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Philip's SFFO 3cm 4Gig Optical Discs
JL writes "New Scientist reports that Philips has a demonstration in Japan recently of a 3cm rewritable optical disc that can store four gigabytes. The drive is small too!"
Interesting that they note that 4 gigs can store 5 2 hour movies on the thing :)
I hope they don't try to burden this format with built-in DRM, because then it will 'flop' commercially so bad that it would put even Betacam to shame.
If this technology will be cheap enough, is this not potentially useful for portable music?
Imagine using these small drives as cartridges, such as the minidiscs. It would be great, and probably widley used. Just look at those old walkmans and such. They where great in their days.
Wandering away...
Have you noticed that if you calculate the value of those movies or especially MP3s on the disc (~16$/album, ~20$/movie) the value of a disc is more than the same weight disc made out of gold.
Btw. if RIAA catches you walking around with pocket full of these discs, and those discs contain more albums than an average music store. Can they charge you similarly as if you had robbed all albums from one of their stores?
WHY does everything have to relate to the cellphone?
Well, most of the world has pretty good coverage. The US is the exception largely due to its vast size, but this means that unusually for a piece of technology, the US market is considered secondary. Hence, so is increasing coverage.
The rest of the world is running out of things that cellphone companies can use to convince us to buy a new phone. It's stupid, but it serves as a quick easy application for marketing types.
Watching a movie on a 2.5" screen, no matter what the resolution, is simply silly
It would be pretty cool if they could build a decent screen into a pair of glasses though. Then the portability of something this size would be a definite benifit.
First thought when I saw this was "oh yay, another format to buy, with mediocre advantages, namely size". Mini-DVD, meet Mini-disc! Then the thought occured to me, you could theoretically increase your maximum transfer rate off this media by quite a bit over traditional-sized DVD/CD-ROMs, since the diameter is smaller and thus angular inertia is much lower. The disc will have a higher maximum speed and won't explode around 28,000 RPM. Don't feel like hacking out the math, but I'd imagine it'd be signficant.
10 Hours of movies? In what compression format? Certainly not MPEG-2. This is slightly less than a single sided DVD. Why make it so small? If you double the radius the amount of area is increased by a factor of four.
In the last picture near the bottom of that site, there's a shot that looks like little compactflash modules with discs in them.
I'm thinking they're probably just the equivalent of jewel cases, but wouldn't that be cool if it were an extension of the IBM microdrive concept.
Mmmmm... 4 Gig microdrive...
"You worthless post!"
-Shakespeare, 2 Gentlemen of Verona, 1. 1. 147
That time is already here. A new battery for your cellphone is more expensive than a new phone in a lot of instances.
"I went on a diet, swore off drinking and heavy eating. And in fourteen days, I had lost exactly two weeks. Joe E. Lewis
That will be DVD+RW I guess......
I'm waiting for storage that can store a few gigs cheaply that has NO MOVING PARTS. MO's are nice, but as long as you've got moving parts, they're still the part of the computer most likely to fail (taking your data with it). I wish that storage companies would instead focus on say, flash card technology or something similar so that we wouldn't have to worry about drive failure.
Think about this:
Almost every school/University I have gone to has zip disks. This was a great Idea at the time because CD Burners were so expensive.
Now, CDRW's are cheaper than zip disks. Hell the burners costs almost as much as a small pack of zip disks. CDs are pennies.
My point:
DVD+/-Rs is a safe bet. Why would anyone want to move to a format like this 4gb optical disk. It's just another "Zip Drive" of the future.
Keep an eye on thinfilm.se, they have the memory cell technology (not suitable for main memory in a PC, but ideal for mass storage). "All" we need now is cheap submicron litography for roll to roll processing and we can kiss moving parts goodbye.
I'm still waiting for something which can replace floppy disks. Will this do it?
Floppy disk replacement isn't a matter of medium choice, there are plenty: zip, superdisk, orb, flash, et al. The problem arises from the lack of flexibilty of PC BIOS in being able to substitute those other mediums, which are often ATA/IDE based for the floppy disk.
A simple solution would be to create add an additional ATA connector that the BIOS would treat as the floppy drive, depending on what was connected to it. At boot time if I disk was present and bootable, the system would boot off it and present it as the A drive. Even better would be a modular BIOS that would allow BIOS-level drivers to be installed so that BIOS could boot off of other buses -- USB, 1394, and so on without an operating system-level driver.
