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."

Comments

Surprise surprise...

[Power Everywhere]

1,000 gigabytes of data and the only application you can think of is the Simpsons?

*sigh*

Re:Surprise surprise...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Get yours before they're gone!

[coupland]

>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....

Re:Get yours before they're gone!

[Null537]

And their listed release date is Feb. '05

Re:Get yours before they're gone!

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

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.

Re:Get yours before they're gone!

[Jeff DeMaagd]

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.

Re:Get yours before they're gone!

[TTK Ciar]

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

wow

[diggum]

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!

Just in time

[TrueKonrads]

For Duke Nukem Forever release...

Weaseling

[Anonymous Coward]

...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...

Re:Weaseling

[Mr Guy]

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

Wait till a standards body gets a hold of the tech

[havock]

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.

How appropriate

[jakuis]

...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!

Re:How appropriate

[maxwell demon]

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.

472 hours of _film_ ?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:472 hours of _film_ ?

[imsabbel]

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.

Disc, not Disk

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Hence Compact Disc, Digital Versatile Disc.

Re:Disc, not Disk

[maxwell demon]

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

measurement units

[kirkb]

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

Re:measurement units

[shut_up_man]

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

Re:measurement units

[mikael]

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.

Well,

[hartba]

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.

Re:Well,

[Luminari]

• 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.

Re:Well,

[hartba]

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

New Format??? Oh No

[Anonymous Coward]

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!!

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Simpsons anthologies?

[bgeer]

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.

Ob Microsoft Putdown

[rudy_wayne]

So Longorn SP2 will fit on 2 disks!

That's sooo last month...

[craftyimp]

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

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Professor predicts product probability?

[JUSTONEMORELATTE]

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.

The MPAA cannot allow this.

[www.sorehands.com]

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.

What's REALLY next for optical?

[swb]

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?

I'd have to agree.

[WebCowboy]

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...

Longevity

[Bios_Hakr]

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.

Great

[IGnatius T Foobar]

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

472 hours of video on a terabyte

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Typical slashdot humor

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Nothing New Here...

[Ironsides]

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.