Slashdot Mirror
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.
Seems like everyone thinks the V in DVD stands for video.
My other sig is extremely clever...
No one needs the space because by 2010 all digital material is covered by copyrights - which have been extended for 250 years.
The same Japanese universities plan to store the entire Intarnet(tm) on one DoCoMo 6G 10Ghz cell phone using an old bubble gum wrapper and a used condom by the year 2020.
Does anyone else think thats too much to be carrying around in the palm of your hands? and how long would that take to create? it seems like by the timeit was finished the data on the disk would already be outdated...
I hear ya man, I like hours of porn outtakes haha.
What's the chance of that hardware ever being available without DRM? Not all that useful if we cannot actually use it for backing up any data, moving the discs to any other device and so on.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Now we'll be able to fit entire genres of music, rather than entire band catalogs of MP3's on one disc.
snip snip
"It will also be backwards compatible with standard DVDs, the reports said, with its storage ability equivalent to around 300 DVDs using the current format"
This new technology will drive you to work, make love to your frigid wife, baby-sit the kids, wash the dog and the car. Yes, folks, the year 2010 will be a great one. All thanks to this DVD and $25mil.
Sent from your iPad.
"* BY 2010, according to senior Intel architects, a CPU will have processing power equivalent to the brain of a bumble bee."
Wow. Woweewow.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those.
Oh. Wait. I have one of those in my back yard.
Backwards compatible is no big deal -- your typical DVD player can read CD, VCD, etc. formats. The real question is whether consumers will be ready for yet another format change by 2010. Somehow I doubt it. If you go by the previous cycle, it took about 15 years before consumers were ready to buy DVD players.
Also, we don't want to give Hollywood and the DVDCCA another shot at locking us out. The CSS cat is permanently out of the bag for the lifetime of the DVD format, but a new format would provide them an opportunity to come up with some sort of freedom-restricting technology.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
The trend unit is "how many equivalents of library of congress" does it hold?
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
Wow! That might hold a fourth of my collection
Thanks captain obvious!
Don't eat shrimp candy, just a heads up.
The amount of data on a single disk made me think what the uses could be, and the primary thing I could come up with is hi-res multimedia. There was an article in one of the popular magazines about the next 10 years advancements, and one of them was about digital projections that fool the eye -- one would not be able to distinguish between real images and digital images.
But, this also makes me wonder... Our ability to process information has stayed the same (e.g., it still takes me awful lot of time to read a small book -- let alone the LOTR), but the amount of data is just exploding.
May be there would be some new technology that leads us into faster/better processing of the tonnes of information?
S
Hmm... so what that make my Pentium III equivalent to? A cockroach?
-MT.
So DeCSS will still work?
Ahh the timeless question
Does capacity expand revelvant to the expansion of porn?
Or is it that more porn must be made to fill the space?
My ignorance is a perfect shield against your logic.
2010--- that's 7 years from now. 7 years ago I was dumbfounded by Pentium 166's with 200MB hard drives. In 2010 1.5Terabytes will be no more impressive than the 4.7GB I can currently burn on my DVD-R/W drive.
Confucious says: Man who runs behind car gets exhausted.
// jeku.com
1000 hours of film footage of you, plus every transaction you have made with credit card, through paper work, and what have you, will all be put on one of these bad boys, and tin foil is not going to help.
---
When you come to a fork in the road, take it! --Yogi Berra--
I wonder how much one of these things will cost? Considering I could probably buy one and not fill it up for like 10 years, I'm curious as to how this technology will be viable, at least in the home user market. It'll be great for big IT department backups, though.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
So we will STILL be stuck with DVDs in 2010?
