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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."

6 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. 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.