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100 Terabyte 3.5-inch Optical Storage
ignipotentis writes "According to PhysOrg we are close to being able to record our entire lives on a single 3.5" optical disc. This article talks about using ultraviolet light since focused laser beam is smaller in diameter than other frequencies of light. The expected cost per drive upon production is $570-$750 with discs costing $45."
I wish they would use meaningful (quantitative) data storage units.
I'll believe it when I see it.
Microsoft announced that the next version of Windows will have a base install size of 99 terabytes
I just bought a DVD-Burner. ... It was the same thing for CD-rw drives back in the day.
Although it would seem to me that if this is a reliable media the prices would be cut a lot of it becomes popular. At least considering how the prices of high-speed DVD burners (and media!) has dropped over the last year as it has gotten more popular.
Although the question is if this will become popular on the market, especially with more worked-in standards as dvd already out there (think blue-ray).
Great, Now we can have some movies/live events in HDTV on a single disk!
My UID is prime is yours?
Cheers,
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
And that's understandable. The drive and disc might cost a pretty penny, but you'd only need one drive and one disc, so who cares?
Don't forget the $1/megabyte tax that the RIAA will undoubtedly impose. The price becomes a little prohibitive.
yeah, sure, if you measure your entire life in terms of how much pr0n you've downloaded... as if anyone around here would *cough* do that...
The graphic in the article says 10 petabyte, not 100 terabyte. That's a factor of 100 different.
Also, the second graphic refers to Seagate and "Maxstor"... perhaps they mean Maxtor?
If Colossal Storage Corp. can't even get their infographics right, I don't know what that says about their ability to make these drives.
we are close to being able to record our entire lives on a single 3.5" optical disc ...
Obviously, we now need a technology to either spawn or backup our lives.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Microsoft has announced they are working on a totally different standard for these disks (even though a standard hasn't been officially announced) and will incorporate it into Longhorn, causing it's production to be moved back again.
Seriously though, what is the rot rate going to be on these things. For the average user, the media will probably become unstable before the disc is filled.
The preceding message was based on actual events. Only the names, locations and events have been changed.
I am really happy about this. Once a week I travel 50 miles to transfer data from our main office to a remote site. You'd think that in 2004 nobody would be using sneaker net to transfer data, but when it comes to scientific data, it's much cheaper to do it by car than by fiber.
I'm looking forward to getting my hands on one of these babies.
Remember to moderate properly, or else be banned
http://www.colossalstorage.net/ -- it's pretty ghetto, in a circa 1996 sort of way. Animated GIFs abound.
Today's PC has on average 64 megabytes of cache and...
What sort of cache? Not an L* cache obviously..
The 100 Terabyte iPod! Now available for the 300%-profit-margin price of $99999!
..news at 25.00
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
meeting our needs for the next millenium, it says. Well, at least it's realistic. I'd even be willing to say that this technology may be viable in a mere nine-hundred years!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Maybe they use a complicated error correction scheme that requires a 100:1 parity bit to info bit ratio?
Wake me up when these babies are actually being sold. 100 TB in theory is still nothing.
Hate me!
According to PhysOrg we are close to being able to record our entire lives on a single 3.5" optical disc.
If I trust what I learned with the 12cm optical disks I currently use (CDRs), my entire life would last about 2 years before getting unreadable.
At any rate, even if the media lasts for a long time, which will remain to prove with this new technology, the problem with computer storage is almost always finding drives to read them in the long run. Tried to read a 5 1/4 diskette recently?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The disk is a slim 3.5" but unfortunately the reader is the size of a 747.
With 100 TB, why not forgo the whole notion of removable media and make it a permanent, integrated storage device? As you say, you'd only need one disc and one drive.
:)
If we're talking around $1000 for this type of capacity, one would think the advantages of an integrated device (longevity, reduced mechanical movement, ability to seal or create a vaccuum in the interior) would faaar outweigh the advantages of being able to remove data and carry it around in your pocket.
Of course, at this stage it's preposterous science fiction mumbo-jumbo anyway
Read Pynchon.
It looks really cool, but there are a couple things that worry me.
1. Being that the technology is patented is stressed highly in this article. Patents may not prevent adoption of the product, it will stifle inovation by anyone else.
2. Is there any supposed transfer rates? If we couldnt write very fast to it, it would be pointless to have so much space.
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
Interesting technology; this would sure make my backups easier, assuming the bits don't fly off the disk if someone turns on the TV in the next room. The major problem I foresee is that we'll need some new bus/interconnect technology in order to make this effective; this thing looks like a firewire drive. Filling/scanning a 100TB firewire drive is going to take a looong time.
Disclaimer: I work for a company, but I don't speak for them.
Not only does the article (and its accompanying graphics) have a ton of simple grammatical errors, but the sentence structure is not indicative of a native English speaker.
Choice phrases like "That's greater 1,000 times any State of the Art hard disk technology with 100 Gigabytes on one disk" and "The need for new storage technology is evident to only to those having backgrounds in data storage." cast a lot of doubt on the credibility of this source.
I remember when SeaGate was making the MiniChief and DataChief hard drives (20 and 40 mb, respectively). At that time there were already one or two outfits who were working on "floptical" media. Price was comparable but storage was about half. With the refinement of laser technology I've often wondered what's been holding up floptical media. circa 1992 the drives were around $400 and disks were about $50.
