Slashdot Mirror
87GB On DVD-Sized Media
BostonMACOSX points to this report in the Detroit News that says, in part, "Boston College researchers have found a way to store about 19 times more data on a disk than a common DVD can hold, using optical media made with common products, the December issue of Nature Materials reports." And it's a mix of high and low tech: the disk is formed of "an epoxy glue sold at hardware stores and a glass-like substance," but written with a currently expensive laser.
You know, I've been waiting a damn long time for a optical storage solution that catches up to the size the will make backing up todays hard drives (40 Gigs and Up) a realistic possibility. 700 Megs just isn't cutting the mustard anymore when were talking about trying to back up 200+ Gigs worth of data.
I Currently have about 1.4 TB of data sitting here in my room on CD-R right now, and let me tell you -- it's getting out of hand. DVD writables are not a solution (Too little, too late theory). I would love nothing more than to consolidate the 13 200 CD Cases I have here into something a little bit more compact.
I've seen a couple of companies working on something like this (Optical CD-Sized solution that stores around 100 GB). Anybody have any theories to when the common dude can roll down to compusa (pick your posion) and snag a few blank 100 GB Disks for a reasonable price? I'm starting to feel like it's 1995 again when a 1.4M Floppy disk was as good as it got.
"The Wright brothers were the first to fly with a heavier-than-air machine, but boy did they have a lousy plane"
I don't know about you folks, but I'm of the opinion that the CD/DVD format is on it's way out. I don't mean that CD's or DVD's are going away, simply that newer denser media won't look like those disks. The problem is this, as the spacial density of the data on the disk increases, the impact due to scratching increases. Instead of obliterating x number of bits, a scratch on a more dense media obliterates many times x bits.
This can be mitigated by using error correcting codes. The cost of these codes is that the number of bits required to represent the same amount of real data goes up. At some point on the density curve we will reach a point where the amount of error correction bits required to make the media immune to most normal scratches will equal the added amount of information storage due to a higher density.
We are already starting to see this with DVD's. How many times have you rented a DVD and it gets skippy and/or halts. Then when you eject it and look to see if it is scratched you see a few scratches that you know wouldn't even give your CD player pause were they to occur on a CD. That's because when the CD format was created they had a quarter inch rule in the standard. The error correction had to be able to withstand a quarter inch hole being punched in the CD. A DVD certainly can't handle that.
What we will begin to find in our exposed media disks is that a higher and higher percentage of the available bit positions on the disk will have to be devoted to error correction. Thus a boost of n in the density won't corrispond to a boost in the actual amount of usable data stored on the disk. The solution, of course, is to put the media in a case, like a 3 1/2" disk for example. This mitigates the risk of actually scratching the disk and so we wouldn't need such a high degree of error correction. We would have those bits to store actual data in.
Great for backing up your system, but depressing when you find out that "one little CD scratch" just wiped out a few hundred megs of important data.
-jc