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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?)
..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.
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
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.
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!
"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
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. -
RAID still won't save you from user failure. Archives and backups are good :]
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