I don't want to say that it's an industry conspiracy but, well, there's no better explanation for why floptical drives haven't received the kind of attention, development, and marketing that they deserve. For all practical applications floptical media could leave magnetic media far behind.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
Ok.
I LOVE reading about these tastey new technologies.
I HATE the fact that the media trotts out mini-blurbs on these works-in-progress without considering that most of us will be DEAD before
an advancement like this comes to the commercial market.
All the same though it'd be nifty to be able to store all my recipes on one single piece of media... hmmm...
If your whole life will be on one disc, backup becomes even more important!
50 cents per terabyte, huh? I guess that's ok, but it still seems a bit pricy ;-)
Does anyone else remember full-height 20MB drives for home computers that cost $700? I feel like I'm in a Virginia Slims ad....
I've never visited that web site before, but the article looked a bit... dodgy to me. I would say it's because of the numerous spelling errors, which sort of cheapens the whole thing. Is what the article says actually true or is it just some sensationalist BS?
Back when we got our first CDROM drives, they were a big thing. A whole 650 megs compared to our 100 meg hard drives. There hasn't been a removable media to make that leap before. Sure, we've got 4.7GB and 8.4GB DVDs and 25GB Blu-Ray discs, but we've got 300GB hard drives now. 100 terabytes... I don't think there's anything you couldn't store on that, but they said the same thing about 10 meg drives...
This technology could make that happen again, and it would be very very big... especially if it is rewritable right off the bat. If he plays his cards right he could have one hell of a product. Even at 800 dollars per drive, that's less than a tenth of a tenth of a cent per meg.
I keep hearing about these new technologies with a much larger storage capacity compared to anything we have today. But what I really want to know is how long until any of these products actually become useful to me?
"Welcome to the 3D Atomic NanoTechnology of the 3rd Millennium! Atomic Holographic Optical Data Storage NanoTechnology! Patents Granted on Revolutionary NanoTechnology for development of Rewritable Ferroelectric Volume Atomic Holographic Optical Storage NanoTechnology! ...will NOT be effected by extreme high energy EMF or Cosmic Rays i.e. Solar Flares and Solar Winds!"
Gold!
This is what happens when you train monkeys to speak using only a 1950s physics textbook and a biography of PT Barnum.
Read Pynchon.
"Michael invented and patented the world's first and only concept for non-contact UV photon induced electric field poling of ferroelectric non-linear photonic bandgap crystals,"
Say what?
Captain Kirk to the bridge, please!
The article is long on buzzwords and short on fact. Color me skeptical.
Well, you'll be pleased to know that you can fit "nearly 10,000,000 high-resolution images", or "6,840 raw uncompressed high quality Video/TV hours"...
[affects deep, manly voice] So... that's about half my 'life' then.
I couldn't tell from the article whether it's read only or not, but it occurs to me that if it isn't, with that amount of data density, you could probably make it virtually read/write by just keeping a record of deleted/replaced sectors or something
100Tb is a lot of storage, but it won't be enough for a ultra hi-res 60 degree widescreen movie that's been running for just under 32 years.
Even if a third of it is with the lens cap on.
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
They also suggest using this technology in flat screen displays.
An article on the subject, and an article by the inventor himself (scroll down a bit).
Now, this is way out of my league, as IANAQP, but this sounds psuedo-scientific to me. Am I wrong?
Also, check their R&D unknowns.
-- "I'm not a religious man, but if you're up there, save me Superman..."
Doesn't UV damage CD's and DVD's? Or have these guys come up with a new material?
My hyperlinks aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
Even the things you don't want to hear may be true. Accepting them is the hard part.
"Obviously, we now need a technology to either spawn or backup our lives. "
Gah! And we thought those super-8 home/vacation movies were boring.
...but home LASIK surgery has finally become a reality!
That's a whole lotta pr0n...
I have an old 10 meg drive in my office. It's big and heavy. I have found the drive advertised for about $700 when it was new.
I like to show it to the "younger" people.
Is this a great hobby or what?
i don't know if theres any truth to this, but i've heard in 10 years HDTV is gonna be obsolite, because that the technology to deliver even greater broadband will be available.
however i can't see any computer use for these 100TB disks, but it might be used to replace the DVD for use with "SUPER HIGH DEFENITION TELEVISION"
I get XP -and- 2000 on one msdn CD. Go figure, huh.
So, first we got infrared laser CDs, then blue light, and now ultra violet. So when can I get my 100 yottabyte electron CD that can store all the informaton in civilization?
-You're only as clean as your towel.
How the hell do you access this much info off of one drive? What kidn of pipes are we talking about here? How come we're still using some Victorian type of storage (gears and spinning wheels)? Where's my solid state coral polyp bio-cube or quantum point source mem-pin?
I drank what? -- Socrates
Yes, their website says "Colossal Storage nanoTechnology will push the bandwidth limits beyond 1000 GB/sec". Of could, a transfer technology isn't good without hardware and a computer bus (of whatever type/configuration) that can push or translate that kind of data.
Of course, that doesn't say they're going to hook their new data transfer mechanism to their new storage medium, or that it'll even be able to read/write anywhere near 1000GB/second (1 terabyte/second).
If that were so, they could fill up their 10TB disk in 10 seconds. That's not what they're going to be able to deliver right now.
