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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."
1,000 gigabytes of data and the only application you can think of is the Simpsons?
*sigh*
BLING BLING. Meet the architecture that's changing everything.
>the first disks could be on the shelves between 2010 and 2015.
Which means EB Games should start taking pre-orders right about now...
I keed, I keed....
So with this technology, we could get the complete, directors cut version of each of the Lord of the Rings movies onto 3 disks? Awesome!
For Duke Nukem Forever release...
Lone Gunmen crew.
"Maybe"? Really, now - I think you can confidently commit yourself to the proposition that 100 > 1...
Once the physicists give their product to the DVD Forum/Alliance, we can expect uncompatible competing formats to delay wide adoption of this technology for the next 7 years after it is launched.... so goes life.
...should be enough to fit every episode of The Simpsons on one disk.
How appropriate. I can already hear anti-piracy people say D'oh!
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.
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.
When you're speaking of a circular optical media, it's called a Disc, not a Disk.
Hence Compact Disc, Digital Versatile Disc.
From TFA...
Physicists at Imperial College London are developing a new optical disk with so much storage capacity that every episode of The Simpsons made could fit on just one. Speaking at the Asia-Pacific Data Storage Conference 2004 in Taiwan today, Dr Peter Török, Lecturer in Photonics in the Department of Physics, will describe a new method for potentially encoding and storing up to one Terabyte (1,000 Gigabytes) of data, or 472 hours of film, on one optical disk the size of a CD or DVD.
Physicists at Imperial College London are developing a new optical disk with so much storage capacity that every episode of The Simpsons made could fit on just one.
Speaking at the Asia-Pacific Data Storage Conference 2004 in Taiwan today, Dr Peter Török, Lecturer in Photonics in the Department of Physics, will describe a new method for potentially encoding and storing up to one Terabyte (1,000 Gigabytes) of data, or 472 hours of film, on one optical disk the size of a CD or DVD.
All 350 scheduled episodes of The Simpsons, totalling 8,080 minutes of film, could be easily stored on the new disk, dubbed MODS - for Multiplexed Optical Data Storage - by the Imperial College team.
The 1TB disk would be double sided and dual layer, but even a single sided, single layer, MODS disk could hold the Lord of the Rings trilogy 13 times over, or all 238 episodes of Friends.
MODS disks will not be the first to challenge DVDs' domination of the audiovisual optical disk market. BluRay disks, which have five times the capacity of a DVD at 25GB per layer, are expected to be released towards the end of 2005 for the home market.
The Imperial researchers, working closely with colleagues at the Institute of Microtechnology, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, estimate that MODS disks would cost approximately the same to manufacture as an ordinary DVD and that any system playing them would be backwards compatible with existing optical formats - meaning that CDs and DVDs could be played on a MODS system. Dr Török believes that the first disks could be on the shelves between 2010 and 2015 if his team are able to secure funding for further development.
"According to our experimental results, we can optimistically estimate that we will be able to store about one Terabyte per disk in total using our new method," said Dr Török, leader of the research. "This translates to about 250GB per layer, 10 times the amount that a BluRay disk can hold."
The Imperial researchers and colleagues at Neuchâtel and Thessaloniki filed a patent covering their ideas in July 2004.
Under magnification the surface of CDs and DVDs appear as tiny grooves filled with pits and land regions. These pits and land regions represent information encoded into a digital format as a series of ones and noughts. When read back, CDs and DVDs carry one bit per pit, but the Imperial researchers have come up with a way to encode and retrieve up to ten times the amount of information from one pit.
Unlike existing optical disks, MODS disks have asymmetric pits, each containing a 'step' sunk within at one of 332 different angles, which encode the information. The Imperial researchers developed a method that can be used to make a precise measurement of the pit orientation that reflects the light back. A different physical phenomenon is used to achieve the additional gain.
"We came up with the idea for this disk some years ago," says Dr Török. "But did not have the means to prove whether it worked. To do that we developed a precise method for calculating the properties of reflected light, partly due to the contribution of Peter Munro, a PhD student working with me on this project. We are using a mixture of numerical and analytical techniques that allow us to treat the scattering of light from the disk surface rigorously rather than just having to a
This sig contains repetition and redundancy.
Simpsons episodes? I thought that the accepted unit of measurement for storage devices was "libraries of congress"?
