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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.
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)
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."
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.
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.
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.
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?
Not exactly. There are some weird people who have this idea that a single piece of data is a datum, and data is the plural of datum. Using that warped philosophy, it would be correct.
I've got a mind like a steel trap - it's got an animal's foot stuck in it.
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
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
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
The circumfrence of the earth is roughly 40,000 km, so the farthest you can be from a given spot is 20,000 km.
Add to that, that you also need to send the request, you somehow need to think up a transport medium, that can travel at 20,000 km / 0.0025 seconds == 8,000,000 km/second.
We'll get in tuch with you, when we manage to send data at 26 and 2/3rds the speed of light at a distance of 20,000 km.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.