It looks like spinning media, so my guess is that it is going to approach something close to the best CDROM speeds in the real world. If they make a hard drive out of the same technology, I'd imagine it would approach your best hard drive transfer capabilities in the real world.
There's a rather old technology for doing a spawn/merge of your body together with somebody else's. There's some additional details, with graphics, here.
Read and write, actually.
Though to be honest, I'm about to kick the drives out along with the rest of the hardware - just one big backup session of all the disks I've got, and they can go too (after cleansing the personal ones).
Same applies to my QIC-80 tapes and drives (1 internal, 1 external)
They're not that hard to find, though - just have to know where to look. In the end, there'll be a restoration company that has these drives and then some, and you can get stuff restored for a fee, and that sounds alright to me.
Thank you very much.
Sleep, eat, work, eat, work, eat, sleep... repeat ad nauseum.
The more you know, the more you know you don't know.
Every Week or so, there's a new "breakthrough" in storage that will allow us xTB or yPB to be stored on zMEDIA. In real end-user life, however, we're still behind 5 yrs ago practical announcements of tangible products.
Remember when the DVD was announced and started shipping, what was it, 18GB onto 1 single disk, dual layer dual side. We're starting to see that dual layer out, with almost no medias, a technology that was promised way before today, remember fluorecent CD drives with over 100GB of information that were supposed to be commercially available before this year?
We're still drooling on the blu-ray drives DUE to ship with consumer-level prices somewhat by the end of this year or next year, yet, we're still far from what we were discussing that was "so close" less than a decade ago.
I don't want to sound bashing or anything, but what I don't like about all those announcements, it's when they dare saying a date of availability out of vapor, this, besides showing off, has the adverse effect of pissing off people that could actually design hardware/concepts around that technology, and miss their deadlines even with delays accounted in (months of delays is reasonable in some fields, but years isn't). The other bad effect is you might actually kill the funding of your technology just because lots of consumers might just wait for that "other better" technology. I'm not talking about those 50$ dvd writers, I'm talking about early adopters of new technologies (my first CDR costed me 2500$US) that pay a premium per devices, or OEM that helps to build a market for that new technology, whatever you do, it ends up pissing people off.
Then again, I guess you have to BS a bit to get some funding sometimes just to iron out that last bug or to go from R&D to commercial, but I still don't think that giving out timeframes out of the blues or based on the "miraculous positive planning scenario" is being honnest towards the consumers and OEMs. Don't get me wrong, I love to know what's around the corner, and how it works and the fields that they are aiming, I just don't like being lied to with false hopes.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Nice to see a kooky theory get so much attention, just because of its high "ghee-whiz" appeal. But, let's face it, this "technology" is utterly fake -- even a casual read of the article should make this quite clear. Let me count the ways:
-The "prototype" drawing shows "optical data" and "power/control" connectors, neither of which are exactly standard on today's (or yesterday's, or tomorrow's...) PCs. If this drive where anywhere near real, a controller card or at least an existing interface standard (IEEE1394, USB, PCI...) would be shown
-The inventor was invited to present this fascinating discovery to the National Science Foundation in February 2004. So, what was the outcome of that meeting, a few MONTHS ago? And what, exactly, do you have to do to get invited by the NSF? Send them a proposal?
-The Optical Density Roadmap misspells the trade name of at least one important competitor, and fails to make the difference between "2D" and "3D" technology sufficiently clear. If current DVDs are "2D" technology, where EXACTLY does the third dimension come from for this new product? The disc shown in the prototype drawing looks like a regular CD/DVD to me... Also, why would the very clever engineers at Maxstor (sic) et al be too stupid to use a different color laser?
-The real clincher, though, is the Schematics Atomic Switch diagram. OK, so we take a really thin laser beam to change the energy level of an atom/molecule(?). So far so good... But how does the particle RETAIN this energy level after the laser is turned OFF? The Transparent substrate and Air gap are very unlikely to help a lot here, so... how does it work? What magic substance will keep the particle at the desired energy level? And what will keep the particle from moving (always a downer for consistency...) or interacting with its neighbors?
Questions, questions, questions... And no answers on the company's web site -- cool background MIDI, though...
Well, this technology may actually exist in the lab (though I'll believe it when I see it), but getting a 12 year old to create their website at http://www.colossalstorage.net/mainframe1b.htm ?
:
Seems like they are getting too excited and shooting their load off early. For example, in their 'comparison' table with current technologies, they quote..
10 terabyte Sony 4.7 GB rewrite DVD disk drive @ $595,560
my calculations, based on me buying cheapo Princo 4X DVD-Rs at the markets for AUD$.50 ea, and a DVD burner for $200 gives me 10TB of storage for AUD$1265. I guess a small markup for DVD-RW?
Unless these dickheads are buying a DVD burner for each disc, I can't see how they justify their figures.
more creative accounting
1 Colossal drive uses 12 watts/hr versus 120,000 watts/hr for 10,000 Hard Drives
uh, using an array of 1GB hard drives? why not use a massive array of 4MB MFM drives, or 400kB washing machine drives as a comparo to REALLY make your vapourware look good, I mean shit, my 120Gb hard drive uses -much- less power than a warehouse full of punch card readers.. aint progress wonderful!
Whatever happened to Flourescent Multilayer Discs?
The earth is 98% full, please delete anyone you can!
