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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.
Great technology, but again, remember back when they announced 100 gigs on a CDROM? Seems storage size is getting smaller ;P
When I see someone manufacturing it, I'll be impressed, but until then.....
oh yeah- don't forget- just how long would it take to back this up (should it ever become RW?) At SCSI 120mb/sec..... right, you get the picture.
The RIAA and MPAA has banded together with researches from Boston to create a "fail safe" copy protection technique. And in yet other news, Media companies sales have dropped 99% as now people can fit 19 times the copyrighted content on cheap media with faulty copy protection.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
Sounds like this could replace tape drives for backup, if it's cheap enough
Instead of paying $27 for my four DVD set of Lord of the Rings, I might have only paid $17 if this technology were available today?
Cool.
What next, you play it more times than your supposed to, it melts in your DVD drive as punishment glueing it shut to prevent future acts of piracy?!?
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I must say that this will be good for backing up my harddrive, but when else will I really have an opportunity to fill the entire thing up?
One can only use so much porn....
While getting 87 Gig on something the size of a CD is cool and all, how is it possibly going to effect us? It has very little chance of being adopted by major manufacturers, and even less of becoming a standard. I'm sure that, to the folks that created it, it was a neat project, but that's about as far as it will go...
Karma: Marginal (mostly due to the border around the website)
Headline reads "Researchers boost computer data storage with common materials". This discovery is, of course, nothing to the great Filo's "How to build plutonium out of common household objects".
I'd suggest you don't use Slashdot as your only news source, or you will suffer permanent brain damage.
If you're packing more on then dust will have a much bigger impact on the readability of the disks?
Bring back caddys?
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"
Think of the uses for this though. Being able to back up all of my servers to a single disc without compressing anything. That would be a great time saver. And then there are the not-so-legal-but-who-cares-we're-all-going-to-die- eventually-anyway uses... like storing all the episodes of shows that aren't released on dvd in the US (Family Guy for one).
But how much would they cost per disc and how much for the burner? While dvd burners are getting pretty cheap now, the media still isn't as cheap as I would like it.
How is it that one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
Must go buy more popcorn now.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
My brain inserted 'household' between Common and products. I got real excited when I thought something like Lemon Plegde would allow me to store more data on a DVD...
...kinda like taking a hole punch to a SSDD 5 1/4 floppy.
(ya see, when _I_ was your age, floppy disks were actually bigger, and floppy, not 3.5" on a side and 'stiff')
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
It seems as though every so often someone comes out with a new form of media storage which reflects our current style, as well as about the standard size of storge. I remember when DVD's were announced, i had two 9 GB harddrive in my PC. Now i have two 80 GB drives.
And by the time this comes out, or something like it, it will cost considerably too much for a while, and then it will be fairly priced and it will be a norm that we find boring. The RIAA will have a fit about it.
I think that new generations of storage media that use entierly new technologies, that really push the envelope, will be the real exciting times.
I need something to backup my 120 gig drive onto.
The cake is a pie
Though it may placate the MPAA/RIAA a bit :)
On another topic, I hate shit like:
"...equal to 87,000 paperback books."
My mother in law knows what a gigabyte is. I think it's safe to stop with the point-of-reference crap.
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
Sorry, this just struck me as weird. 30 sentences, and I counted 14 uses of the word "said". Is this bad journalism? Or simply repetetive, dry and boring?
Whatever happened to declared, spoke of, pronounced, noted, claimed, admitted, told, pointed out... ??
Any sufficiently well-organized Government is indistinguishable from bullshit.
...how many Libraries of Congress is this?
By John Stebbins / Bloomberg News
"and the data don't degrade"
Looks like Mr. Stebbins might be a slashdotter himself!
"It's a very tangled subsystem." --Windows kernel guru
The FIRST version of FMD from c-3d would have been 100G...they were thinking 20 layers (200Gig+...I think I read somewhere they were hoping for a terabyte) would easily be possible..and they had tested throughput at rates high enough for 1080i HDTV (full-resolution) reads.
_ 00 /News/c3d.htm
y s. htm
I think the company (which I once owned stock in) is now dead. Their site is not working. Here's a a couple interesting links to info...
http://www.filmandvideomagazine.com/Htm/2000/10
http://homepages.ihug.com.au/~roidy23/technolog
If they couldn't make it with this killer technology (TONS of storage) how does this other company expect to fare any better with technology that is only 1/10th the product.
C-3D was doing pretty well with agreements for disc makers, agreements with WAMO (who pushed DVD), etc.
Sucks ass when something this promising doesn't ever come to fruition. I remember last year this time they had working RW drives.
