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."

Comments

"record our entire lives"

[abionnnn]

I wish they would use meaningful (quantitative) data storage units.

Re:"record our entire lives"

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish they would use meaningful (quantitative) data storage units.

what do you think 100 tarabytes represents? this is "quantitative".

Vaporware?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll believe it when I see it.

Re:Vaporware?

[Zeinfeld]

My bullshit alert is blinking on overdrive here. The article seems to use the word patent in every paragraph. If this was a real article the patent would be mentioned at the end if at all.

It is pretty suspicious when any company comes along with a technology that is an order of magnitude better than the state of the art. In this case the state of the art is about 10Gb and they are claiming 4 orders of magnitude better.

Why would the disk be removable for that amount of storage? Surely keeping the heads free of dust would make you want to seal the thing up. Why the incredibly precise price range when we know that every new technology starts high then drops in price?

If the technology was real you could charge $20K for a device easily. You would also find that at this point you had to use some pretty expensive electronics to keep up with the necessary data rates. 100Tb takes a heck of a lot of time to move along a firewire or USB2.0 connection.

Getting the beam size small is not all you need to do. At the beam size they claim you would have to do quite a bit to avoid the effects of vibration etc.

Re:Vaporware?

[GuineaPigMan]

Don't forget to check the source... There's a link on the page for a UFO crash that "happened" in 1908 and they're just finding and researching it now... Reliable source? I think not.

The drive alone is as much as my pc!

[RoboTuna]

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?

luggableness

[karmagardless]

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

Thanks but no thanks

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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?

Why bother with the discs?

[caitsith01]

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 :)

Re:Why bother with the discs?

[r3m0t]

This is massively different. How large is a photo collection, straight from the camera with 4 megapixels, saved as lossless .png?

Very little. Probably a few megabytes.

How about a proper high-resolution video, 120 minutes, not nicely compressed? A few gigabytes?

Maybe one day we'll have 3D videos to go with our 3D monitors, which are actually stored as 3D and not as two 2D layers as with the current 3D movies.

Then, and only then, come back to me and tell me you need a second disk.

thru and thru

[Kraegar]

"I gave up two times because I was not able to work thru a concept of non-volatile, non-destructive readout," says Michael. "I finally had a break thru when reviewing Einstein/Plank and Niels Bohr Atomic Theories."

An article so well written, with all that there proper spellin, and usin words like "thru", sure does inspire me to trust their unbelievable claims.

Was this written by the Star Trek script team?

[Nevo]

"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.

Numbers Numbers...

[tcc]

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.

Pack of Lies

[Anath]

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?

Write Speed?

[CdBee]

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.....

What - everrrrrrrr

[ckedge]

.
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.

Re:Graphics inaccuracies

[gardyloo]

Yes, the article is rife with typos, grammar problems and graphics inaccuracies. Most of the "sell" (and I'm pretty sure that's ALL this is -- a snake-oil sale) is actually vapid b.s., especially given that the claims are based upon some science which has not come about (stable molecular switches, as one poster pointed out, e.g.), some science which is really horribly described ("an Ultra Violet Photon and an Electric Field" -- photons and electric fields are THE SAME THINGS) and things which are flat-out wrong ("[nano-optical devices having] both positive and negative index of refraction" -- this has been shown to be impossible with such small structures, and the region of negative index is going to be exceedingly small with such small currents: see the Physics Today of a month or so ago).

These and several other problems make me wonder if either an editor of PhysOrg had a fun time being bought off, or someone managed to sneak that crap on the server w/out anyone noticing -- 'til /. came along.

(Oh, and IamAP, or at least play one in graduate school).

scam artists

[SuperBanana]

From the Physorg website:

"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.