I remember reading in 3001: The Final Odyssey (the last installment in the 2001 series) that they had devised 15 petabyte (? exabyte? I forget) blocks which they used to store everything because they had never found a need for any more data, and I suppose, getting a better space:storage ratio wasn't worth it.
This spawns an interesting question, of course, which is, how much data will we need after that? Obviously the qualitative "an entire person's life" has been used for a while to describe the ultimate in personal data storage. But why wouldn't we want to store two? Or perhaps a room filled with records of everyone in a group? (Scary, anyone?) So somebody goes off to the lab and gets it even smaller.
I think the issue is that at some point, it becomes data-greed. (To a certain extent, I see that today with filesharing: people have vast collections of music they don't listen to, because it was sometimes about the music but always about collecting as much of it as possible. How many times have you boasted the size of your music collection in public? 10 gigs? 20 gigs? 50 gigs?)
Even better, it brings up the issue of having everybody's existence catalogued. If you're data-greedy, then being out of touch with the past experiences of other, long-dead humans isn't an issue you can discuss. Could that help someone in the future? Yah. Could it hurt? Probably. Future office conversation:
1: I got the new iPod today. 120 exabytes.
2: That's weak, my Human Experience collection is 200 ex's strong.
1: You watch all those experiences?
2: Some of them.. not really.
1: When I got it the first thing I did was go to the Apple iExperience Store and buy Morgan Freeman's life. I'd share, but it's DRM'd.
2: You are such a tool! Hey, I'm going to watch MTV5372, the 5,372nd independent music channel. It rocks so much more than MTV5371, which totally blows. They have a half-life of 12 hours, want to join me before the sell out by the end of the day?
I for one say the future can suck it. Let them solve their own damn problems, I have enough to deal with myself without getting brought back to life and retroactively sued for letting the notion get into some kid's head that icy hot was a good idea for that sort of thing because he can't skip forward fifteen minutes and see the consequences.
There are many technologies that never made it in the market, and others that never evolved as predicted. In the early 1980's it seemed obvious that the mechanical technology in magnetic disks would soon become obsolete. There was something called "bubble memories", where bits stored in a magnetic medium were shifted from one place to the other using magnetic fields. Intel even released to the market some devices. But it never came to be, since the micromechanical technology in magnetic disk heads and positioners evolved much faster.
I'm not convinced modern machines could even handle this: Bear in mind that IDE buses run at what - 250mbps max?
How would an OS react to suddenly having to catalogue a multi-terabyte disk? By locking, I suspect.
That said, just think of what the thought of this disk would do to the RIAA: A single disk, no larger than a floppy, which could hold a high-bitrate Mp3 copy of every song ever produced.....
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
There's bells ringing in the back of my head about an article back in the '90s touting unreasonable information density using "volume holographic storage". It made a lot of nouse on the nets and turned out to be a scam. Is this round two?
If you look at the 'fine print' on the graphic, they're talking about using 50nm wavelength light.
You couldn't fit a 50nm light source into the little box. Getting that kind of light takes a bit of work (and $$$).
Don't hold your breath for this one, it's way out in the future.
Its use does not exactly inspire confidence in an author.
Just as earlier predictions that 640 KB RAM or 5 MB hard disks would be all we need, or more recently that "never throw any email away again" from GMail (I'ver already used 10 percent in a couple of months), people will find a good use for 100 T within a matter of months and demand more.
Over a hundred comments so far, and I can't find a SINGLE comment raving about the tremendous amount of pr0n that this device can store!
This should have been the FIRST expected topic. And the third, and the sixth or so, and so on with reasonable frequency.
What has Slashdot come to? Are we at the dusk of Slashdot culture?
Shame on y'all!
(Oh, and just to make the picture complete: "w00t, imagine how much pr0n you can store with a beowulf cluster of these! In Soviet Russia, pr0n hoards YOU!")
target audience: Slashdot
All of these disc based media are limited to a RPM speed of 7200-10,000 before they basically tear themselves apart. Given that his beam size is roughly 1/10th the size of current, wouldn't that only translate to a gain of about 100X in storage capaicity? And if we accept his density claim, its gonna take a damn long time to read/write the whole disc.
I'd prefer to keep the "blue screen of death" from becomming used in the literal sense.
I'm 31 years old and my life so far is only up to 1/3 of a standard 1,44 MByte floppy disc...
I'm starting to find these new types of storage as solutions to non-existant problems.
At what point does it become too much information recorded? Too many old tv shows that no one has time to watch? Too many blogs that do mothing but waste time and bandwidth? Perhaps we'll reach a point where the efficiency and usefullness of the info outweighs the urge to record it.
OK, this is from their whitepaper...
"The holographic optical drive will use the Einstein/Planck Theory of Energy Quantum Electrons to control molecular properties by an atom's electron movement/displacement. The FeDrive - FeHead Semiconductor Integrated Optical Read / Write Head plans to use lenseless Ultraviolet/Blue laser diodes with Voltage tansducer to write, new definition of the term include photon induced electrical field poling..."
I ask you, does this sounds like it's written by someone who actually understands what these words mean? You could get a better pastiche of a research paper using a Markov Chain bot.
.
An analysis of the "company" "ColossalStorage" and it's founder "Michael E Thomas".
