 2^^24 * current processing capacities). Add recording of other aspects of the environment like smell, temperature, RF, etc and you could soak up technology forever. People will want these things.
The day will come, probably within this century, when petabytes and petaips are to us what bits are today.