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

In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

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

How fragile is stored data?

[erick99]

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

Graphics inaccuracies

[nstrom]

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.

Re:Graphics inaccuracies

[Mark_in_Brazil]

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

Coming Soon...

[two-tail]

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

Re:"record our entire lives"

[mst76]

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.

Re:"record our entire lives"

[caitsith01]

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.

It has been done

[mangu]

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.

Re:"record our entire lives"

[Waffle Iron]

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.