See all the waving flags on their website and his proud "United States Veteran - Top Secret Clearance" at the top of his bio page?
Yeah, there's no way in hell these guys are delivering jack shit to the marketplace in the next 20 years, let alone the next 5.
And who the hell is physorg.com anyways?
Registrant:
Alexander Pol
Metallistov 63
St-Petersburg,
Uh huh. Some amateur "science/tech news site". It is NOT a respected authority on ANYTHING.
According to google, there are ZERO websites in the world that link to physorg.com, and the first 4 pages of google "pages that contain the term" show zero references to physorg.com from anyone in the physics or real world technology industry.
Excerpted:
"Today's PC has on average 64 megabytes of cache and 20 to 60 gigabyte hard drives. "
64 MEGABYTES? Who has 64 megabytes of cache?
I highly doubt this would ever get off the ground, even if they managed to create a disk that is stable and managed to produce a drive which can cope with the tolerances being 8 times tighter than a bluray drive the write speeds would be horrid.
:)
We can't continue using disks, there slow, access times are bad, and they tend to require excesive protection as the data is stored on the surface of the disk (CD's being an exception but the surface of the disk is still vunrible).
If I was going to back any storage medium past bluray it would have to be cartridge based, ideally ExpressCard sized, though optical expresscard would be even nicer, wonder if PCI SIG will make a specification for that
price and storage is good but they don't mention speeds and media reliability.
It would be superb to waste five weeks waiting the device to record all that into a disc that has 30% chance of becoming useless each year
put up or shut up (sorry to be harsh)
....... - I've heard this stuff about new storage coming soon for many years - it's all cobblers till I can BUY one.....
I've been an AVID hard disk HATER since I was about 15 (11 years ago)
I love computers, I love computing but the hard disk has been letting us down for an immense amount of time.
A disk with sub 1ms access time, and 100mb a second, PLUS obscene gobs of space would revolutionize the way we work with our machines......
Sigh
Also isn't it co-incidental that hard disk technology incriments (sp?) are so close from manufacturer to manufacturer - hmmmmm
This is basically the same kind of thing. Something that people would love to have, and would be useful, but by the time it's developed and released it will be utterly worthless. Unless, of course, you're the Chief Executive Officer and you just made $5 million off the entire game.
This guy is looking for a grant. Right now, all I can afford to give him is a couple of pints of urine.
Enjoy!
Anyone know where I buy a fibre-chanel to SATA RAID bridge board?
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Welcome to the web site of the early 1990s!
Heute die Welt, morgen das Sonnensystem!
That crazy atomic picture sure did teach me a lot of things electromagnetism courses couldn't...
For instance, there is both an electrostatic and electric field within the atom at a time when there is obviously nothing static going on! Boy, Maxwell should be spinning in his grave for missing that. Spinning like an electron creating a dipole magnetic moment within an atom! (Sorry, bad joke). And like someone else said, if you're going to move electrons around and give them energy, you're going to have one hell of a time making them retain that energy.
Also... maybe this is me not reading the picture correctly, but are those electric fields behaving a lot like magnetic fields? I tend to think of an electric field as radiating... Unless those are equipotential lines, in which case they wouldn't have vectored direction, so I guess that's out.
There have beeen a lot of posts so far about this being just more vaporware, but how about some more posts explaining this is just pure BS? Neils Bohr may have been a smart guy, but his theories do nothing to solve the problems this guy "conquered".
PS: I think that they just used a picture of NaCl for their atom.
At first, reading the headlines and the article, I thought this was a hoax. Then I thought about the "technology" used and realised it is kinda old hat.
Think back a decade or two when the Magnetic Optical drive was release. Basically, it was a high powered laser used to weaken the ferromagnetic domains so that the region could be written to, but once the temp went down, the region could not be so easily affected by stray magnetic fields due to the "burned in" domain alignment.
The only difference from then till now is the use of a UV laser to create the same change. So by narrowing the min theoretical beam diameter, you have likewise reduced your surface area required for storing a bit of data, allowing for large quantities of raw data to be stored.
Since the state of the medium requires both a UV activation source as well as a writing/reading field, you now have a very stable bit of data. Kind of like inserting a metal ball in clear melted wax, cooling the wax to lock in the position, then optically reading the position of the ball. When you wanted to rewrite it again, you melt the wax, shift the position of the ball, then reharden the wax again.
So the media should be very resilient just as MO disks are resilient. Though I wonder at the cost of the drive and the disks as well as the data read/write rates. It will be interesting to see whether this drive requires fiber-channel to use or not.
The only thing new is the beam and the materials the medium/disk is made of. Would be interesting to see actual working devices and samples. :)
Winged Power Photography
"There's bells ringing in the back of my head about an article back in the '90s touting unreasonable information density using "volume holographic storage". It made a lot of nouse on the nets and turned out to be a scam"
Holographic storage isn't a scam. However much like bubble memory it was impractical and they haven't found a suitable material to get those qualities competitive with other technologies.
Has anyone considered the possibility this may be a hoax? how reliable is this "Physorg" dot COM no less...
"If you have recently published a paper and want to give it publicity or your company wants to publish a press release please click here to contact PhysOrg team."
Someone else mentioned the strong emphasis on patents and whatnot. There's also the genius sole inventor, who is president of the company- kinda sketchy. Lastly, outlandish claims- "bandwidth limits beyond 1000 GB/sec".
