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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 :)
Indeed. How many Libraries of Congress is that, anyway?
found a Japanese site with pics http://www.zdnet.co.jp/news/0210/04/nj00_sffo.html
Philip's SFFO 3cm 4Gig Optical Discs
That Philip is a mighty smart guy. I wish I could make optical discs.
2G of pr0n in 3cm! Wow, that's smaller than my... oh, never mind.
First versions of the disc will be:
a) Ready for sale in two years.
b) Store only 1 Gb.
c) Expected to cost £70 / drive.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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.
can they fit it on one? would be nifty.. !
seriously, though. what happens to all those great storage options? it seems to me that every few months someone comes up with a clever technique, but I'm still stuck with 700mb CDr's !
Two years from now the world's smallest optical disc will let your cellphone store five two-hour movies...
OK, I can see a small disk like this being very useful, but WHY does everything have to relate to the cellphone? "You can do this with your cellphone...you can do that with your cellphone."
How about simple things, like actual coverage?
Watching a movie on a 2.5" screen, no matter what the resolution, is simply silly.
There are some nice pictures at: http://www.zdnet.co.jp/mobile/0210/04/n_sffo.html James
Like tinyurl, but one letter less! http://qurl.co.uk/
i don't mean to be a wet blanket here but announcement like this on slashdot are pretty common, and most of the time it takes a few years or so for the product to become widely available. more often than not, due to bad marketing decisions or various other reasons, the product doesn't even see the light of day.
yea i know its nice to read about it and the article says 2 years more, but that's what they say all the time. rewritable DVDs were such a hot topic once but when they actually came out all the different formats and standards adopted by the different companies made it pretty much unsuited to mass-market adoption, not to mention the price of the drives themselves, though those have dropped a bit since.
speaking of drives, the article mentioned the cost of the discs, but not the cost of the players themselves. the discs might be dirt cheap after a while, but are the drives going to cost too much for the average consumer to afford? and should it be cheap enough to be competitive with DVDs and HDTV will this get any opposition from rival companies who may view this as a threat to their products?
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...
Wayne Fletcher at Philips's Southampton lab says SFFO will be ready for sale in two years. Chris Buma, who heads Philips's optical division at Eindhoven in the Netherlands, says discs can be made for "a few cents". The drives will initially cost around £70 but this is expected to fall.
I wonder how this price compares to costs to produce a DVD.
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?
This thing belongs inside a digital video camera. I mean, all that work on jitter resistance must have some point....
We already have this capacity: (re)writable DVDs. So the main compelling advantage must come from the size and maybe energy usage.
It is small, but Flash memory is even smaller. Let's say the drive will be commercially available in 1 year (and then I think I'm being optimistic.) By that time flash storage will already start to come close to these capacities. For instance, the successor of the proprietary Sony Memorystick and XD card technologies by Fuji and Olympus can go up to 8 GB. Flash is technically superior to optical storage (no moving parts, less energy consumption) but optical storage is far cheaper. But most people would store their flash memory on their harddisks anyway.
My karma ran over your dogma
So Tommy Lee jones was right, that small disc he held *is* going to replace the CD someday... ;-)
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.
Well, last time this was posted as news the disc was billed as being coin sized. Some guy here apparently has a habit of rolling naked on his money (seems strange to me too). More interesting/funny was a comment about pushing quarters into the slot on your machine to pay for goods online. Future tech support headache on its way - this will take over from broken cup holders on your ROM drive.
1.
Please make different sizes of media that use the same format, E.G. 3cm, 12cm, 30cm.
Portable equipment can support just the smallest disc size.
Consumer equipment can support the small and middle disc sizes.
Industrial equipment can support the large discs, for things like medical applications where you need uncompressed HDTV, etc.
2.
Please encourage use of all sizes - I have loads of CD-singles that are on 12cm media, not the 3cm media. If only they were all on 3cm media, I could have a pocket-sized discman!
