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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."
5 to 10 years! 1 Terabyte won't mean diddlypoo by then. Remember Moore's Law?
The ultimate goal of science is to unify all forces of nature to a single law that can be silk-screened onto a T-shirt.
Blueray is the guaranteed next step up from DVD, and the consumers have yet to hold anything in their hands.
Seems like a waste of article space on slashdot.
Why are there only 19 people folding@home for slashdot?
By then, I'm planning on the entire global computer network to be seemlessly linked and networked so that I no longer need to save it locally, or back it up to disk. Distributed storage will have a whole new meaning.
That way, only one person has to have the entire Simpsons...or only one person has to have the pr0n if you prefer.
I'm only kidding of course...but who's to say that 1TB is even going to be worth having in another 6 years? I expect to carry that in my pocket on a pen drive by then.
I dont think you can really take a 4k scan for face value. Not even good slrs with very good lenses and the best films available can really get 4k usable resolution on a 35mm film.
And somehow i dont think a film camera doing 24fps can archive the same quality.
Yes, you can scan it with that resolution, but you could scan it with 16k, too. There is just no (or little) more information in your 4k scan than in a 2k scan.
I know you are nitpicking, but you could also claim that 3d is mission, what about ir und uv, ectect.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Well, the article doesn't state that there's a recordable version. Indeed, given that it relies on not just the size, but on fine details of the pits, I could imagine that making a recordable version of that quite hard at the least.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
What's this have to do with transistors and circuits?
Remember Moore's Law?
Do you?
Never confuse volume with power.
I don't have the text of the article, but I did RTFA. The FA doesn't specify:
- Transfer speed(s)
- Cost of a player
- Cost of a writer
- If this technology can be used for RW discs
What it did 'specify' is the cost of an empty disc, they expect it to be about equal to a normal (writable ? rewritable ?) DVD; and the fact that players should be able to play normal CDs and DVDs too.I remember several yars ago reading about a CD Burner that would be able to burn 5.6GBytes onto a regular CD. It used a gray-scale recording like they are talking about only it worked with existing CD-Rs you could buy in the store. Only difference here is they are using the existing DVD technology and a higher order modulation.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Don't forget Porn :)
Linux is not Windows
Actually, hard drive storage densities are increasing much more quickly than that.
I've been tracking hardware price trends for a few years, and hard drive data densities have increased exponentially, but on a changing exponent.
From the late 1980's to the mid 1990's, the rate was about 1.6x per year. Around 1996 the annual rate of increase climbed to 1.8x, then 2.0x, to a peak of about 2.2x/year until the "dot bomb" around 2001, which knocked it down to 1.4x for a while. It has since climbed back up to about 1.6x/year. (I'm not sure why the dot-bomb had this effect.)
If we assume, naively, that it will continue to increase at a mere 1.6x/year, then we should be seeing 6+ TB hard drives by the year 2010, easily. That is, imho, a conservative estimate.
On the other hand, there are any of a number of things which might change the commodity hard drive market (for instance, the advent of thumbdrives which are "good enough" for the masses, leaving only the corporate market for hard drives). So pop some popcorn and pull up a lawnchair, and we'll see what hapens.
-- TTK
Ten years ago I had a 80 MB harddrive in a 486, I think you are about a factor 10 wrong here since my current pc came with a 80GB drive two years ago. The pc before that had 40GB (I bought it in 2000) and before that 4GB ('97), before that 210MB ('95). If I'd buy one now it would be 160/200 GB so that would be about twice what you'd get two years ago. See the trend?
So if you extrapolate to 2004, 100x 200 GB is about 20TB in 2014. 2010 I'd expect about 5TB. The 1TB harddisks should appear around 2007/2008. That is all assuming the growth trend remains the same which is debatable.
Jilles
Shortly after Half-Life 2 then?
A single standard should be agreed on now for these new disks and not give companies the chance to make lots of different standards like the HD-DVD and blu-ray, DVD+R/-R, etc.etc. formats.
Establish a single format and make everybody happy!
No one will be buying season 1 of The Simpsons when they can buy FAMILY GUY 3D in HDTV2.
Just like nobody buys old black and white movies anymore?
Also, broadcast TV really beings to lose its luster when I have 20,000 hrs of video sitting on its shelf at home. I have 500 channels today, and its 99% garbage. I'd be much better off buying the shows i like in a static format, but the price point isn't quite there yet.
Theoretically, it should never be there. Broadcasting should always be cheaper than distributing static media. Most of the stuff that worth watching is still only worth watching once anyway. I mean, aside from the pack-rat mentality, why else would you need a permanant copy of something that you're probably never going to watch again? Luckily, said pack-rat/collectors mentality keeps the static media option viable, but also allows the price point to stay right where it is.
Simsons are bit of a relief from the usual 'library of congress' or ' minutes of music'
A morning without coffee is like something without something else.
By that logic, a quantum computer is trivial to build because we have a CRT monitor to plug it into.
But you must remember, The Simpsons will never be cancelled. Therefore, storing every episode is truly a marvelous feat.