Um. Riiiiight. Call me when he has published results and a working prototype he's shown. Until then, he's just a "don't look under that large 40 gallon-sized compartment in my infinite motion car" scam artist.
Please help metamoderate.
...with the nearly 2 million loony-tunes and translucent floppy disks my users insist on using?
Obviously, some amount can be dealt with via error correcting codes, provided the mean time is at least 100 years.
Excerpted:
"Today's PC has on average 64 megabytes of cache and 20 to 60 gigabyte hard drives. "
64 MEGABYTES? Who has 64 megabytes of cache?
Cache here doesnt't mean the processor's instruction or data caches, but rather main memory. In many server applications and some desktop ones, main memory is primarily used as a cache for the disk.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
No time frames are mentioned, even for the older technology. I have no doubt that when this thing goes mainstream (if it ever does), it could definitely sell for the stated price. But it's clearly at least five years away, and probably more.
They also fail to mention the source of this wonderful UV light. And from the looks of the graphic comparing densities, this is very deep UV light. I have a feeling it'll be a while before the necessary UV light source is available.
Of course we can build warp engines... all we need is to first figure out what Dilithum is!
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Every now an then there's an article on Slashdot mentioning some über-cool storage media. But even years after that you can't find them in any store.
This company trying to get venture captial to fund their business idea... which sounds a little bit like the ideas during the golden dotcom days.
make me wonder if either an editor of PhysOrg had a fun time being bought off
From other evidence it looks like PhysOrg is part of the scam. Have you read their "whitepaper"?
The holographic optical drive will use the Einstein/Planck Theory of Energy Quantum Electrons to control molecular properties by an atom's electron movement/displacement. The FeDrive - FeHead Semiconductor Integrated Optical Read / Write Head plans to use lenseless Ultraviolet/Blue laser diodes with Voltage transducer to write, new definition of the term include photon induced electrical field poling...
"Those words, I don't think they mean what they think they mean"
Disclaimer: IANAP, but I try to keep my chops in 20 years after leaving college.
I am wondering how big the internet currently is. Google is trying to cache as much as possible. They might have some sort of base numbers for comparison. It would be nifty to have a huge chunk of the entire internet stored locally right now.
Anyone have any WAGS on the numbers?
As the cost of mass storage and processing are approaching zero, various people are predicting that soon hardware will be free. Only the software and content will cost money. But the shift towards content being the only source of profit will make copyright enforcement more and more important. This will mean tighter copyright laws and ever more draconian restrictions on consumer use of technology.
But there's a much deeper shift going on. It's a transition from paying for things because we can't do them ourselves to paying because we aren't allowed to do them. Supply used to be the other side of Demand. With a limitless supply of copies easily available, Supply will be replaced by Permission. Keeping this system going requires much more granular regulation of individual behavior.
I try to put it in a historical context. Not long ago, North America was a land where if you wanted to you could walk out into the wilds with some tools, build a cabin, put up a fence and start farming. Nowadays every square inch of land is owned by somebody or something, and usually not by the people who live on it. We borrow and pay. Even after your house is paid for you still don't really "own" it, because if you don't keep paying your property taxes you can get kicked out. Sounds like rent to me.
But we've gotten used to all that. We will probably also get used to the notion that other people own everything we see and hear. Within our lifetimes most information and media content will probably be on a pay-per-view basis. It will be editable or removable at any time by the owners. History will disappear unless individual people choose to privately write things down -- paraphrasing of course, not quoting. I think people will tolerate restrictions and loss of privacy for the sake of copyright protection just as we have accepted the authority of planning commissions and building inspectors for the sake of public safety. That's what I think will happen anyway, but somehow I still don't like it.
These "AHD" discs are nice and small, 70% the size of DVDs, at 100x the projected capacity of even the new DMDs, which are 142x the size:info of AHDs. But they cost 180x the 1TiB DMDs (at $45:$0.25), for only 56% the cost:capacity. Crank up a 200-DVD changer capacity to 15x200=3TB with the new 15GB DMDs. Once they get to 1TiB multilayer discs for $0.25, like DVD-R, we're talking about a full 200TiB changer for $3500, $17:TiB. If you record 5.1 channel, 16bit, 48KHz surround sound, and panoramic stereo views as 8Kpxl * 6Kpxl (double the frequency of your retinal sensors) 32bit * 60fps (at you, and from your own eyes = *4), and 100MiBps for medical telemetry plus URL consumption metadata, that's 43GiBps.That's 24s:TiB; 80 years would fit in 100EiB (exabytes, 2^60B), or 0.1ZiB (zettabytes!). You'd store 80m (minus sleeptime, maybe 2h) in a single carousel, a week in a bookcase, and a lifetime lining the walls of your house (1200' of 6' bookcases). And the 100EiB DVD system would cost $30M, while a 100EiB AHD system would cost $54M (down to $300K with $0.25 AHDs), and fit along one 8' wall. Finally, a return to utility for mausoleums!
--
make install -not war
I bet I can fill up one of the disc in a month or less. I'm using 50 CD-Rs a week at the moment
I've learned the hard way never to run without back-ups, redundancy and multiple machines.
Hell! I expect to supper hardware failure personally once myself.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
governments successfully to pass laws against individuals owning massive drives because they could be used for massive copyright infringement? Maybe that should be a Slashdot pole.
