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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."
it's just getting ridiculous. i think we all grossly underestimate both the tech we will soon have, and how soon we will have it. i sure do. my feeble imagination is boggled.
Great! So this means I can store all the stuff I need to know for my degree on a disc that one of my lecturers in the department has developed? So if I set up a video camera at the back of the lecture theatre, set it to record...
Say fifteen hours of lectures a week, for 25 weeks of lectures, that makes 375 hours of lectures this year... Should just do it.
Ah, extensive lie-ins await.
Yes, I study Physics at Imperial. Yes, Dr Torok is one of my lecturers. Yes, I should be posting this anonymously.
Due to lack of disk space this user has been discontinued
Just about the same time when we should be getting our first flying cars!!!
I'll be installing a Terabyte Disk player in the dashboard for sure!
That should keep your average desktop busy in 2010! And picture doing this over a LAN or WAN.
I've learned to completely discount all the "..researchers announce xxx {giga,tera}bytes on a DVD..." stories I've read here, simply because they've never become products or the timeline is so drawn out (2015???) that it's meaningless.
The only products that appear likely to actually hit the market for real are Blu-Ray and its competitor, DVD-HD (which seems kind of dead in the water as a data storage standard due to its limited size and growth). Blu Ray appears to have some legs from what I've read, due to its layer growth capability.
What's after that? Are there any storage standards backed by large consortiums coming after Blu Ray? Or is multi-layer blu ray supposed to be "good enough" until some of this lab stuff makes it to market in 2015?
What a shameful waste of technology. All those flat, vast expanses of yellow skintone and blue hair that are Homer's abdomen and Marge's hair? Anybody who watches the Simpsons ought to recognise how compressible such simple artwork is. Add that to the fact that most TV animation is "shot on twos" so it is largely 12 or 15 frames per second anyways.
Come to think of it, properly compressed one such disk could probably store the complete works of the Simpsons, Futurama AND South Park and have room to spare--without noticeable degredation in picture and sound quality.
Lets use our imaginations--with high-density storage like this, consumer-grade equiment of the future could store amazing virtual worlds right down to the last twig and blade of grass...
Seriously, once you can start getting 10 seasons of DVD quality material onto one single disc, it ~really~ puts things in perspective. I see two good things coming out of this:
1. Licensing non-sense for legacy audio-visual media goes away. Napster/Gnutella is a 60lb weakling compared to the Gorilla of 1 terrabyte optical storage. At today's prices, it makes sense for me to fly from Toronto to California, burn a few TV series of shows onto a disc, and fly back home -- it would be cheaper. 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.
2. A new boom in television and film, as the new resolution and storage capacity gives way to much more impressive presentation. No one will be buying season 1 of The Simpsons when they can buy FAMILY GUY 3D in HDTV2.
Of course I'm wildly optimistic, and am not considering media conglomerate consolidation activities, DCMA III: Son of Thurmond, and media format wars. But on the whole I think the latent capability of the media will be strong enough to defeat corporatisation.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
Once USB drives reach 20-30GB for ten bucks or so, who's going to need a bigger optical format?
Isn't the unit of storage the movie? Or the CD collection? Once I can put all of that on a hardware device for the cost of a cheeseburger, what the heck do I want to be carrying around disks for?
While I'm glad to see advances being made in storage media, I'd prefer to see these guys working to make a '100-year DVD+-R/RW'.
After all, who wants to spend one week a year doing quality assurance on media. And even if you do QA, what if you find something is bad. While you can re-download your warez and pr0n, the photos and videos of your family vacation will be lost forever.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
I think your numbers are a bit off. In 1994, I purchased a 340MB drive for about the same price a 4OOGB drive costs today... that's a factor of 1000, not 10. Yes, bigger drives existing back in 1994, but they were on the order of 2GB and $2K. That's still a huge factor.
Hard drive capacity doubled every 24 months before the discovery of the magnetoresistive effect. After the discovery of the giant magnetoresistive effect, the growth cycle sped up yet again to its current 9 months.
I've seen 2k side-by-side compared with 4k (scaled down to 2k) and it's amazing how much more information is present.
(google for 4k vs 4k scan or look here for some images: http://www.cintel.co.uk/technology/4k.htm )
Anyhow... just griping that it takes SOO much space to do on-line edits these days
And another thing.. since they are targeting this things 5-10 years out, don't you think it's right on track with Moore's law? I mean.. what's so surprising then??
... using multiple step angles of a slope to set a value sounds to me suspiciously like they're heading in the direction of analogue recording which rather defeats the whole point of using pits as binary ones and zeros. Sure , using an analogue system you could head towards infinite data density but with increase in apparent storage so is there an increase in error rate. Fine for a music CD where the odd corrupt bit of data doesn't matter , perhaps more of a problem for DVDs but not a killer , but DEFINATELY a problem for data CDs/DVDs. I can't see this method catching on, its just too open to read errors , and as for writing data using a RW system (as opposed to pressing) , oh man....
Of course by then the "execs" will just add so much bloat that you still won't get anymore then one movie on such disk. And not to mention who knows how much disk space videos in the future takes with all the advancements and what not...
I can see the value of such a storage device in the future, but for now, who needs this? I'm not trying to flame the technology, it's great that significant research is being conducted in this area, but what kinds of media are you putting on these disks? Software companies still ship their products on CD's (even if they span 5-6 discs) simply because it is cheaper than the higher capacity discs (ie DVD). The largest application I've ever seen was a X-File game that spanned 8 CD's, which would be somewhere in the range of 5.46875GB, FAR less than a TB (1024GB).
:)
With that being said, it's exciting to see new ideas in technology emerging at such a rapid rate.
I don't think it was so much the dot bomb, but that people had already downloaded all the MP3s they wanted, or at least had a disk big enough to do so in the forseeable future.
20-100GB is enough for most people's MP3 collection, and I think that is really what drove that boom in hard disk size increases we saw from 1996-2001.
MP3 really was the killer app driving hard disk sales during that period. During the couple years before that, they were driven by people wanting to run Windows 95, maybe with an online service, and realizing their hard disk was really too small for windows and/or the other shareware crap they wanted to download.
Really the software is what is driving the hardware, when it comes to something like memory and hard disk capacities. Stuff like CPU speed is something you can never get enough of, but hard disk and memory are the kind of thing that, if you have enough, you have enough.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I think the next big thing for HDs will be tivo like devices for HDTV. For normal TV, 250 or 300GB discs are fine, but if users want their current experience with 1080i, there will be a market for 1 or 2 TB discs.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?