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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."

58 of 345 comments (clear)

  1. In other news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Microsoft announced that the next version of Windows will have a base install size of 99 terabytes

  2. 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 simcop2387 · · Score: 3, Informative

      well not just radiation, if it is just a single molocule, what prevents entropy from scrambling the data? all you'd have to do is heat it and boom its all scrambled

    2. 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.

    3. 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.

    4. Re:How fragile is stored data? by scrod · · Score: 3, Informative

      Existing magnetic drives already write bits multiple times in succession to guard against corruption, and CD technology has error correction as part of the standard.

    5. Re:How fragile is stored data? by scrod · · Score: 4, Informative

      Well, This paper would suggest that such a ferroelectric disk would be resistant to stray electromagnetic fields.

    6. Re:How fragile is stored data? by platypus · · Score: 2, Funny

      all you'd have to do is heat it and boom its all scrambled

      Ever observed an old fashioned CD ROM in a running microwave?

    7. Re:How fragile is stored data? by OwlofCreamCheese · · Score: 2, Funny

      dude, DNA doesn't work now? glad you showed us the impossiblity of us existing!

      --
      -You're wasting your time. Alfador only likes me.
  3. The drive alone is as much as my pc! by RoboTuna · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

  4. Not quite $45 per disk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Don't forget the $1/megabyte tax that the RIAA will undoubtedly impose. The price becomes a little prohibitive.

  5. Graphics inaccuracies by nstrom · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Graphics inaccuracies by Mark_in_Brazil · · Score: 5, Informative

      No kidding. Lots of red flags in this article.
      Besides the graphic problems described by the parent post (and "COLOSSAL" in big letters on the drive in the linked cheesy graphic in the PhysOrg article) and Colossal's oh-so-cheesy animated gif-filled site, there are pseudoscience-y claims:
      "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"
      "He was invited to present this fascinating discovery to the National Science Foundation in February 2004."
      Puh-leeze. The "science" part sounds like something from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the NSF bit sounds like something out of a cheesy Hollywood script.

      And when we get right down to it, how reliable a source is PhysOrg? This, for example, doesn't strike me as the kind of news one would find on a really serious physics site...

      --Mark

      --
      "It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
    2. Re:Graphics inaccuracies by gardyloo · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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).

    3. Re:Graphics inaccuracies by NanoGator · · Score: 2, Informative

      No, Maxstor is right. They store volumetric molecular data.

      --
      "Derp de derp."
  6. Replacement lives needed ... by foobsr · · Score: 4, Funny

    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)
  7. In other news... by deutschemonte · · Score: 2, Funny

    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.
  8. Re:"record our entire lives" by Scoria · · Score: 3, Funny

    Hey, that disc is 1/46th the size of a Volkswagen Bug!

    --
    Do you like German cars?
  9. Re:Vaporware? by wik · · Score: 2, Funny

    It's ultraviolet. You're not going to be able to see it. Trust me.

    --
    / \
    \ / ASCII ribbon campaign for peace
    x
    / \
  10. luggableness by karmagardless · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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

  11. Colossal Storage Corp.'s Website by nstrom · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://www.colossalstorage.net/ -- it's pretty ghetto, in a circa 1996 sort of way. Animated GIFs abound.

  12. Coming Soon... by two-tail · · Score: 5, Funny

    The 100 Terabyte iPod! Now available for the 300%-profit-margin price of $99999!

  13. data storage devices get better over time.. by gl4ss · · Score: 2, Funny

    ..news at 25.00

    --
    world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
  14. Realistic timeline by Lord+Bitman · · Score: 2, Funny

    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
  15. Thanks but no thanks by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Thanks but no thanks by Zarhan · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

      Frankly, if you've CDR's that have gone unreadable in 2 years then you must have somehow mishandled them or gotten a bad batch. One of my friends lost a bunch of photos because he had accidentally marked them with a marker that contained solvent.

      However, correctly handled, the CD-R:s should last quite long. I've a few that are over 10 years old (burned back in 1993 with a single-speed CD-R-drive or something like that). And they still work just fine. I've never had a CD-R fail on me except during the burning phase.

      Oh, incidentally, one of those CD's from -93 contains all the stuff I had with my 5 1/4" floppies. Upgrade your data to a better media if necessary. However, I would thing that the CD-sized optical disc remains readable for quite a long time. The form-factor is just so...convenient that future standards will probably use it, so your HD-DVD and Bluray drives can read CD:s just fine.

  16. Why bother with the discs? by caitsith01 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  17. thru and thru by Kraegar · · Score: 4, Insightful
    "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.
  18. 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.

  19. This stuff writes itself! by caitsith01 · · Score: 4, Funny

    "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.
  20. 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.

  21. Was this written by the Star Trek script team? by Nevo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "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.