If you don't think it can happen, you obviously haven't been paying attention to globalization.
locked in some safe to not be used?
Seriously, wouldn't this put a really big downer on storage manufactures and such?
Let me guess, to wipe a disc blank you use a black light and a air ionizer. Of course the microwave is always a good data destroyer.
Damn, that's a lot of porn!
If you had a single optical disk, with everything you could ever think of needing, stored on a single disk, what happens when that disk is damaged? Or stolen? I guess the only solution would be to have several copies of the exact same disk, so you'll always have a backup.
Will it fit in my iPod?
The article discusses spot size as resulting from the shorter wavelength. From the description in the graphic, a 50-75 nm wavelength is required. There is no available source in this range of wavelengths that does not occupy a whole lot of space, take a whole lot of power and cost a whole lot of money. This is not really ultraviolet; it is closer to soft x-ray. Some idea of the difficulty can be derived from observing what the lithography community has struggled with to get a 13 nm source for "extreme ultraviolet lithography". For that matter, the community has sharply reduced work at 157 nm (in favor of immersion 193) for lack of a workable material set for the optics. The wavelength that is apparently proposed here is quite a bit more energetic than 157 and probably nearly as difficult to produce and direct as the 13 nm. Virtually all materials absorb at these wavelengths. Moreover, the photon energy is well in excess of available semiconductor material bandgaps, implying to semiconductor laser source. Whatever may be true of the recording mechanism, there is no clear path to implementation of this kind of device.
...that we're now seeing quantifiable limits of how much information you could possibly consume in your lifetime, and the possibility of storing it all locally? It's kinda upsetting when you can measure your lifespan in amount of media consumed, it seems shorter somehow. Though I wonder if I can use the excuse "Sorry my playlist is already set for the next 50 years." to avoid watching another crappy movie my ex has picked out. :P
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
I remember when SeaGate was making the MiniChief and DataChief hard drives (20 and 40 mb, respectively). At that time there were already one or two outfits who were working on "floptical" media. Price was comparable but storage was about half. With the refinement of laser technology I've often wondered what's been holding up floptical media. circa 1992 the drives were around $400 and disks were about $50.
I don't want to say that it's an industry conspiracy but, well, there's no better explanation for why floptical drives haven't received the kind of attention, development, and marketing that they deserve. For all practical applications floptical media could leave magnetic media far behind.
Yes, this is an active troll for more mods to waste more mod points and, yes, I can post it again and again and again...
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
would fill up at least two of those drives by friday. God bless sharaza.
With all the current generation of recordable optical cd and dvd disks being suspect of no being able to last even 2 years, what hope is there for a 100 TB disk not losing all your data 10 years out?
Just how many disk copies are we to make every year so that we can just back-up the latest back-up? Isn't this a bit wastefull of the earth's resources, we should mandate that future backup technologies meet a universal standard for long-term data viability, otherwise, it's just like all those disposable dvd's that keep getting proposed from time to time!
basically, absymal transfer rates.
the stateful application of energy to a specific area of the disk caused a physical phase change in the medium storing it, which was detectable.
i.e. a laser heats something up and makes it change its magnetic state.
problem: it takes time for the energy to be transferred enough to cause the state change.
That was a joke. People can't see UV. Duh.
A lifetime of sex can be recorded on one disk without that much encryption. It just sounds like "Yes Yes Yes Yes"
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
I generate more than 1TB of audio a year at my studio. If I included video as well, I reackon I'd hit a TB every couple of months.
Be nice to get rid of the stacks of DVDs if this is a new practical storage method though.
I already am recording my life; I use a small logitech pocket video 550 that uses SD cards and AA batteries. I can record over two and a half hours of good quality video with audio (how good? I watch it full screen on a 22' monitor and it looks great - it's that good!) on a 512mb SD card and sometimes more, depending on content, as the other night i forgot to switch it off as I slept and one recording went on for over 4 hours as it recorded me asleep in the dark, and there were already other recordings on the SD card (it was amazingly interesting to hear me breathe and move as I sleep and the noises i made; a bizarre insight, but that's not the point, I mainly use it as a video diary or journal and found it extremely useful). The batteries I use are 2300mah AA NIMH rechargeables. So storage and batteries are not a problem as I already have two 512mb SD cards and over a dozen high-capacity batteries. I download them regularly to my other 160gb HD, which has enough capacity for a year. I can also burn them to verbatim datalife DVDs which aren't that expensive over time.
Sounds crazy? Not at all. I would say I'm a much much healthier and self-aware person since i started recording and watching myself. It was difficult at first, both in terms of how uncomfortable it made me feel and building the habit, but now it's an essential part of what I do.
What is the problem? information overload! Say I record 5 hours a day, which I already can, when will I find the time to watch all this?! as a result I've been recording roughly two hours a day or quite often less than that and then just watching random bits whenever I'm on the computer, using the shuffle mode in the player to play items from either recently or the hundreds I've accumulated so far as they all can be playlisted with a simple search for a keyword they all have in common. So there you go, I'm already using half or less of the capacity I really have.
The idea of recording even more makes me feel a certain degree of uneasiness about how the information overload may dramatically worsen.
Will Gmail send invites again so that we can enjoy our terabyte of storage? Imagine, they could store 100 users on 1 disk!
