1.5 TB DVD by 2010

prostoalex writes "The consortium of three universities and four Japanese companies is investing $25M into a project, that is supposed to deliver a 1.5 TB (that's a terabyte and a half) Digital Versatile Disk by 2010. The Inquirer story quotes multiple layers being used for storage." More importantly, they claim that this will be backwards compatible to existing DVD technology.

Comments

Nice to see the correct name

[Microsift]

Seems like everyone thinks the V in DVD stands for video.

Re:Nice to see the correct name

[Carbonite]

From another "official" FAQ:

http://www.thedigitalbits.com/officialfaq.html#1 .1

[1.1.1] What do the letters DVD stand for?
All of the following have been proposed as the words behind the letters DVD.

Delayed, very delayed (referring to the many late releases of DVD formats)
Diversified, very diversified (referring to the proliferation of recordable formats and other spinoffs)
Digital venereal disease (referring to piracy and copying of DVDs)
Dead, very dead (from naysayers who predicted DVD would never take off)
Digital video disc (the original meaning suggested by some of DVD's creators)
Digital versatile disc (the meaning later suggested by some of DVD's creators)
Nothing

And the official answer is? "Nothing." The original acronym came from "digital video disc." Some members of the DVD Forum (see 6.1) tried to express that DVD goes far beyond video by retrofitting the painfully contorted phrase "digital versatile disc," but this has never been officially accepted by the DVD Forum as a whole. The consensus is now that DVD, as an international standard, is simply three letters. After all, who cares what VHS stands for? (Guess what, no one agrees on that one either.

Re:Backwards compatible?

[vasqzr]

15 years to buy DVD players?

In 1983 the first CD players were released in the USA.

CD's have only been out ~ 20 years, DVD's half of that.

Re:but... but... but...

[WetCat]

PB - Peta Bytes.

(no relation to PETA which is animal rights group).

Re:TB GB MB Is Obsolete

[Glonoinha]

Jesus man, you said that with enough authority to almost sound like you knew what you were talking about.

The LoC is approximately 100 Terabytes. I would love to the see the goatse that approximation came from ... perhaps share a little of your scratch paper with the rest of the world?

Here is a little math of my own :
1 page 8x11 is roughly 50 typed lines, 80 characters per line. That is a little large for most books, but gives us something to work with. That is 4,000 characters per page on the high end, and assumes that a page is mostly typed and not white space.

Two hundred pages is about the average, pulled right from goatse.cx but close enough for government work. 200x4,000 = 800,000 characters in a full book. Lets stretch it just a little and say there are lots of fat books, make the average 1 million characters (bytes) per book.

A million books, at a million characters (text only) per book is 10^12 bytes, or a full Terabyte. In ASCII form, one terabyte could hold the text of one million books, assuming 200 pages of single spaced (no white space) pages. For reference, Neuromancer by William Gibson as text (including the copyright notice at the bottom) is stored in an ASCII file 472,253 bytes in size. So might we say that half a million bytes is closer in size to average we are up to 2 million books stored in text only form on a 1TB disk.

How many books are in the Library of Congress? Dunno. Are there two million? Probably. Extrapolate that to your 100TB estimate and we are presuming two hundred million books in the LoC, each about the size of Neuromancer. Every man in America would have had to write two full 200 page novels, get them published to some degree, and then into the LoC to have that many. I am guessing that the LoC has closer to 3 million books in their archives.

3 million books at 500,000 characters apiece and Voila! this new disk could hold all of them (ASCII format.) Thus the new unit of measurement is born : the LoC = one of these disks = 1.5TB

It still wouldn't hold all of my porn, though.