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Pioneer Ultraviolet Laser Promises 500GB Discs
No Fortune writes "Here's an article indicating that Pioneer is developing an ultraviolet laser for data storage. Since the wavelength of ultraviolet lasers is shorter than the wavelength of blue lasers, the beams are finer and they can pack more data into per square inch. This gives a data rate 20 times more than the blue laser Blue-ray disk."
Microsoft Gamma Laser Promises 500 PB Discs
Here's an article indicating that Microsoft is developing a gamma laser for data storage. Since the wavelength of gamma lasers is shorter than the wavelength of ultraviolet lasers, the beams are finer and they can pack more data into per square inch. This gives a data rate 1,000,000 times more than the ultraviolet laser discs.
Looks like I have to buy the White Album again.
...what color is it?
(I'm a fan of blue...)
error correcting 15.8 megabytes of obscured data!
So now i can lose 500GB of data?
...
I'm moving to punchcards
Now that I've paused to read the article...
The article only discusses write techniques. I'd like to hear if there are any peculiarities involved in reading it before I make guesses as to the delay before production. I'd also like to know if they only have a tube or if they have a diode already.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
People more versed in physics than I am can answer this:
:)
The lasers used for optical media keep on progressing to higher frequency light, which is better able to resolve things. Where is the likely end for optical media?
Past ultraviolet light is x-rays and gamma rays I think... Will they be used for optical media? They are known as "dangerous", but perhaps in low power situations they aren't too bad? Or, you could just have the optical drive shielded in lead
Microscopes haved moved past light, into "electron microscopes", which used streams of electrons to resolve things that light cannot. Will that be possible with our optical media techniques?
And there is nothing I want more than to wait 3.6 days for a disk to finish writing..
...by putting sunscreen on them?
They would hold a lot, but since the gamma rays would go right through any CD-like disk it might be hard to read or write to them!
Better not put your feet under the table either or they might get cancer and fall off!
These should really come in some type of protective casing. Like a floppy or something.
I have many CD's and they were pretty resilient to scratches. They played fine even if they had a pretty hefty scratch on them.
Then I bought DVD's and I brought them on over sea flights for entertainment. I was transporting them in one of those CD wallets and they just started getting unusable really fast. The smallest scratch and it would stop working.
I'm thinking that these disks can get a scratch that is smaller than can be seen with the naked eye and it'll still be a real problem for the disk.
So they should either have a protective cover like a floppy or they should have lots of redundant information physically far away from each other on the disk.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
That is a lot o p0rn!!!
I see nothing about who developed the UV laser, all I see is that Pioneer is using them to write (and read) optical storage. The innovation is that they had to use a carbon mask to reduce scattering.
Of course, I can't read Japanese, so perhaps the original article is more informative and/or accurate.
Other companies already have UV diode lasers in production, like Nichia since 2002. However, I see nothing here indicating that Pioneer has developed the UV laser that they're using for this new disc format.
Anyone who reads Japanese care to track back and get more details?
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
When in the recomended use of your CD/DVD drives did you see the laser? Yes.
Happy Noodle Boy says "F###ing doughnut! Mock me? You fried cyclops!!"
When you're referring to hard drives, it's disk. When referring to CDs or other removable media, it's disc except when referring to floppies in which case it's diskette. FYI, there isn't a "discette" - yet
Hope this clears it up for you.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
and we quickly find out that pioneer is working on this project for epic in order to release the unreal tornament 2005 collectors edition. Just think, only 2 of these discs will fit the game on it!
I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. - Catcher in the Rye
For the benefit of any idiot who thinks parent poster is serious, allow me to point out that your current CD and DVD players use Infra-Red laser diodes, which are also invisible and dangerous. That's why your CD player will often have a warning on the outside.
Dr. Pantyhose is a known Troll. Please don't try to engage him in discussion, that's what he wants. Well, that and karma.
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
So I assume the breakthough is that they made it into a diode? UV lasers exist now:t m
http://www.laserinnovations.com/sabrefred.h
CD lasers are infrared
DVD lasers are red
Blu-ray lasers are blue
Sugar is sweet
And I love you
CD's are red,
Blu-rays are blue.
UV DVD's store your data,
But WHEN? I have no clue.
*:)P*
We're missing a big point in all this: We need better ways of preserving data, not better ways of storing more data.
--
does our rule benefit the earth? does it help the grass to grow, the sun to shine?
Just so I trust that my precious video of that birthday party is conserved...
I am willing to only get 100 GB per disc, if the redundant copies in the 500GB space give me a good chance of seeing the 100GB I want...
Super-redundant error-tolerant copy software anyone? I sure want it to tbe open-source, so that I can trust it will survive for a few years.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I'm sure that Pioneer has considered the fact that UV light gradually destroys most plastics.
So what type of material will these UV laser disks be made of?
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
It's been what? 20 years now that we've been using CDs and their cousins. I wonder when we'll make the jump to a new medium and what that medium will be.
And what happened to FDs? they were supposed to be the next big thing (tm).
You can't buy 500GB White Album.You must buy Ultraviolet Album
Better yet cover them with this.
It should fix the knicks and scratches problem.
Most plastics lose clarity and become brittle under UV exposure. Focusing a UV beam, even if only at a miniscule power, at such a small track width seems to introduce a whole slew of new problems. I've heard that Blu-ray will be the last generation of plastic-substrate optical disks unless better UV resistant materials can be developed.
When we lost a floppy disk, we only lost 20 pictures at most. Alas, when we lost an optical disc, we lost an entire vacation's worth of pictures.
When media data storage rates double, reliability needs to double too!
There have been many comments about using gamma/X-rays in order to write to discs and getting even better storage and people saying it's not possible because it would go right through any disc.
