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Plasmon Exhibits Working Blue Laser DVD Drive
tedgyz writes "CDR-Info has an article describing the first working prototype of a blue-violet laser optical disk drive. The drive boasts 30GB of storage, dubbed Ultra Density Optical (UDO). The article has technical details and images of the drive and media." We've been hearing about the advantages of blue light for seemingly years now. It's cool to see a product prepare for market that actually uses it.
The purpose in using blue instead of red is because blue has a shorter wavelength. Going further, the next step is in ultraviolet LEDs for shorter wavelengths and higher storeage densities.
If there haven't been prototypes, how is Sony going to start selling them in a few weeks? What am I missing?
You might want to look into ATA RAID solutions. I just built an ATA RAID 5 solution for less than $2 per Gigabyte.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
I am aware of those, but I have noticed the first (very fine) grains of dust inside some of the minidisks I have. I guess it's inevitable.
Sigged!
All this would do is move the potential for damage from the media to the shell.
That's not entirely correct. The way CDs/DVDs work is that they actually focus the laser ray with a little but powerful lens, a few millimeters above the CD/DVD. Small optical obstacles that are somewhat removed (distanced) from the focal point, which is the surface of the media will interfere much less with the signal than it would do if on the surface itself.
That's exactly why dual layer DVDs can work! You focus the laser about half a millimeter lower in order to read the lower layer, while the middle layer doesn't interfere at all.
Sigged!
Not as fast a tape drives for writing (you can get 22 MB/s with compression 2:1, 11 MB/s real), but the random access capabilities of this type of media would put a tape to shame.
Their aimed at replacing MO drives, I currently don't know anybody with one of these at home, as they are still expensive (about $1500 USD). The people using these I am guessing are very interested in long-term archiving without degradation.
Seeing how this is a first generation drive, I guess this is "1x" speed, when the get the 60GB (2nd gen) and 120GB (3rd gen) drives out, if they double this in each generation, that would give you a "4x" (16 MB/sec - equivalent to a 109x CD-R) 120GB drive, this would still take 2 hrs 8 min to fill at "4x", but a 30 GB disc would only take 32 minutes.
This is not the sig line you are looking for... -- Old Jedi Sig Line Trick
That's what we thought, until our RAID controller died catastrophically. Immediate and complete data loss.
;)
RAID is nice; daily backups are better. Both together, plus a revision controlled and journalling file system is best
Nowhere in the Plasmon information does it call this a DVD drive. In fact, the CDR-Info page specifically points out that this is NOT DVD.
It would be nice if the people releasing submissions would check the article titles for accuracy.
* As is generally the case, my opinions do not reflect those of my employer.