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1 Terabyte Optical Storage Disks

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the that's-a-lotta-bit-torrents dept.

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."

78 of 266 comments (clear)

  1. Surprise surprise... by Power+Everywhere · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:Surprise surprise... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Can't wait. I'll finally be able to fit my entire pr0n collection in one suitcase.

    2. Re:Surprise surprise... by Mastadex · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.
  2. Get yours before they're gone! by coupland · · Score: 5, Funny

    >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....

    1. Re:Get yours before they're gone! by Null537 · · Score: 4, Funny

      And their listed release date is Feb. '05

    2. Re:Get yours before they're gone! by WhatAmIDoingHere · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.
    3. Re:Get yours before they're gone! by Jeff+DeMaagd · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    4. Re:Get yours before they're gone! by WPIDalamar · · Score: 2, Funny

      But they'll have an "Anticipated Ship Date" of next year =/

    5. Re:Get yours before they're gone! by Mr+Guy · · Score: 2, Insightful

      What's this have to do with transistors and circuits?

      Remember Moore's Law?
      Do you?

      --
      Never confuse volume with power.
    6. Re:Get yours before they're gone! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

    7. Re:Get yours before they're gone! by TTK+Ciar · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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

    8. Re:Get yours before they're gone! by GigsVT · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

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    9. Re:Get yours before they're gone! by jilles · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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
    10. Re:Get yours before they're gone! by imsabbel · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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?
  3. wow by diggum · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!

  4. Just in time by TrueKonrads · · Score: 4, Funny

    For Duke Nukem Forever release...

    --
    Lone Gunmen crew.
    1. Re:Just in time by cdrudge · · Score: 2, Funny

      Shortly after Doom 3...oh wait. I can't use that one anymore.

  5. Weaseling by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny
    ...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...

    "Maybe"? Really, now - I think you can confidently commit yourself to the proposition that 100 > 1...

    1. Re:Weaseling by Mr+Guy · · Score: 5, Funny

      But does it hold up for very large values of 1?

      --
      Never confuse volume with power.
  6. Wait till a standards body gets a hold of the tech by havock · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  7. How appropriate by jakuis · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...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!

    1. Re:How appropriate by maxwell+demon · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.
    2. Re:How appropriate by Ubergrendle · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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?"
    3. Re:How appropriate by ivan256 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

  8. 472 hours of _film_ ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:472 hours of _film_ ? by imsabbel · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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?
    2. Re:472 hours of _film_ ? by Throtex · · Score: 2, Funny

      Or one 524288 x 524288 @ 32 bpp frame, uncompressed.

    3. Re:472 hours of _film_ ? by EvilNTUser · · Score: 2, Funny

      "Saying things like 472 hours of video is fairly meaningless without saying what KIND of video."

      That's why we here at slashdot usually use real units, like Libraries of Congress. The editor must have messed up.

      --
      My Sig: SEGV
    4. Re:472 hours of _film_ ? by Overzeetop · · Score: 2, Funny

      Yeah, but just think how good the 650MB DiVX rips will be!

      *ducks*

      --
      Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
    5. Re:472 hours of _film_ ? by Andy_R · · Score: 2, Informative

      I used to make 35mm slides with a computer controlled slide writer. We wrote slides to film at 4k resolution, and only used the low quality 2k setting for rush jobs - the difference was clearly visible on all but the very worst office slide projectors. When I got out of the business, 8k and even 16k writers were not unusual, and the improvement was noticeable, so scanning at 4k will indeed provide a lot of useful information from certain film types that 2k will not show.

      --
      A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
  9. krrraazzy by blooba · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  10. Disc, not Disk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    When you're speaking of a circular optical media, it's called a Disc, not a Disk.

    Hence Compact Disc, Digital Versatile Disc.

    1. Re:Disc, not Disk by maxwell+demon · · Score: 5, Funny

      So magnetic disks are spelled with k, optical ones are spelled with c. Now, what about magneto-optical? Disck?

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    2. Re:Disc, not Disk by iNetRunner · · Score: 2, Funny

      You can leave that 's' off.. Enough consonants there already. ;)

      --
      Store with salt
    3. Re:Disc, not Disk by dmayle · · Score: 2, Informative

      Now, what about magneto-optical?

      Sorry to be pedantic, but it would be a disk (or a cartridge). Current optical media are labelled discs because of the physical format. (For example, 3 1/2 inch floppies disks contain a magnetic disc inside their sleeve.) Hard disks use disc-shaped platters on a spindle.

  11. before it gets totally slashdotted.... by LiquidMind · · Score: 2, Informative

    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

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  12. measurement units by kirkb · · Score: 5, Funny

    Simpsons episodes? I thought that the accepted unit of measurement for storage devices was "libraries of congress"?

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    1. Re:measurement units by shut_up_man · · Score: 5, Funny

      I believe the a more practical unit of measurement is the "collected works of Jenna Jameson".

