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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."
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?
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.
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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.
"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.
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.
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.
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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.