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
Would that be every episode of the Simpons from inception to today or until the release date in 2015, and exactly how many epsiodes with that consist of? Would I be able to store deleted scenes and commentaries? What if Matt Groening decides to convert some of the characters from earlier episodes to CGI, with the help of Stephen Speilberg and George Lucas? Could those fit as well? I need to know this or I'm not buying one.
60 percent of the time, my comments are right everytime.
cool. Enough time to allow me to rip all my CDs so I can listen to them in the fusion powered flying cars that will also come on the market ten years from now.
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?
http://www.physorg.com.nyud.net:8090/news1333.html
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.
Damn, I just bought the Star Wars DVD collection and now Lucas is will get me to buy another format of Star Wars. When will it end!!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
HOURS not DAYS but brain into motion before mouth.
I'm kind of confused by these nonstandard units they're using here. How many Libraries of Congress can it hold, or better yet what's the unit ratio for Simpsons anthologies per human genome? TIA.
So Longorn SP2 will fit on 2 disks!
A similar story was posted last month on slashdot.2 4&tid=198&tid=1
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/25/16392
Optware -- the company claiming to have done this a month ago -- has a press release available at:
http://www.optware.co.jp/english/what_040823.htm
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a new method.
holographic optical storage
Caught it about 90secs before it started intermittently saying "PhysOrg is temporarily unavailable."
You know you've been IMing too long when you almost say 'lol' out loud to a non-geeky friend...
There was a Dilbert strip long ago in which he returned to college. The professor introduced his class by presenting a complex diagram -- "This diagram explains why I'm an expert in economics, yet dress like a flood victim."
Call me when it's out of the Uni and into a corporation's lab, then we can talk.
They must get Congress to out law this. At the same time, maybe they should have copyrights extended to 200 years instead of the puny 75 years. 75 years is not enough time for the copyright holders to recoup their investments and 200 years will encourage the creative people to produce more creative works.
Fight Spammers!
Seriously, by the time this mego-optical disk is ready, the Simpsons might actually all finally be released on DVD. They just released season 4 on DVD, and what, we're on season 15 now? Shit, if they did release all the episodes on one MEGA disc, it would cost damn near $1000, and it would be worth every penny. :)
"Jeremy, you need to get to an internet cafe and cut and paste some appropriate sentiments about me from the world wide
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.
It's too bad Duke Nukem Forever is coming out before either, or it could fit on just one of these discs.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
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...
During the last discussion about Star Wars DVD set sombody mentioned that the original featured a 15000 line resolution, I guess, the final edition which will consist the "shoot before Greedo FPS" will barely occupy one of these discs...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
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PUT not BUT.. Put brain into motion before typing.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
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.
Wikipedia confirms this, but you'd have to be a fanatic to actually make the distinction. Still, definately not flamebait.
Now I'll have to buy the White album again.
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Just because the disc can hold more doesn't mean that those poor actresses won't still get tired. They need to eat and sleep just like the rest of the overworked, underpaid actors striving to make it.
And boy, do they ever make it.
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.
It is time for Google to upgrade to 1 TByte :)
M.
--
http://incuso.altervista.org
1 Terabyte is that 1.000 gigabytes?
/. so they the best way to say how large is the storage capacity they should say 1,099,511,627,776 bytes. (I don't think I'm the only one that counts the powers of 2 when I want to sleep or when I'm just bored.)
472 hours of film,what the hell, now we have a new system of measurement for storage?
This is
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.... 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....
I think whenever an article adresses storage that is X years away, you can expect the following breakdown of jokes:
65% pr0n jokes
10% microsoft jokes
10% star wars jokes
8% duke nukem forever jokes
5% white album jokes
2% slashdot humor jokes
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
I can think of two scenarios:
1. Dr. Torok is vulcan and this is the first seeding of Vulcan technology (apart from the T'Pol grandmother selling velcro to Americans in the 1950's).
2. Isn't Torok that caveman stuck in the futuristic jumping / FPS game? He's certainly progressed.
JP
Stiny! Get me a danish!
It will rather be used for extreme-HDTV: put 2 hours of video on it, with 10000x10000 pixels at 200 frames per second. That'll keep the p2p pirates busy for a while.
One of my concerns as data density increases, especially on portable media like an optical disc, is that accidental damage can be catastrophic. A scratch on a 1TB disc could wipe out 50 episodes of the Simpon's! :(.