:D
I can imagine getting a 500 in 1 hollywood DVD collection off the streets of HK
More importantly, they claim that this will be backwards compatible to existing DVD technology
But wait a sec... with which DVD it will be compatible? DVD-R ? DVD-RAM? DVD-RW? DVD+RW? There are more then enough DVD-xxx technologies already, and if rate of creating new ones will be the same, I think in 7 years they will have at least 3-5 new more to choose from!
put it in perspective:
before cd-rom's came out there were no mp3s, no video, no 3d games.. if someone told you you could hold 600 megs in your hand you'd have probably said the same thing here.
i don't know what's to come, but i'm sure someone will find a good use for it
When can I get the 'Back to the Future Trilogy' on one of these? Sincerely, /. Nerd
There was a company called Constellation 3D that was supposed to have something called a Fluorescent Multilayer Disc (FMD) with capacity in the Terabyte range.
You'll notice that their website no longer exists. It did stink of vapourware from the beginning, but I had a glimmer of hope that it would become something. Here is the most recent press release I could find on the subject, but it's from early 2001.
They said they'd have their terabyte discs out "within a year or two". Oh well, I guess I'll have to wait until 2010 now...
Carpe Cerevisi - Seize the Beer
Not until 2010? 7 years is a long time. Shouldn't that amount of space be pretty much commonplace by that point anyhow? Sure, it sounds like a lot now, but somehow I don't think that number will be at all impressive in 7 years.
I imagine that if one of these gets scratched you're gonna lose a whole lotta data unless it has some sweet error correction going for it.
You can't take the sky from me...
WOW! 1.5 TB!
That ought to be just enough to hold the LotR collectors edition with all 3 special editions, all 3 regular editions, and 56.2 hours of special footage detailing every aspect of every actors life, and every thought that went through Peter Jackson's head in the last 12 years (not to mention, Sean Astin's 6 hours of bitching about how his hobbit sized underwear kept riding up while filming) all on ONE DVD! In both Widescreen and Fullscreen formats!
Awesome!
More importantly, they claim that this will be backwards compatible to existing DVD technology.
Who's to say what we will be using in 10 years? When it comes to storage, I wish they'd focus on reliability, performance and something to replace hard drives with, rather than on compatibility. Honestly. If they managed to come up with something fast, reliable and highly performant to get away from hard drives, I'd pay little attention to compatibility to existing devices.
I don't WANT more on DVDs. I want bigger HARD DRIVES.
Thing is, I don't want to have hundreds of stupid little plastic discs in their stupid little plastic boxes lining shelves in my place.
Thats why I ripped all my CDs to my hard drive and hooked my comp. to my stereo. I listen to stuff I never bothered to before because it was a pain going through all my 1000+ CDs.
I want to store all my DVDs on my HD for the same reason. But I cant as it is!
Give us 50,000 TB hard drives FIRST (what comes after tera??)
This space available.
this could be cool, it would allow uncompressed 1080p video and uncompressed sound too. hopefully there will be players and TV sets capable of taking advantage of this by that time.
I'm sure a lot of people see this and say "Finally, I'll be able to back up in a reasonable way!" but it needs to be recordable.
Even current DVDs are only recordable in one layer. You can't record directly to multiple layers, you have to master two layers separately and then wafer them together in the manufacturing process.
While a > 1TB disc is a cool idea, if it's only usable on commercially duplicated, mass-distributed data, it's of very, very limited use.
supposed to deliver a 1.5 TB (that's a terabyte and a half)
This reminds me of a quote from an old Sports Night episode. They were talking about Mt. Everest, I think.
Guy #1: "Twenty-nine thousand feet. Can you imagine how high that is?"
Guy #2: "It's 29,000 feet."
Guy #1: "Yeah, but you've got to put it in perspective. Compare it to something you can visualize."
Guy #2: (beat) "It's 29,000 rulers."
Thanks for the clarification, guys.
I write in my journal
If the dvd group doesn't approve it for use noone will be able to use it anyways...can you say vapor ware???
BY 2010, according to senior Intel architects, a CPU will have processing power equivalent to the brain of a bumble bee
now that was random...
Um... geeks. Guess what? You could devote some of that space to error correction and redundancy.