    2. Re:measurement units by mikael · · Score: 4, Funny

      You need this handy table of International Units of Measurements:

      Height of small objects: Pepsi/Coke cans

      Height of medium objects: Two storey family home

      Height of large buildings and astronomical objects: Statues of Liberties or Taj Mahal's

      Volume of medium-sized objects: Ford pickup truck/Indian bull elephant

      Volume of large objects: Superbowl stadium/Oil tanker

      Volume of extremely large objects: Planet Earth

      Slow speed objects: Garden snail

      Medium speed objects: Grand Prix racing car

      High speed objects: Artillery shell/Rifle bullet

      Most if not all of these objects can be found around or near the typical family dwelling home.

      --
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  13. Well, by hartba · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
    1. Re:Well, by Luminari · · Score: 3, Funny
      • 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?

      If George Lucas is involved then they will change it so Mr. Burns will have fired the first bullet when Maggie shoots him in the Who shot Mr. Burns episode.
    2. Re:Well, by hartba · · Score: 3, Funny

      If Stephen Speilberg is involved, Maggie's gun would be replaced with a walkie-talkie and Mr. Burns would fly away on a bicyle.

      --
      60 percent of the time, my comments are right everytime.
  14. Who needs it? by jmcmunn · · Score: 2, Insightful


    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.

  15. New Format??? Oh No by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!!

  16. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 5, Funny

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  17. Simpsons anthologies? by bgeer · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

  18. Ob Microsoft Putdown by rudy_wayne · · Score: 5, Funny

    So Longorn SP2 will fit on 2 disks!

    1. Re:Ob Microsoft Putdown by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      And one of those will be for the EULA!

  19. That's sooo last month... by craftyimp · · Score: 3, Informative

    A similar story was posted last month on slashdot.
    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/25/163922 4&tid=198&tid=1

    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

  20. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 4, Funny

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  21. Coral Cache by silverfuck · · Score: 2, Informative

    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...
  22. Professor predicts product probability? by JUSTONEMORELATTE · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

  23. The MPAA cannot allow this. by www.sorehands.com · · Score: 5, Funny
    If there is that much storange on a disk, it will only be used by movie pirates. And if it gets into the hands of consumers, it will destroy the entire movie industry.


    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.

    --
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    1. Re:The MPAA cannot allow this. by russint · · Score: 2, Informative

      Why is parent modded flamebait? Hint: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony

      --
      ^^
  24. Simpsons did it! by mrshowtime · · Score: 2, Funny

    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. :)

    --
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  25. Ooh! by Paster+Of+Muppets · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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
  26. In 5 to 10 years? by WormholeFiend · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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!

  27. It's the transfer rate stupid by joelethan · · Score: 2, Interesting
    So, expecting to fill such a disk on a home system, it would be a reasonable user requirement to expect to take a maximum of 30 minutes to fill the single-side, single-layer disk. That is 250GB in 30 minutes, or 138MB per second.

    That should keep your average desktop busy in 2010! And picture doing this over a LAN or WAN.

    /JE

  28. Two leading innovation accelerators. by ceeam · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Wars and software piracy.

    :)

    1. Re:Two leading innovation accelerators. by Taladar · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Don't forget Porn :)

      --
      Linux is not Windows
  29. What's REALLY next for optical? by swb · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

  30. I'd have to agree. by WebCowboy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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...

    1. Re:I'd have to agree. by Rheagar · · Score: 2, Insightful

      But you must remember, The Simpsons will never be cancelled. Therefore, storing every episode is truly a marvelous feat.

  31. Ideal for Star Wars 50th edition by mirko · · Score: 2, Funny

    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.
  32. Don't lose it! by perdu · · Score: 2, Funny
    Just don't leave one in a cab with all of your pictures on it, as we read in Why You Should Never Lose Your Digital Media

    --
    You only use 2% of your DNA
  33. Re:woah! uberporn! by WhatAmIDoingHere · · Score: 2, Funny

    PUT not BUT.. Put brain into motion before typing.

    --
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  34. Is anybody going to care about optical? by DanielMarkham · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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?

  35. Longevity by Bios_Hakr · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
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  36. Great by IGnatius+T+Foobar · · Score: 5, Funny

    Now I'll have to buy the White album again.

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  37. 472 hours of video on a terabyte by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  38. Re:/.ed by VitaminB52 · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Anyone have the tet of the article? How are transfer speeds/times?

    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.
  39. Hmm , call me a cynic but... by Viol8 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ... 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....

  40. Typical slashdot humor by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    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

  41. Nothing New Here... by Ironsides · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    --
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  42. Dr. Torok? by JPamplin · · Score: 2, Funny

    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!
  43. Re:Physical limits by YellowElf · · Score: 2, Informative
    RTFA RTFA RTFA (before the Slashdot Effect rears its head, of course). The article describes where the additional storage bitspace comes from:

    ... 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.

    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.
  44. mass storage by Paralizer · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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. :)

  45. Single standard... by pdjohe · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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!