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1 Terabyte Optical Storage Disks
fenimor writes "Physicists at Imperial College London described a new method for potentially encoding and storing up to one Terabyte of data, or 472 hours of film, on one optical disk the size of a CD or DVD. Maybe it won't be as large, as 100TB holographic optical storage, but still should be enough to fit every episode of The Simpsons on one disk. Dr Török, Lecturer in the Department of Physics, believes that the first disks could be on the shelves between 2010 and 2015."
Just thought I'd nitpick, but at 10-bit log depth, 4k academy aperture scans of 35mm motion picture film (which is about the standard now for digital postproduction), 1TB will only hold about 13 minutes of footage! :)
At 2k, it's a much lengthier 55 minutes or so
Saying things like 472 hours of video is fairly meaningless without saying what KIND of video.
When you're speaking of a circular optical media, it's called a Disc, not a Disk.
Hence Compact Disc, Digital Versatile Disc.
What does it have to do with hard drive storage?
Moore's law is an empirical observation stating, in effect, that at our rate of technological development and advances in the semiconductor industry, the complexity of integrated circuits doubles every 18 months.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Moore's law concerns the number of transistors on a die, although drive capacity does follow an exponent law, but at a different rate.
It seems that it takes about ten years for hard drive capacity to multiply by ten. That means a doubling of drive capacity approximately every three years. By 2010, there might be 1.6TB drives. By 2015, people might be buying 5TB hard drives. A 1TB optical disc might not be too bad during that time frame.
The problem is that many of these projects die in their infancy. The last big one I remember was Constellation 3D's FMD, but I really wasn't sure the claimed material science of flourescents / phosphorescence was real on that one, it was hard to distinguish it from a fully vapor project.
If we assume the PAL resolution (768x576) using the NV12 pixel format (at an average of 12 bits per pixel), and PAL framerate (25Hz (50Hz when deinterlaced)), we get 16 588 800 bytes per second. At this rate, 1 TB (or 2^40 bytes) would give you 18 hours of video.
Implying a compression ratio of 1:25 when talking about storage doesn't help the quality of the information.