One thing I'd like to know from BIOS experts is why this couldn't be done (especially the third "floppy" ATA connector) and what legacy OSes (*cough*DOS*cough*) would think of a floppy disk with > 2.88MB of available storage? Do they have hard-coded storage variables that can't deal with a "floppy" with capacities larger than 24 bits?
If you can hide one under a coffe cup, think of the possibilities for information theft.
Think, a white coffee cup, a white 3cm casing, a little rubber cement... no one would even know that 1-4 gigs of sensitive corporate information was leaving the building.
Small enough to be tucked into the 5th pocket on a pair of jeans, slid into a shoe without much (if any) discomfort, palmed, hidden inside a container of stress putty, even tucked into a person's hair.
Hey, isn't that roughly the size of the iPod's wheel?
Hell, 3cm is small enough to hide almost anywhere...
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
It would be pretty cool if they could build a decent screen into a pair of glasses though. Then the portability of something this size would be a definite benifit.
Like this?
They havent got it quite right just yet. However, I've been wearing a version that clips onto your classes for over 3 years now.
"What I really want in storage is already covered by the CD, the floppy, and the DVD (though DVD is a little expensive"
This would be the ideal solution to the storage problem with increasingly larger digital camera images--along the lines of the Sony CD1000 that uses mini CDs.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
When are we going to get DivX ;-) player units anyway?
I've tried searching teh web, but It's nearly impossible to search for a "DVD/DivX ;-)" player without getting tons of old dusty websites about the Circuit City DivX fiasco.
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Interestingly enough, Philips got OUT of the music business right as MP3s were taking off...
1998 Seagram buys Polygram from Matsushita rival Philips for US$10.4bn
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
This has to be MO. One of the biggest disadvantages to MO is the COST.
Last time I checked, the 5.2 GB 5.25in discs costs about $80.00usd. I can just imagine what this would cost.
I do not think that you will see anything like this in a car stereo, just because a product like this will not hit critical mass in the marketplace.
I'm thinking that 5gb compact flash, or something like it will hit the market first. It, CF, would be smaller, faster and more reliable.
Another problem with small media is the speed. At 3cm this thing is going to be slow. Even on the outside tracks, *warning my math sucks*,
(3/2)*pi*r*d/?, shit never mind... But even if it's going at 10,000 RPM it's going to be slow.
Power consumption will suck. Look at the microdrive.. If you have a small disc spinning fast it drains batteries way too quickly. You would not be able to listen to an entire album without a recharge.
One of the few reasons that you need a disc is because its inexpensive. Inexpensive enough for content producers to sell their wares in that format. There is no WAY that the RIAA would sell a disc with 1000 hours of music on it. for anything close to $100usd.
And even if the content producers do not produce content on this format. The best hope for this media will be a backup solution, which comes back to speed and cost.
The next video disc will have to have enough room for at least 1 HD movie. With better compression this might happen on this disc, but why not use a 9gb DVD? There is not a need for ultra portable video. And again, look at the cost. My guess is that there will be something like DVD2 or something that uses the same media but uses better compression to get more bang for your buck.
For removable storage (floppy killer dev) it HAS to have to have a drive that plugs into a USB port. like key ring storage. Otherwise, it's useless for being universally excepted. And if you take the drive around with you with one disk in it all the time, why bother with a disc?
I wish that I had more positive things to say.
I think if Philips can resolve the issue of shock resistance and make a re-writeable disc in this new format that stores at least 3 GB, there's a better application: high-end digital still cameras.
.TIF format. This new drive could be perfect for professional digital still cameras, that's to be sure.
With professional digital still cameras already going past ten megapixels in resolution, even a 1 GB IBM Microdrive in a Compact Flash Type II slot ain't going to cut it especially if you store the digital still in uncompressed
Well... Every new technology is expensive.
DVD wasn't competatively prices compared to vhs or cd when released.
DVD-R's are just getting competative, as in price per MB, compared to CD-R.
Does that mean that they shouldn't have bothered to release the standard?
Of course not. That way, no new technology would ever see the light of day.
So if they do release this new diskformat, just wait a few years and it'll be at a price that the average consumer can afford.
And by then something new will have arrived, that is expensive as hell but it 10x better...
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)