3.
Please consider the possibility of, for example, 12cm media, with a push-out 3cm disc in the centre, that contains the first track, (for audio applications, for example), so that you can buy an album, and play the single on your portable player.
"Here's a nifty little gadget, (holding up small, silver-dollar sized, CD) It's gonna replace CD's soon. Guess I'll have to buy the White ALbum again."
"See, we plan ahead! That way, we never have to do anything now."
I'm still waiting for something which can replace floppy disks. Will this do it?
:)
Think about it. Nothing is really as useful and standard as the floppy. Easy use, always works, no special drivers, no monopoly.
Will this drive form a new standard? I hope so, but I suspect it will do as Zip drives and the rest. If Phillips probably keeps the standard locked down like the Zip drives, then it will just be another useless Zip drive.
Nice little thing, I hope it makes it
-Rene
As for five 2-hour movies in 4 gigs, that sounds like it uses MPEG 4. Besides, most "2-hour movies" these days are really 90 minutes long. The rest of that two hours is for changing the audience.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
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.
I think that if you held a spinning bicycle wheel by the spokes you would either get sore fingers or get dizzy really fast.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
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?
it's one thing to karma whore, it's another to accuse others of the offence, even though the posting you want modding down was 45 minutes earlier than the shameless, karma whoring copycat that's now somewhere at the top of the page...
karma sucks anyway, it's useful additions to the discussion that are valuable, dupes happen, live with it...
Let us put this in the proper context for /.
The disks will hold *** 10 HOURS OF PORN! ***
Now, see how simple that is?
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
I hope they make a normal DVD-sized one. It would be nicer to have a 50-gig disk that is a few inches across than a 4-gig disk that is 3 centimeters across. (I don't watch that many movies on my cell phone.
Actually, the area calculations aren't quite that simple...
In a circle, if I double the diameter from 3cm to 6cm, you do have a 4x area increase. But optical media, you have to consider the empty spaces left on the inside and outside edges. Increasing to 6cm could potentially more than quadruple the capacity - I esimate about 4.3g per side, 112g for a 12cm version.
What I really want to see is a 6-disc changer made out of a 12-cm CD-style plate - something like they suggest.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
That's 10 hours of video on a cell phone screen. Video takes up a whole lot less space at that low resolution.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I think you may have to reconsider that when these come out.
Just like the floppy was killed by the Zip disk. Seriously, what you need in a floppy replacement:
Cheap. This should happen over time.
Random access. Not the case with current CDRW, but could happen with this Philips thing.
DEPLOYED EVERYWHERE. I doubt it will happen with this drive. CDs are just too good, and I can't see the point for home computers in having anything smaller than mini-CDs. Cellphones or cameras, maybe, but it's not like the average Joe has a camera or a bleeding-edge media cellphone. We'll see in about 2 years. On the other hand, you could make a bitching USB keychain out of these things (except for the moving parts). Maybe pocket drives will catch on, but for £70?. Whatever.
SUPPORTED BY BIOS. Not going to happen for a good long time.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
I was trying to remember the last time I used a floppy rather than a network connection or a CD-RW.
A few months ago I installed linux on an old machine without a bootable CDROM drive.
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!
Robbing a store would be breaking & entering and grand theft, going around with a bunch of cds is "only" mass copyright infringement. Also intent would be a factor, if you rob an entire cd store, the intent is presumably to sell those for profit. If "everybody" can walk around with a music store in their pocket, you can claim it's just for personal use.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
"There will be some small loss of space on the disc itself as a result", said congressman Payme Goode, "but the disc will still have abundant free space, a good 1.44 Meg, available for the end-user's data".
Any purchaser of the disc will require a license. In order to apply for the license, the applicant must first submit to a thorough background check and will be profiled and fingerprinted by the authorities. Once granted a license to use this dangerous technology, the licensee will be required to carry the license at all times or face a penalty of 50 years in prison with no parole.