Can't fool me. If they were serious they'd have said 1.44 TB.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
I remember when geeks weren't cool, no matter WHAT size their hard drive was.
The subject of that sentence was consortium, which as you will notice, is singular.
... they'll be running BeeOS.
*ducks*
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
That's right. That's how big it is.
When you work in Uncompressed 10bit HD, it requires a TB or so for 90 minutes. So, figure you'll get a 2 hour film or so, uncompressed in HD.
Still not as good as viewing film.
It would take that whole disk just to hold the M$ Window$ Installation files.
I am sure they will have some great anti-scratch technology keeping all of your hdtv home movies safe and secure. Diamond Coated disks rock.
OK, so how long will it take to spool that data from a hard drive onto that 1 TB disc? And how long will it take to write it? My understanding is that a full DVD takes over an hour to burn, and this is a disc with over 300 times the capacity. That's a loooong burn...
Ummm... something sounds wrong here. A terabyte for 90 minutes of video? Ummm, I'd have to ask - what resolution is that at, and what's the BPS rate for the encoded video? At 10MBps it would imagine it looks pretty damn good, and 10x60x90=54,000MB (36GB). At 100Mbps it's 540Gb. It is roughly a rate of (a little less than) 200MBps, because that's what it would take to be able to use use 1 TB on 90 minutes of movie. That being considered... I know of nothing that plays movies at 200MBps. DVD-ROM's could not spin fast enough... and I think the processor/memory load would be astronomical.
Also, why would it be better in film when a lot of these movies are starting to be being RECORDED in digital? I'm guessing even the movie studios aren't using hundred-thousands of Terabytes of digital video. Going from a digital medium to an uncompressed digital medium... loss should be low if not null.
My calculations may be off... but something still sounds fishy about this
7 years down the road and 300x the capacity, surely it won't just be called a DVD. Maybe DVD2, SDVD, or DVD+? Or maybe even an entirely new acronym with no official meaning.
I don't think backward compatibility to current DVD technology is going to count for a lot in 2010 because nobody will be using current DVD technology (for data) by then. Backwards compatibility with Blu-ray, or its successor, or whatever comes along and supplants both five years from now, is what will really matter. Compatibility with a by-then obsolete standard will actually turn out to be a handicap in 2010, and they probably know that, but here in 2002 maybe it helps them get funding.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
prostoalex writes:
"...that is supposed to deliver a 1.5 TB (that's a terabyte and a half)..."
Is this for all the people who think that 1.5 means "one and a third"?
My
Limekiller
1 scratch and you can wipe a whole movie! whoopee!
Essentially less fault tolerant, and less ability to make backup copies.
Who wants that?
this is absurd. Posting some vapor news about media in 2010. Well, in 2010 the democrats will resume control of the house and senate. Pah.
"Cats and Dogs living together, Mass Hysteria" - Ghostbusters.
Where did this post come from?
:)
You can pet bumble bees as they're pollinating flowers. All they normally do is sort of kick at your finger with their hind legs.
You sound like an incredibly nice person. Petting bumble bees and thinking of them as little cows helping nature along.
Are you like a saint or something?
As my father lik@(munch munch)...
Anyone recall the concept of storing about a terabyte in a cube, storing the data in 3 dimensions? Discs are so passe.
For the VaporWare of the year awards!
I don't keep a lid on my coffee so when I walk around I look busy -me
Bah! That's nothing... now forwards compatibility is another story. I'd thoroughly enjoy watching my 1997 DVD-ROM drive say, 1500 GB of used space.
-------
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
And Doom IV running on this at about 7 fps. =)
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Star Trek sometimes used the term "gigaquad" whatever that is. Sounds big...
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
I remember something I read about 3-4 years ago about a water polymer that was going to create a 3D cube with 3 lasers, all coming to a point in space within the polymer to either polarize or depolarize that specific point in space ... pretty much a multi-layered physical storage media that used water as a primary component.