Amazon has had each one for $33 I think...so it's not quite a car payment for some of us.
But don't worry, that is one car payment spread out over at least 6 years! Your car will be paid off by then!
read what I wrote. Divx format at VHS quality. Thats easily months. Not hours. Slightly short of a year though.
So 332 angles means another ~16.3 bits of data per pit. "Tens of gigs" * 16.3 could give close to a TB, depending on your number of tens.
Insert witty saying or aphorism here.
Anyone know where the site moved to (if anywhere) - the link in the original story is dead.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Depends on the resolution. I prefer to watch my Simpsons episodes in 191000076 x 108000054.
I don't think 332 angles gives you ~16 bits/pit. At best you get ~8 bits/pit. And a lousy error rate. Certainly not usable for storage of your typical MPEG data, where a one-bit error can cause major visual damage. To get data reliability you'd have to use a very aggressive error-correcting code which would undo a lot of the gains in density. There aint no free lunch. You can get more density, but you have to give up some signal/noise ratio. Maybe the Simpson's reference is apropos-- cartoons can be rendered with fewer bits.
If one watches ten hours of TV a day for their entire life, that is about 250,000 hours. If you wanted new material every hour, and assuming PAL, then you'd need about 250 TB.
Does anyone know the total amount of network and cable TV archives?
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 stand corrected. ~8 bits is the correct dimension.
Insert witty saying or aphorism here.
"believes that the first disks could be on the shelves between 2010 and 2015"
Won't we have 1TB on our keychains by then??
C'mon man... invent something now.
You know, like fsck.
You know that wonderful zero-G nausea you get when you're about to make a backup of some irreplaceable data, and the drive tray slides shut before you have the disc seated correctly, and then the whole thing makes a horrible grinding noise?
That's nothing compared to the feeling you'll get with 1TB discs.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
but the Imperial researchers have come up with a way
I just hope the Rebel Aliance catches up soon... Go Luke!!
how long until
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.
Well, let's see...
Blah Blah Blah
If I had a nickle everytime I read about some storage breakthrough, I'd have at least a few dollars.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Breakthrough Nanotechnology Will Bring 100 Terabyte 3.5-inch Digital Data Storage Disks
http://www.physorg.com/news785.html
that is what im wondering about. will it be fully RW? ie, no more limited numbers of rewrite like the cd-rw's have (about 1000 rewrites). hmm, it would allso be interesting to have the ability to delete files without haveing to erase the whole media...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
by 2015, all of the episodes of the simpsons might actually be out on DVD...
Now this is one thing I NEVER want to see happen... it's already bad enough that it takes up to 9 months to release season 5 while they're still shooting season like 16 (mostly because they don't have time to do all those DVD commentaries), if they had to wait till they could do the commentaries on all 20 (or however many seasons there will ever be), then by the time they're done, we'll be at a time when we'll say "Phew... you mean that disc can only hold one tiny terabyte?!?"
Give me my Simpsons on DVD and stop looking for new technology!
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
Maybe 472 hours of DVD-quality movies.
Full movie film quality with no loss requires 1TB per hour.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
By 2010 we would have more simpson episodes which means, much larger disks of 2TB or more which would delay the project to 2020, by then we would have 10 additional years . . .Oh I just now came out of my requirements discussion.
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!
one terrabyte, huh? Hmm, whopper home library on one disk. I'd like that, thousands of books on one disk, cool beans. Maybe use it to record your own movies or stills all on one disk in the camera (if it was fast enough to do it real time). How about a terrabyte of "live" linux versions, REALLY get a "try em all" disk?
I wonder what the entire source forge or freshmeat library of apps would take?
Hey, how big is the ole intarweb right now? How many 1 TB disks would it take to hold what's on the net at any given time lately? That's an interesting stat to know, I guess google might have a clue or lexis nexus.
When I worked for Kodak I saw the towers they used for 'screening' new technology. A 4k scan is nothing- the HR500 uses a 4K scan in the vertical direction of a 35mm frame... and we were only limited by the size of the available sensor at the time it was integrated (about 7 years ago)
;)
So... 12 bit REAL ADC on a 4K vertical Linear scan (3 channel + IR dust removal)...
As for information differences in a 2k or 4k scan, I guess that really comes down to your perception of quality. I know mine is alot higher than yours
(yes I have a 50" wide print by 12 foot long)
Simpsons episodes? I though that the accepted unit of measurement for storage devices was "libraries of congress"?