"We think that this is a very fair and equitable act", Hilary Rosen was quoted as saying, "It nicely balances the rights of the individual user against the recording and motion picture industries' rights to ensure that all digital technology is hobbled to the point of being useless".
Sigs are bad for your health.
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
I think you're right, but linear bit density is also a factor. If the limiting factor is the acceleration experienced at the edge of the disk, then
So, the maximum velocity that can be achieved underneath the read head still decreases as we make the media smaller, as you correctly observed. By this reasoning, it looks like a SFFO would have half the maximum media velocity of DVD:However, with SFFO, the bit density has been increased. These discs are about 1/16th the area of a DVD (1/4th the diameter: 12cm vs. 3cm), and 1/5th the capcity (4.7GB vs. 1GB), so they have about triple the areal density (bits per unit area), at least if we assume that the unusable areas in the center and outer margins will be proportional to disc area.
If the density increase has come equally from shrinking the distance between bits on the track and shrinking the distance between tracks (i.e., the aspect ratio of the bits remains the same), then the change in linear density of bits along a single track will be proportional to the square root of the change in areal density. In other words, the bits are probably closer together by 1/sqrt(3). So, labelling the density of adjacent bits within one track as "linear_density", we get:Other factors that may also determine how fast the disc can be spun are when the disc media starts to ripple and buckle, which I believe is helped by media thickness and hindered by media diameter (SFFO is smaller but thinner), and frictional and aerodynamic forces, which are portional to v or v**2 respectively, which would favor spinner small media faster.
Got some nano-dust on my cd...gotta clean it...
But CD-ROM isn't a random-access read-write medium.
And this matters because...? Just grab another cheap blank when you need to copy more files.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Without doing any serious math...
This new 3cm disc can indeed have very high data transfer rates, but it will not rely on absurd spindle speed in order to happen. This is going to be a very low-velocity medium.
While it certainly is physically possible to spin a smaller disc faster than a larger one of similar composition without it turning into shrapnel, there is absolutely no need to do so given the areal densities involved.
I'll use a CD-ROM for comparison, because we're all familiar with them. And I'm going to make quick work of the math, because it's late. And I'm going to use inches, because it's a unit that I'm comfortable with, aside from giving me a good opportunity to upset the more worldly readers of this text. I'm also going to make horribe blind assumptions and assertions, pull numbers out of my ass, and do all kinds of other underhanded things. I haven't even read the fucking article, and I'll probably be modded down for my effort (Note to Mods: if you think I'm wrong, either reply yourself and show me why, or piss off). Here goes:
Let's assume that our 5" CD has a hole in the midde 2" across that can't store information, for a total recordable area of 16.5 square inches. If this disc holds 700MB of usable data, it has an areal density of 42MB per square inch. And as long as I'm not showing my work, I figure this is good for a transfer rate of 19.5 megabytes per second at 28,000 RPM.
Let's assume that the 1.18" disc has similarly-proportioned hole in the center, so that it also has 16% of its area consumed by mounting surfaces. This leaves us with 0.904 square inches of usable area, or 3.6GB per square inch.
Which is to say that data transfer should happen about 85 times faster than a CD, on average, at a given angular velocity. This is also to say that it can produce data rates equal to those which causes CDs to disintegrate, at only 326 RPM.
Multiply that by 10, and you get a nice, sane, 3260RPM device which will be kind on battery life and offer a transfer rate somewhere in the impossible realm of 16GB/second.
And at a CD-shattering-but-probably-safe 28,000 RPM? 1.3 terabytes per second.
How many Libaries of Congress is that per minute?
I don't even want to bother with trying to figure out at what speed such a small disc would itself disintegrate at, given these numbers.
Thus, I submit that the format, in the unlikely event that it ever sees the light of day, will operate at extremely low spindle speeds, have fairly high latency, and excellent sustained transfer rates.
Kid-proof tablet..