A 1" cube was supposed to hold like 1TB or something insane like that, and it was going to be as fast as the RAM at that time but not need refreshing (so it could also be used as permanent storage.) In my mind it blurred the line between operating memory and storage.
Did I just imagine it, or has anybody got any insight into the Water Drive?
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
At current growth rates, I suspect that harddisks will be surpassing that capacity quickly at around that time. So, we'll probably still have disks that are much bigger than DVDs. And that means that 1.5TB DVDs will probably not bee too different from the way DVDs are today: a slighty too small and fairly slow medium for storing data for a few years (since they are not guaranteed to last much longer).
I'll do all that right now for free! Just pay for the plane ticket and tell the Mrs to slip into something more comfortable. And for the car, one coat or two?
.5C is still half a clue and 2 is equivalent to the number two.
This is not my sandwich.
Oooooh, I don't wanna be the guy that leaves that database backup on the dash of his car.
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
is really, really valuable. Obviously, this means I don't have to buy another LOTR set, I can still use my old DVD one. But will the player cost significantly more due to its ability to play DVDs? With those crazy DVD guys jacking up prices already, do you think they'd lower them to make this device feasible? Probably not.
Read jack phelps dot net
http://www.abiworld.org/headlines/02Dec17.html
:) $300M would probably help them out, even the lump sum after tax would be good enough to get them out of debt. Guess you could say they already spent the jackpot.
Seems they filed for Chapter 11 this past week.
C3d should play powerball...it's their last chance.
It will be sad to see them go.
You need a higher capacity sneakernet to fill the 50,000 TB hard drive.
That's kinda the idea.. You see at the rate we're going by 2010 hard drives 1TB in size will likely be tiny, that presents many of us here a serious problem, serious as opposed to; "wow, see how much hdtv porn i can store now". That is of course:
Backups.
Offline storage has to keep up HD storage for this reason most of all, and with the current exponential price increase with each incremental tape storage size increase, optical technologies like multilayered DVD's look like one of the best possibilities.
Geeks are cool? I don't think that is a situation that will long obtain. When the salaries start dropping, the coolness of being PC-bound will abate, sadly.
At current prices, it'll be quite a while before Joe Sixpack will choose it over a standard TV.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Right now, there are obvious uses for such a high capacity optical drive, especially if they can produce at the same time a one terabyte re-writeable drive too.
For a re-writeable drive, one obvious application is personal video recorders (PVR's). Imagine by 2010 instead of recording shows on a TiVo or Replay TV unit on larger and larger hard drives the PVR will only sport a 20-30 gigabyte hard drive to store the program code for the PVR and program indexing information; the actual program itself will be recorded onto re-writeable and removeable 1 TB optical drives that will store nearly 1,000 hours of standard-format digital video or circa 300 hours of 1080i 16:9 uncompressed HDTV video. It is this technology that will finally end the reign of VHS VCR's for good.
For non-writeable 1.5 TB media, there is one application that needs it now: theatrical quality digital projection of movies. By 2010 digital projectors will have picture quality equivalent to 2000 lines non-interlaced, and that will mean massive storage requirements. Imagine storing the entire movie in uncompressed 2000-line digital projection format on just ONE DVD-sized disc, including multichannel audio in 6-7 languages and 7-8 languages of subtitles! Such a change will make it possible to have true simultaneous worldwide release of theatrical features, and just the savings in shipping costs between a movie on these new digital discs weighing well under half a pound (including the shipping package!) and a 35 mm print that weighs 105 pounds per hour of film is tremendous, to say the least.
We won't get those until the year 2525.
That's a lot of porn one could back up :)
"I believe in everything in moderation. Including moderation." -Dean DeLeo, Stone Temple Pilots
The second is in a traditional MO form factor, aimed at the archival storage market. The manufacturer claims that this one will hold 20gb per platter too, but has laid out a schedule that will get it to 100gb per platter by 2006, and they feel they can get to 1tb per platter by 2010 by using the multi-layer optical technology. It is altogether feasible to think that they could make a read-only version that would fit 1.5tb on a platter, though obviously they don't intend to do so (since they are a vendor of traditional MO drives).
