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100 Terabyte 3.5-inch Optical Storage

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the finally-enough-room-for-all-our-pr0n dept.

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."

9 of 345 comments (clear)

  1. How fragile is stored data? by erick99 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    This is very cool! Writing data by flipping a molecule "on" or "off." I wonder though if at the molecular level do you end up with data that is "fragile" once written to media? I don't worry too much that a burned or impressed "pit" in a CD, for example, is going to be affected by background radiation or other similar phenomena. But, if your bits are now single molecules, how robust is the media in terms of preserving the data? I am obviously not a physicist.....

    Cheers,

    Erick

    --
    http://www.busyweather.com/
    1. Re:How fragile is stored data? by ajs · · Score: 3, Interesting

      We're certainly getting to the level where we're going to require some redundancy in order to maintain data integrity, but I'm ok with buying three of these things to store my data that many times... or you could have redundant sectors on the media, perhaps fully duplicated or just maintain parity.

    2. Re:How fragile is stored data? by Tlosk · · Score: 4, Interesting

      With the capacity, throughput, and rewritability being claimed by the company, the issue of fragility is readily solved through any number of different means. It's just an engineering problem. Data redundancy, robust error checking, hardier media (diamond coatings, enclosures, smaller form factor, etc), etc.

      But it won't surprise me if between now and a product launch the specs are brought way down. While it makes great press now, cooler business heads usually prevail and squelch any advancement too far ahead of the current tech, preferring to milk the techonology over many years, a la 1X, 2X, 4X, 8X, 16X etc etc like we saw with CDs, and now seeing again with DVDs.

  2. Re:"record our entire lives" by abionnnn · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I REALLY should have worded myself better. =( My complaint was not with the title, nor the article itself but the description. I'm just sick of people claiming that digital storage is somehow equivelent to the way the brain stores information.

  3. Re:"record our entire lives" by mst76 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    A 40GB (0.04TB) iPod stores 10,000 songs. One of these discs has the capacity of 2,500 iPods, or 25 million songs. The entire iTunes Music Store catalogs has about 1 million songs, so you can store the entire iTMS 25 times on a $45 disc. I would guess that one or two of these discs can hold all recorded music ever published.

    A good quality 2 hour MPEG4 movie can fit in 1GB, so one of these discs stores 100,000 movies. If you can spend 4 hours per day watching movies, it will take more than 140 years to watch them all.

  4. Pie In The Sky by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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.

  5. capacity and time to read/write questions by Quatloo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  6. Re:"record our entire lives" by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The sound bytes alone won't fit on that.

    If you constantly recorded an MP3 at a decent 1MB/minute rate for an entire lifetime of 80 years, you would end up with 4.2e13 bytes, which is only 42% of 100 TB. So you could record every sound you experience or produce, with room to spare.

  7. Re:Vaporware? -- vapor source by Angstroman · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.