Damn it, I want FMD...not this wussy 80GB crap.
Why are we looking for Media Solutions... Data should all be Stored Dynamically. I need a 10t store at "Yahoo" (pick your flavor) for $5 amonth with a data access rate in the 5ms range accessable from any spot on earth, by me and anyone else I so desire. - anyone working on that?
Take it from me...pouring epoxy glue on a DVD does not increase the storage capacity.
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
I've been seeing reports of stuff like this for at least two years. Wasn't there someone just a few months ago, probably reported here... hang on a sec...
yea here it is.
Anyway, I've been seeing reports like this forever, but zero consumer products. When something hits the market, I'll be interested. Until then I don't care.
Whoever implements this:
PLEASE BRING BACK THE CADDY!
Breathe the wrong way on this baby and you've wiped out HOW MANY library of congresses worth of text?
Okay, no panic, we're not there yet. But we will be.
CADDY! CADDY!
I'm tired of renting blockbuster dvd's with cigarette burns on them.
Um, yeah. I just got a down-mod shiver, so here's something insightful.
a DVD-size disk able to hold about 87 gigabytes, equal to 87,000 paperback books
EXCUSE ME?? Are you saying a paperback book is 87 megabytes? NOT EVEN IF YOU SCAN EACH PAGE IN BITMAP!!! (Because paperbacks are black and white.)
What's the writer smoking?
Other then people doing video work, at this time who really needs this kind of storage.
I have a 20Gb mp3 player and I still have not filled it 1/2 way.
I would hope that a system would never need more then 15Gb for a full useful install (included a suit of programs for use to be productive)
With the above listed size I would hope a system would never need, a 20 Gb system would still have 5Gb for user data, a 40 Gb system would leave 25 Gb for user data. (admittedly some specialty apps such as cad systems would need more storage, but here I am thinking more on the lines of home users, maybe I am wrong thinking there, maybe these systems are targeting business then I can see the use, databases can get very large)
Also how is the speed of this DVD?
What applications would you see for use of this technology?
A number of issues still need to be worked out, Fourkas said. One is that once data is written to the disk, it can't be changed. Each disk has to be written individually, he said. A mass- production method would need to be found to lower costs. The cost of the laser also is prohibitive. "The one we use is about $100,000," Fourkas said. The cost would come down with mass production, he said.
They should start measuring storage space in hours of porn.
Anonymous Cowards suck.
This seems pretty similar to the 'Scotch Tape Drive' where they were getting 10 gigabytes of data onto a roll of adhesive tape using a laser in much the same way.
Jack William Bell
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
They're all like this. "Researchers at Acme, Inc have discovered a way to put 2 TB on a Post-It with 2GB/s transfer rates, excellent durability and low cost...."
There's seldom a followup story, unless it involves the mythical holographic cube storage, in which case we hear about it all the time; maybe each time Taco watches 2001.
In reality, we have lots of cheap ata disks and 4.7GB DVDs will be everywhere in about a year or so, but no zillion-gig storage devices.
I really do, because I hate the "old news" posters, but I do recall seeing this for CDs. A guy in check-o-slow-va-kia (those who've seen the show will get the joke) made a multilayer CD that could hold gigs worth of data. It was revolutionary, but was derided because HD's were getting so large. Why do I think the same thing will happen here? (after everyone is done the pr0n jokes)
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
And the more important question, would the RIAA/MPAA ever let it happen? Imagine people selling discs of thousands of hours of music, or a whole year's popular films for $5 on the street.
When the Tech Industry creates its own, well funded PAC a la the NRA and starts outbribing the Hollywood Cartels in Washington. The tech industry is orders of magnitude larger than the consumer electronics industry, which in turn is an order of magnitude larger than Hollywood and the Recording industry put together.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Yeah, what he said. Not only that, this new tech sounds remarkably similar - it also involves flourescence at multiple layers. Of course c-3d's players would have been fully backwards compatible. Or alternately, wouldn't have even needed a laser per se, just coherent light.
However anyone that's worked with flourescent compounds knows that eventually they will bleach. I have a strong suspicion that this may have been what killed c-3d, and it's possible it may prove to be an intractable problem with this new tech as well, although they say it doesn't degrade. We shall see.
(For the record, I think c-3d's FMCs - a card-sized non-rotating version of FMDs - were their best idea. Exposed disks are too easily damaged and distinctly kid-unfriendly, and the normal sized disk is too large to carry in a pocket. CDs and DVDs got this very, very wrong.)