Thanks to the DMCA you can't put the Library of Congress on a digital medium any more.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I only submitted this story A YEAR AGO.....
if you want "No More Hiroshimas" then I say "You First. No More Pearl Harbors."
All of these super-high capacity optical/holographical stuff is always "just a few years away".
Wake me up when one of them actually hits the market. Give me an extra shove if it's at a somewhat reasonable price.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
There's at least one.
-------- In Soviet Russia, "Soviet Russia" sigs hate Slashdot.
You are.
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And then there will be a lawsuit as to why the 1 Terabyte disc holds only 1000 GB instead of 1024 GB.
All your Sybase are belong to us.
Listen... I just want some dual layer disks that don't cost as much as a new movie. I don't need a terabyte right now, just some $.25 blanks.
Don't blame me, I voted for Cthulhu.
I can fit an infinite amount of video in one bit of storage space.... Here is the bit stream that represents every video ever made: 1
See... now the resolution is pretty low and there is no audio stream (haven't figured out how to compress audio yet, might need another bit), but the video is all there! enjoy.
Note: I own a copyright and patent on this technology. I call it 'one-bit-video' compression. Use it and I'll sue you for all you're worth.
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
..at least I hope you meant to mock the ridiculousness of taking a relatively tiny flash cartoon, recording it to video and re-compressing it in MPEG2 or some such thing.
I'm astonished at the cluelessness that some other posters exhibited in their comments about artifacting, framerates, etc etc relating to MPEG encoding. I'm talking about PROPER compression people! Using DivX on a cartoon isn't exactly the best way to go--that's like saving a line graph as a highly compressed JPEG--it'll look like total crap and it's only done for convenience sake. There are more effective compression algorithms for "line art". Hell, some cartoons would look fine in 256 colours as well.
There is also no need to fix the frame rate. Simpsons is generally shot on twos (that is--one drawing for every two frames, or 12 frames per second). There are exceptions of course. For example, when panning the artwork is moved and shot on ones (24 frames/sec), and if the animated character overlayed on the background must interact with an independently scrolling background the artwork will be done on ones as well (the intro is almost all shot on ones because of all the action). The video need not maintain 24 frames per second and could drop down to 12 much of the time (or 30 and 15, if a feature was shot direct to NTSC video, or 25/12.5 on PAL...)
truly...I think you could watch nearly all of South Park over dial-up at broadcast quality...
2015
-2004
------
11
hmmm...at least a decade?
Advanced users are users too!
This is the assumption I've encountered when watching the science channels; "This luxury yacht is the length of twenty blue whales put nose-to-tail and contains the volume of two superbowl stadiums. The captain's deck is at a height equivalent to two-thirds of the Statue of Liberty".
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
When these come out the super-hyper-extended version of LOTR Will fit on only 3 of these! A full 2 months of nonstop goodness :D
"What use is power to the Keeps of Balance?" -Disnt of Nightmare LpMud
Photo active chemical sites are generally created from a minimum of 4 photons up to ? number. As for quantitization, any number of techniques exist in the film world for causing only partial development of the grains- that means that instead of your static 1 and 0, you can get .5, 3/4, etc. Frankly any number in between.
Sadly a film grain escapes my brain at this late hour, but I've used the SEMs to image custom made crystals that were about 5nm... but really, we're talking about different things.
I'm talking about images made on high quality 35mm film and scanned in the thin side at 4K by 6K. In fact I've scanned 35mm chromes to 8k lpi and had them blown up to 40x60. Said image downsampled does not sufficiently retain the subtle details and shadings present in the higher resolution scans.
Resizing the lower resolution up to the high one exhibits the same failures- not enough details.
Yes you can use a crappy ass lense and 1600 speed film and find out that, whoa and behold, there is no detail to be gained at 4K resolution. But trade that for a nice rodenstock and some 25 speed Kodachrome and your eyes are in for a candy appled treat.
Simpler solution: Stop making the fucking commentaries.
This is old news except that Japan already did it and it's not 10 to 15 years away. more like 3 years away
m
http://www.optware.co.jp/english/what_040823.ht
I'm dissapointed. I thought this would be about open-source porn :(
Im hanging out for the 4Tb DVD-R. When it hits 50 quid..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"