:(
And poor hotmail will barely be reaching it's 1 Gigabyte storage.
Sure sounds better than my current 5 1/4 floppy drive. I was going to upgrade to 1.2 meg 5 1/4 but maybe I'll wait. I wonder if they'll be compatible with an 8086?
"My other computer is a Cray."
Just a quick question, if the story's real, just how long would that take to initialize/format?
Visible light is just above UV. UV is so energetic it gets absorbed by the atmosphere.
This could take some time.... With that much space, some sortof continuous defrag would be needed or the allocation table would be just way too big. the cluster size would be massive compared with modern drives as well... With memory prices now, it could have some extreme caching on it that would help both of these things out.
...i guess I could delete the old stuff before saving it to their disk...
Chicken Run quote: ...It was boring!
I saw my whole life flash before my eyes!
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
This might be a case of a little knowledge, but I quote:
"The small size of ferroelectric transparent structures makes it possible to fabricate nano-optical devices, such as volume holographic storage, having both positive and negative index of refraction"
Negative refractive index? Doesn't that mean light travels faster than.. light?
I think that somebody's trying to make fools of people. On the mentioned page one of the very first sentences reads:
Colossal Storage Corporation has exclusive licenses to dominant patents the first patents issued in any field that details the discovery of something totally new.
Further in the text we have link to (supposedly) two patents they (supposedly) own, which turns out to be a patent search.
On the company webpage they have a link to the 3 page "whitepaper". Try reading through it. The writer jas just thrown some solid state physics jargon into it to make it look like a physicist's work. It's totally absurd. The author mentions molecule dissociation (which means breaking molecules apart) and then happily trot on to describing how those (dissociated) molecules switch some "binary positions" in the crystal!. The use of terminology is absurd, the author writes about "perovskite molecules". A perovskite is a type of crystal. You can have perovskite crystals, but not molecules.
Some time ago a French physicist Alan Sokal published a pseudo-philosophical books which made a parody of post-modernist intellectuals who liked to use physics as an argument knowing nothing about it. Looks like they came back for revenge.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
Wow, the entire Truman Show on one DVD. Buy it while it's hot!
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Okay, so this technology is supposedly designed with the intended purpose of recording your entire life (all your knowledge and experiences) in a single spot. The only reason I can see for recording any significant amount of my knowledge and experiences in their pure formats would be to convince the far-future-aliens/evolutionary-offspring-of-humans to clone me and reproduce my brain using their amazing technology.
If they know everything there is to know about me, they have no reason to resurrect me. In fact, they'll probably decide I'm not worth resurrecting, even if I had valuable information. If they only know enough to make me look interesting, then they might resurrect me, if only long enough to see if I have any useful biological traits.
If only Slashdot had a moderation point for "Screaming Homeless Guy Crazy." I just can't figure out whether it would be a + or a -.
Happiness is relative, Based upon the way we live.
Perhaps, but I'm pretty sure the most harmful UV is about ~260nm, as this corresponds to the diameter of DNA. A shorter wavelength may not actually be as harmful.
Besides, I don't see how any spectrum of UV can jump out of the drive's case to give you skin cancer...
sustainable living
Is that a disc with 109,951,162,777,600 bytes, or a measly 100,000,000,000,000 bytes?
It kinda matters; we're now talking a difference of just less than ten thousand billion bytes =]
Though, I'd have to assume that they're talking about the second version, since --according to wikipedia-- the IEC declared the boring all-0 version a "terabyte" relegating to sensible binary version the the name "tebibyte".
-d
I'm just wondering about how I would fit all of this onto the drive, seeing as though at this moment, I need the data to be stored on my hard drive, and then burnt onto a cd.
Would this be a CDRW, or a cd with different sessions; considering how I, and most others, do not have 100 TB of hard drive space, needed to burn said 100 TB of "stuff" (pr0n, movies, mp3s).
Wake me when it ships.
Rip
I mean, let's have a quick reality check here... Affordable optical media for consumers right now is in the form of DVD+/-R(W), with a maximum capacity of 19GB or so per disc. Suddenly, totally out of the blue, a totally incredible technology, presented by a company that has never produced anything before, shown on a news site that has no scientific credentials whatsoever (not to mention extremely poor grammar, sentence structure, and diction) changes the way that we store information forever? I'm trying to look at this optimistically, but I'm still unable to come up with any conclusion other than "it's not likely," and "it's probably a hoax, if anything."
I would like media that holds 100TB to exist as much as the next person, but being a bit skeptical about such incredible claims is not a bad thing either...
Now the question is if these disks are that dense how susceptible would they be to scratches/laser rot/dirt? It would suck to lose terabytes of data due to the near uncontrollable possibility of damage.
record my whole life ona 100 terrabyte 31/2 inch disk when I can record all the highlights of my life on a 31/2 inch floppy of ~1.44 mb (sex included!)!!
Just thought I'd add the obligatory "How long before we're all required to wear a microphone and enough cameras for 360-degree coverage?" paranoia.
/Stylin' in my new tin-foil bowler.
I viewed the story ealrier and went back to show my boss and found no story missing. This smells like
hot air to me.
gvt
THIS IS BULLSHIT
"finally-enough-room-for-all-our-pr0n dept." ???
Speak for yourself.
OJ
"Artificial Intelligence usually beats real stupidity."