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
What is happening with Blu-Ray, the DVD format that nine members of the DVD forum supported earlier this year? Blu-Ray uses a 405nm blue-violet laser, and can hold up to 27GB on a single-sided single-layer disc. While the capacity is not as great, the commercial support is.
I think I'll wait on this format (that has the backing of Hitachi, Sony, Pioneer, Philips etc etc) before going out on a limb with any epoxy solution.
Ladies, form queue here -->
I fail to see the value of this technology for several reasons. The recording medium is not so much the issue in optical media. The bigger issue is the optics, specifically the laser. Why aren't 100GB Blu-ray DVD-ROMS in our computers right now? It's because the blue lasers in them cost > $2K right now. It's not because the technology isn't there to cheaply make the reflecting layers and organic dyes.
/. story about the researchers who measured the dielectric constant of chicken feathers and then said it could someday be used to replace the high-tech dielectric layers being used in today's microchips. Dream on guys....
So what do these guys do? They decide to reinvent the recording medium, only their medium is inferior because it can't be stamped. And that means their discs can't be mass-produced. To top it all off, they use a laser that costs $100,000, or 50X that of the Blu-ray laser.
These guys have a product that:
1) Has lower storage capacity than Blu-ray
2) Costs 50X more than Blu-ray
3) Uses an inferior recording medium compared to Blu-ray
It might be kinda nifty that they used common materials, but that fact that those materials are inferior is probably why CD's and DVD's aren't made with common materials now! It reminds me of the
Maybe if they actually sold TV Seasons on a volume or two at less than $50 (A standard 26 ep season will often take 13 volumes and cost well over a $120) people would actually buy them. The current model, which is to charge MORE MONEY for LESS TIME than a movie for a LOWER QUALITY product that is available for FREE ELSEWHERE, is absolutely ludicrous. Being able to put a whole on a single volume would be a good start for mass-market pricing.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
First, for the lesser informed, it sends a wave of "oh shit, that DVD player I just bought is already obsolete!". This is of course absurd.
Second, there's always people who don't really know what they're talking about who then go and preach the aforementioned "DVD will be obsolete soon!" bit. Somehow these huckleberries always seek me out - probably because I'm a techie. Perhaps they want to impress me, perhaps they want to pretend they're the first to know something, perhaps they want to make me feel stupid for buying so many DVD's. No amount of evidence seems to convince these people that just because something brand new has been produced in a lab doesn't mean it will be on the market next week. They especially hate it when they tell you "HDTV is the next big thing!" and you point out that this has been the situation since 1989.
But the worst part is that there's a certian chunk of the population that hasn't bought into Technology X and go on to say "yeah, I'd get DVD but I'm going to wait for the next format." They don't realize it takes decades for formats to get formalized and introduced to market - and then only if there's a killer app neccessary. The Compact Disc came out and worked since the music industry was ready for a new format. Witness how the VideoCD didn't go anywhere outside of Asia - VHS was king (killed Laserdisc even) and only with the advent of the fast Internet, big hard drives and CD burners did VideoCD take off, and mostly due to piracy. DVD only worked since they decided the killer app was video, namely movies. Notice how DVD-Audio is pretty much going unnoticed. The only format I see coming along in the near future is whatever format supports HDTV - fortunately the DVD Forum has decided that the HDTV DVD format will be reverse compatible.
Just because something better comes along doesn't mean that everything will be tossed out in favor of it. I'm 25 and programming a 1985 mainframe in COBOL for a living, so I can vouch for this line of reasoning. However, much like people tend to think the latest (whatever) is always the best, they tend to think that the latest technology is about to obliterate whatever is currently out there and they're the first to know.
And don't even get me started on those 13-year olds griping that their copy of Windows.NET Server 2003 RC1 won't run Counter-Strike...
Schnapple
That's Natalie Pr0tman to you...
graspee
Well, you're right and wrong.
The DVD Forum just selected the NEC/Toshiba blue laser system, so we should be seeing 15GiB DVD in two-three years.
* As is generally the case, my opinions do not reflect those of my employer.
Of course, you'll be able to fit the MOVIES on one of those, but who wants the movie? You already will have seen it in the theatre!
If you want the extended-super-extra-feature making of the movie 94 disc feature set, which includes the entire life history of every actor, including those guys in the orc suits, as well as how Tolkien came up with the idea, and the complete works of Tolkien and every author he liked as read by Charlton Heston and William Shatner (with special guest appearances by Macho Man Randy Savage for the part of Sauron), there's no way its going to fit.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Probably stolen from IG Farben after WWII, along with a lot of other German IP.