Last year in nuclear physics lab we did an experiment where we had a gamma ray source and a detector and took various measurements of how far they could go through various compounds (aluminum, copper, and lead). Let me say that 30 cm of aluminum blocked less than 10 cm of copper which blocked less than a cm of lead. I bet if they made the discs with gold* instead of whatever they use now they might reflect enough of low-frequency gamma or x-rays to read the discs, despite them being really expensive.
*I think too many people microwave discs to let people use lead.
**Techically gamma rays are produced from nuclear transition and X-rays are produced from high energy electronic transitions. I am pretty sure they would not use radioactive materials to obtain gamma rays and that they would use electricty to obtain X-rays but since this convention has been ignored so far, I didn't bother with correcting it in the actual interesting part of my post.
... will no doubt make theirs out of plastic.
Parent comment always gets modded up on slashdot with regards to optical media... here goes.
Redundancy and error correction will make up for any casual-use scratches ("casual" meaning you generally take care of your CDs, but perhaps don't always put them back in their cases immediately or whatnot). The more space, the more error correction you have in the form of redundancy and things such as parity, not to mention faster chips allowing for interpolation to fill in any gaps that may exist.
Also, don't forget the way the data is physically read is AROUND the disc, so in order to do any real sort of damage would be to have large scratches also going around the disc. This is why when cleaning discs, you should always clean from the inside of the disc to the outside, NOT going around it.
Regarding your DVD problems, have you tried cleaning your lens properly (not trying to be a smartass, disc-read problems are more often than not a function of the laser)?
So in short, you have nothing to worry about (this also assumes that you don't buy a KMart brand unit with a poor laser). With more space, we get better error correction and opportunities for redundancy, and the physical nature of the media makes it more resiliant to every-day scratches (just remember how the data is physically read and it becomes apparent). If it wasn't for whatever strange reason, then the engineers who spend years putting the technology together would accomodate for that.
Hopefully that clears some of it up.
I think I've tried every DVD repair kit on the market. Even those that I figured probably were a hoax. Just because I have so many damaged DVD's that it was worth the risk I thought.
I have tried my damaged DVDs on many different players so I don't think that the laser is the problem.
I honestly think that DVDs are much more fragile than CDs.
Another thing which is weird with DVDs is that once it does find a bad spot it tends to lock up the system. I can't even skip forward or backwards.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
Looks like Bill Gates finally realised that 640k memory isnt enough for everyone
cd lasers are red...
dvd lasers are blue...
all your discs have degraded...
no more pr0n collection for you!
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
That's great that we can have 500 GB cheap optical disks and all, but aren't we reaching something of a bottleneck when it comes to disk access and writing? If it takes you an hour to write a 4.5 Gig dvd like it does me, then your looking at 4 days, 15 hours to write one of these babies. KEH'MON!
Actually, thinking about the physical packaging of the media, one thing I've been wondering since DVDs came along is - why the hell do all new media have to follow the exact same 12cm form factor of CDs?
It seems crazy, to me, that we have all these 12cm discs with identically sized holes in the centre, that could contain completely different kinds of data.
If I pick up a shiny 12cm disc, what should I play it on? my TV? My Hi Fi? Or maybe it's a data disc and only makes sense to my computer. In the future, I won't be able to tell by glancing at it whether a disc will be readable in my blue-laser DVD player, because it may be a UV disc.
Admittedly, my DVD player can play CDs, and I only need one optical drive on my PC - these are advantages, yes. And we're probably stuck with the 13cm shiny disc format for the forseeable future now. But shouldn't somebody have realised, back when DVDs were created, that maybe there ought to be a standard way of telling them apart from CDs?
And don't even think about getting me started on packaging design. I mean, it maybe makes sense to put movie DVDs into packages the smae height as VHS tapes, because people may have an existing investment in VHS storage in their living rooms. But in god's name, why would you package DVD-ROMs in the same sized boxes as VHS tapes? In an environment where people have storage space for CD-ROM-sized boxes, introduce a stupid, oversized box.
What sort of box are they going to use for blue DVDs? And what can we do to stop them?
Is it simply because a DVD is a lot wider than a HDD platter?
In magnetic recording devices, the data density limited by either the size of the head or the size of magnetic domains in the platter material. As I understand it, at this time the platter is the limiting factor. The density on a modern HD platter exceeds that of a CD or DVD disc.
With optical storage, the data density is limited by the wavelength of the photons interacting with the medium, as well as the detail of the medium itself. A DVD can store more data than a CD because of the smaller wavelength of its red laser. The blue laser in blu-ray discs as an even smaller wavelength, and yields even more data per disc. Obviously, the media need to be altered to accept the higher data density - and photon energy for recordable discs.
The size of the laser unit itself is not really relevant, as its output is focussed into a tiny point on the recording layer.
At 70 nm between disc pits, you're starting to reach the quantum limit (that's the UV laser). Simple dust particles too small for your eye to see could cause megabytes of data loss on reading and writing. I'm assuming they're either working out the problems (vacuum sealed discs) or already solved them. But I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the next "disc" using x-rays or gamma rays.
:)
For instance, at the energies X-rays, you're now talking electrons. The chance of an error increases enormously. The media would have have to be made of something akin to diamond,or another type of crystal so that the diffraction of the rays could be interpereted as data. And even then, random "tunneling" and such could cause data issues. You'd also have to keep the radiation energy low, or encase the drive in a lead sarcophagus. And forget about gamma ray discs.
I think the next big step will be solid state (crystal matrices or the like) and not disk based. Though if they do work out the dust/scratch problem on the UV discs I'd probably get one.
~X~
~X~