In short, while I'm dubious about the 1.5TB claims, they are credible, and the guys in the archival storage industry are going to be *VERY* interested in these guys. Optical media has the ability to be randomly accessed, unlike tapes, but right now is a bit too expensive (at about $63 per 100gb, vs. under $30 per 100gb for LTO tape). But tape technology is approaching its limits, and the new media for the drives coming out in 2003 is supposed to be the same price as the current media, which would halve the price of optical storage. I have not seen tape drives making these kinds of advances recently... the leap to 120gb LTO was more of an extension of the DLT concept to its logical extremes, and there is not much of anywhere to go there. Given the general scuzziness of tape (and as the architect and head designer of a tape backup product I think I'm qualified to talk about tape being scuzzy :-), I applaud the thought that optical media may *FINALLY* be coming down in price to the point where it can be cost-competitive to tape...
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
A patent is a government grant of limited monopoly for a particular point in time. Ask these people how they'd feel about there being no government patent enforcement, and then ask them if, having been granted a monopoly by the government, surely government has some interest in making sure said monopoly is not abused?
Whatever you do, do not get sucked into arguments about "intellectual property". There is no such thing. Ideas cannot be owned. The government can grant a monopoly ("patent") on use of an idea for a limited time, but it is the monopoly, not the idea, that is owned. The whole reason for the Orwellian phrase "intellectual property" is to trick people into believing that ideas can be owned, when there is nothing in the Constitution, U.S. law, or in the history of humanity that supports such an assertation. A patent or copyright (government-granted monopoly rights) can be owned, but the ideas themselves are no more ownable than the notion that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." (an idea stated by some crazy commie terrorist sympathizer by the name of "Thomas Jefferson", but no more owned by him than any other idea).
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
I will also point out that there are companies like Plasmon that have a game plan to create writable optical disks of up to 1TB by 2010 using the same technology. So your notion of it being "hard to back up" is less than apt. So there (pffft!).
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
...in my flying car.
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
I use a 6-tape DDS-4 DAT changer to back up my network, but that cost considerably more than $300.
Regarding long-term storage, LTO and DLT are expensive but should be considerably more durable than DAT technology was. LTO is currently the cheapest per-gigabyte archival storage mechanism, storing 120gb of data onto a $35 tape. DVD-RAM disks, wholesale, hold 9.4gb for $5 apiece, meaning that they're nowhere near being cost-competitive. HOWEVER: Tape technology is reaching its limits. Densities have gone up, but the biggest issue is that they're reaching the limits of the physical tape mechanisms -- you can't make the actual tape skinnier to cram more tape into the tape because you're reaching the limits of plastics technology. At the moment they are increasing density by making the tracks skinnier, but they are reaching the physical limits of tape registration (i.e., the tape moves up and down slightly as it passes the head, and the issue is that they are reaching the limits of their ability to control and compensate for this limit). Thus even though linear bit densities can increase somewhat, the primary method used by DLT and LTO to get their amazing capacities (putting more tracks onto the tape and stuffing more tape into the same form-factor cartridges) is reaching the end of physical capability, unless you actually imbed a head in the cartridges -- and at that point you are talking about very expensive cartridges.
Optical media, on the other hand, has not yet begun reaching its limits, and has the advantage of random access -- useful when you have to actually retrieve data or are writing data incrementally and do not want to have to wait for the tape to whiz to the end to start writing. I suspect that when we have the 1TB read-write optical media, we will see tape go the same way as floppy disks (i.e., as a rarely-used media mostly used for backward compatibility purposes rather than actual storage).
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
but what do i know, i'm just a model.
Brahma said: Well, after hearing ten thousand explanations, a fool is no
wiser. But an intelligent man needs only two thousand five hundred.
-- The Mahabharata
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...