Dr. Evil - "And with this 'Expensive Laser' I propose to encode the world's copywrited material onto tiny plastic disks, thus causing the collapse of the world's media giants." Dr. Evil mischievously places pinkie next to mouth. Number Two - "That too has been done. 87 gigabytes is just overkill. The average person's ISP would send hitmen to assassinate them if they downloaded that much content, and who really needs to see HDTV porn anyway."
I think of fluorescence as relatively slow to diminish. If you try to spin one of these disks at high RPMs (to reduce rotational latency, of course), are the bits lit while reading during the previous rotation still glowing when they come back around?
I have a dream... imagine a drive where all the necessary OS files are stored, not a byte of them on the Hard Drive... then imagine that the configurations and other changable files ONLY are stored on the HDD. Now imagine upgrading your entire OS just by changing the disc in the drive...
You can have it fast, accurate, or pretty. Pick any 2.
...now I'm going to have to buy the White album again.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
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
As annoying as it is now, if I couldn't fast forward through them, I wouldn't rent them. Period. I don't want her watching a bunch of commercials.
And while she's clever, I'm not sure she's ready to log into our linux box and watch them on the computer. :)
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
Data should all be Stored Dynamically. I need a 10t store at "Yahoo" (pick your flavor) for $5 amonth with a data access rate in the 5ms range accessable from any spot on earth, by me and anyone else I so desire.
Hey, sounds good. Now what were you going to do about the speed of light?
The leading researcher on this is quoted as saying, "We thought it might be useful for something".
Ya think? What use could anybody possibly have for more data storage? (all together now: pr0n!)
RAID is not a full replacement for backups. It can protect you against single disk failure, but can't help you retrieve that file you accidently deleted last week, or recover your system if it gets trashed by filesystem corruption or malicious hackers.
"I believe that the cult of the particular brings only death - for it bases order on likeness." St.-Exupery
Up here in Canada, where proposed legislation will give CD's a 59c tax and regular blank DVD's a $2.27 tax per unit, I can just imagine what they'll want to tax something that can store 19x the data. Ulp! A $43 tax per blank media would really suck.
:-)
(The proposal also has a $21 per gigabyte tax on devices with build in hard drives. Insane; a 10G device would have a $210 tax. Even though our dollars are smaller, that's still $135US additional for a 10G unit.)
I sure hope the Canadian public is vocal enough to stomp this legislation, although we're not exactly known for creating a stir
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
--YES! finally, get all the $%^&8 latest released distros all on one disk, make them all work like a knoppix live cd, settle back, play with them, see which one really is better for "anyone you". Buy one disk, get all of it, done.
Your description of the encrypted data expanding is accurate. That could certainly be one reason CSS encryption is quite weak -- the early players weren't powerful enough to decrypt any more than that, and still have CPU time left to decode the MPEG stream; it could also be the disk wasn't big enough to hold the movie encrypted with "strong" encryption.
In other news, the RIAA has dispatched a team of snipers throughout Boston College with orders to kill any geeks on site.
You see, the Boston College IT department, under strict orders from the Administration*, has for the past two years had to back up their transparent proxy logs, and keep a record of every last packet of information travelling from the Internet to the dormitory ethernets.
The cost of DLT tapes the wear and tear on their StorageTek robot was breaking the bank. After raising tuition from $27,000 USD to $31,000 USD in just three years, they still couldn't afford to keep a permanent record of every CD and DVD pirated by their students.
At some point, the IT department made an offer to all faculty: "Come up with a way for us to back up our logs and we'll service your department first for the next ten years."
Of course it was the oft-neglected chemistry department that so needed support for their purple Silly-Gs and ancient AlphaStations. They kicked into gear with a trip to Economy Hardware on Beacon Street and the rest, as they say, is history.
*who were themselves were under strict orders from their Lawyers, who happen to be owned by RIAA
Can someone explain the difference between high tech and low tech? There's only one technology. High technology and low technology? Technolody is technology.
It is like the episode from Seinfeld: A big coincidence? No. Just a coincidence. There are no levels of coincidence. Just a coincidence.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
I can store an infinite about of data on my hard drive.
Not all at once, mind you...
Has anyone patented the technology? Can it be patented by anyone right now? How about copyright, any issues to work out there?
Basically, is there anything stoping it from being made into a consumer product? I think it's safe to assume that the big players in the industry don't want to see this thing reach the public very soon. It would be bad for business. So it is possible that someone else will make it?
Science may someday discover what faith has always known.
I mean GLUE! 78GB! 25+ layers! GLUE!. Man, I gotta get me one of them low-intensity laser thingamabobs and glue me some bigger hard drives. GLUE! And all this time i've just been sticking stuff together with it....
today is spelling optional day.