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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.
We'll see this soon... does that mean before or after Duke Nukem Forever
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
This is only slightly relevant, as these aren't laser diodes, but but I noticed this AM standard long-wave UV LEDs have hit the electronics surplus market in big numbers lately for cheep (All Electronics has these at $1.75). All you experimenters out there can stock up now!
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
We've been hearing about the advantages of blue light for seemingly years now.
We can't stop with blue light! We need to branch out into purple, yellow, even magenta! Soon all the colours of the world will be under our umbrella, and we will be all powerful!
This is the real signature
(Beats those shadows on the cave wall, don't it?)
Is it me or it would take an awfull lot of time to fill in this drive?
At 4MB/sec and a total capacity of 30 gig, it would take 2 hours and 8 minutes to burn the media.
And half that time to read it all?!?
I'd rather be sailing...
..they have to torment me with 30Gb drives. As I work up to getting a DVD-R, now they're under £200 I've been thinking 'Ah great, smaller stacks of CDs, easier backups..' - and but with these it'd be even easier.
Great. Can't sit around forever I guess, though.
It'd be nicer if optical media had kept pace with hard drive storage. At least it's now starting to catch up - I spotted in the article that "Future generations of drives and media will increase the usable capacity of discs to 60GB and 120GB. Backward read capability will be maintained throughout the whole product roadmap."
120GB on a single disk? Optical media may be really useful once again - providing it's cheap enough, soon enough.
It supports the new UDO disks and it is developed for professional data storage markets, covering archiving, document imaging, call centers, email archiving, GIS, medical, telecom, banking, insurance, legal and government.
... and for the non-professional data storage of personal pictures, pr0n pictures, legal music, pirated music, movies, and pr0n videos.
TodayTM BillyJoelTM GoogleTMd for StitchTMes due to WindowsTM while RollerbladeTMing with an AppleTM and a PopsicleTM
The laser's woman done him wrong...
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
I have always been wary about purchasing a so-called "red laser" DVD unit due to the historical ties that the color red has to Communism. Communism, as you are probably aware, resulted in hundreds of millions of death in the 20th Century. I could not, as a moral man, purchase a laser of this color. Who could sit down and watch Attack of the Clones without thoughts of the Soviet gulags distracting you?
Blue is the color of capitalism. It is also the color of patriotism and masculinity (as opposed to red, which is very close to the feminine color of pink.) It warms the heart to know that I can now watch my John Wayne collection on a moral device that is consistent with the ideals that I donned my country's uniform for in Grenada and Panama.
take off every sig for great justice
But in about ten years, they will combine this technology with that technology and dub it "Density Optical Hybrid" (DOH!).
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
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.
(you heard it here first, get used to it)
sulli
RTFJ.
riiiigggghhhhttt.......
--Keeping the flame wars alive, one post at a time
Thank God they used cartridges in this thing! That solves a plethora of headaches.
Lets hope that the big software makers like Sony/Matsushita et al. decide to use cartridges when they release their (possibly blue laser) HD-DVD players next year (presumably).
Nothing is worse than having media skip from a mere fingerprint or a slight scratch- especially when you are watching a movie!
I'm usually pretty quick to cry "vapor", but these blue-laser DVDs are already a proven concept to lots of companies in their consortium, and they have a standard for it. Unlike other vaporish storage technologies that are always too good to be true, promoted by a small unknown company, rely upon nebulous revolutions in technology, etc. -- blue ray DVDs and their ilk are on the way.
It's a done deal, now we're just waiting to see who wins the race to get them out first.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
If there haven't been prototypes, how is Sony going to start selling them in a few weeks? What am I missing?
I've had 3 Seagate 18Gb Ultra SCSI drives die in the last 6 months.
I am very well aware of the rendundant coding used to provide for a certain amount of resliance of the data, both on CDs and DVDs, but at a certain point when the data density becomes this high, I would imagine that the media would lose data when you just touch it.
One thing that would put me at ease is a kind of media that is completely hermetically protected by a transparent plastic shell. Perhaps a stationary disk while the reader is the one to rotate. That way you wouldn't even need the hole for the rotating spindle.
OTOH, with 30 GB, I can imagine I could put my whole collection of classical CD music on 5 UDOs, uncompressed. Or they will think about some abherration such as AudioDVD, so that the whole 30 GB will be just enough for some 60 minutes of music....
Sigged!
Only $1/gig? Probably much more then that. And, these discs are in cartridges (which personally I think normal DVD's should have been like) so that will add a little cost too.
I'm betting at least $60 a disc when they first hit market.
Cool stuff though, and I'd love to have a re-writable version of this for a real backup solution without mucking around with DLT tapes like I do now. (at home)
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
"Plasmon Exhibits Working Blue Laser DVD Drive"
This is not DVD. It's an optical disk drive, which uses much of the same technology as DVD, but is definitely not the same specification. You would not be able to read a blue-laser disc in any 100% DVD-compliant drive.
Optical discs that can hold more than CD's are not necessarily them DVD's.
-Amalcon
What would be cool if we could get these density DVD on an 8cm mini-DVD. That way it would be a nice solution for portable MP3 player/high denisity hard disk. Just a clue for any product people reading :)
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
What about dataplay, 500MB in the size roughly of a quarter. Very neat, but i think they ended up filing for bankruptcy over competition with flash cards and hard drive based mp3 players. I think even Britney Spears was scheduled to release an album using this technology.
I still think RAID is the #1 way to protect data from hardware failure. Backups are never the newest data, and generally backups are only used to recover data from user error, data traansportation (copy a large database to tape, mail it to DR site), archival. Way way down on the list is recovery due to hardware failure, because RAID is such a perfect solution.
I worked at a data center with thousands of drives, some of them in a 30+ drive RAID set. In the five years I worked there, not once did we lose data due to drive failure.
For home, IDE/ATA RAID is becomming more and more of a reality. When serial ATA comes to saturation, I forsee lots more built-in hardware raid functionality due to easy cable management.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
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!
RAID still won't save you from user failure. Archives and backups are good :]
So when can I get my blue laser pen?
Please, everybody, buy these drives! Drive the price down so I can get it three years from now.
-ZOD-
When the Black Lite lasers finally come out we'll finally be able to store trillions of Elvis and sad dog pictures.
Seuss - I'm telling you this 'cause you're one of my friends. My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends
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.