  22. 100Tb is nowhere near enough by BillsPetMonkey · · Score: 4, Funny

    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
    1. Re:100Tb is nowhere near enough by deimtee · · Score: 2, Informative

      60 degree ultra hi-res ?

      Angle of view is about 150 degrees, but hi-res is only about 2 degrees in the middle.
      The rest you could cover with a low-res mpeg.

      --
      I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
    2. Re:100Tb is nowhere near enough by inburito · · Score: 2, Informative

      Heheh.. and imagine when the first write-speed is 1x, measured similarily as with cd's (realtime music playback) or dvd's (realtime video playback). It will take a lifetime just to record it.. :-)

  23. Re:"record our entire lives" by caitsith01 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Let's not forget that this *is* Slashdot. So for most people here you are certainly not going to need a whole disc.

    Exhibit A: the number of 'how much of my p0rn collection would fit on one of these babies' jokes posted in the first 0.025 nanoseconds after the story was posted.

    --
    Read Pynchon.
  24. Re:"record our entire lives" by ScrewMaster · · Score: 3, Funny

    The storage unit described is the ROEL (i.e. "recording of entire life") which refers to the number of complete human lives that can be recorded on a single disc. Currently this new media stores a maximum of only 1 Reol, although ongoing research is expected to result in substantial improvent in capacity.

    --
    The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
  25. Re:"record our entire lives" by Trailwalker · · Score: 3, Funny
    ...most people here you are certainly not going to need a whole disc
    And now we can say "His disk isn't quite full" or "He's a few gigs short of a full disk"
  26. It has been done by mangu · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  27. I can record my life on a 3.5" floppy... by fejes · · Score: 3, Funny

    Sleep, eat, work, eat, work, eat, sleep... repeat ad nauseum.

    --
    The more you know, the more you know you don't know.
    1. Re:I can record my life on a 3.5" floppy... by wisdom_brewing · · Score: 3, Funny

      dont you mean "ad mortum"?

  28. Numbers Numbers... by tcc · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  29. Re:Vaporware? by Zeinfeld · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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.

    --
    Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
    Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
  30. Write Speed? by CdBee · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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
  31. 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.

  32. Re:"record our entire lives" by magarity · · Score: 2, Funny

    1/46th the size of a Volkswagen

    So it's 3.5 inches across by 4 feet tall?

  33. What - everrrrrrrr by ckedge · · Score: 4, Insightful

    .
    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.

  34. 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.

  35. Re:"record our entire lives" by ultranova · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

    Ah, finally something to hold my anime collection :).

    --

    Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.

  36. scam artists by SuperBanana · · Score: 2, Insightful
    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.

  37. Re:"record our entire lives" by Loualbano2 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Yes, but how many of these Bugs can you park in the Library of Congress?

    And if you filled the Library of Congress up with these bugs, how much bandwidth would it have? This is the real question.

    -ft

  38. Complete balderdash. by argent · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  39. Re:Vaporware? by Bender_ · · Score: 3, Informative

    Judging from the article, it sounds as if the drive would require a 50nm laser source. There are no cheap semiconductor lasers available for this length and never will be. And I doubt you'd want to have an excimer laser in your data drive. In addition to that it would imply that the disk has to be read in vacuum... Veeery fishy.

    In addition I refard physorg.com as a highly unprofessional site. They spam the usenet and various web forums a lot. They also have the nerve to steal entire threads(!!) from the usenet and insert them to their forum, so it looks populated.

  40. 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.

  41. Re:"record our entire lives" by ahfoo · · Score: 2, Informative

    According to the guy who runs the Internet Archive, sorry I don't have the link to the interview, but it is out there somwhere, he estimated that the sum total of studio recorded audio in existence was 160TB the vast majority not being from the US. So, you'd need ninety bucks worth of media.
    He also quoted a surprisingly small number for movies which mostly comes from India apparently and he separated movies and video into two categories. It was a fascinating interview.

  42. Re:Vaporware? by osgeek · · Score: 2

    It's complete and utter crap. It's amazing to me that people like this are allowed to exist outside of a jail cell. It's even more amazing to look at all the /.ers who speculate on how they'll use all that storage space that they'll be buying any time now.

  43. Re:"record our entire lives" by EverDense · · Score: 2, Funny

    So it's 3.5 inches across by 4 feet tall?

    Well, I don't like to brag.

    --
    http://jesus.everdense.com/
  44. Re:Vaporware? by Jesus_666 · · Score: 2, Funny

    Why the incredibly precise price range when we know that every new technology starts high then drops in price?

    It already did. This technology has been around since the 1970s, but the government kept it a secret, hidden in Area 51 because up until now the extraterrestrial space aliens from another world were trying to sue Earth because we violated a few of their patents when we inve-- innovated this device.
    So this stuff is obviously not new and thus has already dropped in price.

    --
    USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)