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."

Comments

In The Mysterious Future!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:In The Mysterious Future!

[SpookyFish]

Sweet, so Office XP 2k13 will still fit on one disc!

All I can say is

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like I have to buy the White Album again.

warning: CD encountered a tiny dust mote

[Anonymous Coward]

error correcting 15.8 megabytes of obscured data!

Bit Rot?

[abrotman]

So now i can lose 500GB of data?

I'm moving to punchcards ...

Re:Bit Rot?

[frovingslosh]

Someone already moderated you funny, but I think it's a real issue. Sure, use UV if it helps, but I would rather have them make the bits a little bigger and a lot more reliable than as small as they can get them and have them rot away. I could live with 100 gig of data on a disc if I could trust it a lot more than 500 gigs on one disc I can't trust.

Re:Bit Rot?

[dgatwood]

Maybe it's just me, but I'd rather them pack as many bits onto the disc as possible, then apply a reasonable error correction scheme to allow for significantly greater damage before data loss occurs.

Put another way, if you can fit 500G on a disc, you can fit 20 copies of a Blu-Ray disc, so when the first one dies, you have 19 spares. Admittedly, I'm not looking for something -quite- that extreme, but the potential for such high-density optical media in terms of improving reliability is tremendous if the vendors just had the guts to use it for that instead of saying "Ooh, we can fit all 17 seasons of The Simpsons on one disc".

Just my $0.02.

Re:Bit Rot?

[schtum]

Maybe it's just me, but I'd rather them pack as many bits onto the disc as possible, then apply a reasonable error correction scheme...

It's not just you. The grandparent suggested making each bit in the disc larger than normal. You suggest duplicating each bit several times. Put the duplicate bits in a row instead of randomly scattered (reducing seek time when they are needed) and your solutions are virtually identical.

Then again, scattering the bits would make the disc more robust, since one scratch would be less likely to wipe out a given bit and all of it's duplicates. So... yeah. Go patent that. =)

Where is the end for "optical" media?

[dustman]

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?

Re:Where is the end for "optical" media?

[zx75]

The limit is defined by the amount of power you can reasonably draw from your system to generate the radiation. Higher frequency means more power is required to generate a 'low-power' beam.

The other limit is finding a suitably reflective material that is cheap enough to be used as media. X rays pass easily through plastics, and they are absorbed by lead. Gamma rays pass through most kinds of material. You need something that reflects well, and doesn't absorb the radiation, that can also be used to store distinct states and be mass produced easily.

Re:Where is the end for "optical" media?

[jd]

Gamma rays are extremely hard to generate and near-impossible to focus. To the best of my knowledge, artificial systems have not been able to do either to any useful degree.

X-Rays, on the other hand, are much easier. X-Ray lasers have existed for some time (though they tend to be on the bulky side) and lenses that can focus X-Rays are used.

However, with X-Rays, you can build systems that don't just rely on reflection (as per traditional optic media). There is a phenominon called X-Ray Fluorescence, in which an atom, when struck by an X-Ray of the right frequency, emits electrons of a specific energy.

A disk using such a system would need to be layered and etched multiple times, which would make it impossible to write on any kind of domestic scale. However, it would mean that you could have maybe fifty or so "layers" to the disk.

You couldn't use this to read at the atomic level, but you could use it to determine the quantity of a given isotope. This would let you increase the effective density still further.

Why are we waiting?

[klubkid79]

And there is nothing I want more than to wait 3.6 days for a disk to finish writing..

So can we write-protect

[Anonymous Coward]

...by putting sunscreen on them?

Protective cover or lots of redundant information

[3770]

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.

Re:I was wondering when this was going to happen

[Christopher Thomas]

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 need a laser with comparable or finer wavelength to the writing laser in order to read an optical disc.

This is almost certainly a frequency-doubled or even frequency-tripled laser, which means it's very power-inefficient (I believe there were old green laser pointers that were frequency-doubled IR; they got awfully warm, as most of the pump beam stayed as IR, and was wasted).

Source laser isn't mentioned in the short blurb (and the full blurb is subscribers-only), but I'd guess it's an excimer laser similar to the kind used for EUV photolithography, if it can make 70 nm holes. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that it's _exactly_ that type of laser, and that this experiment was done in a photolithography clean room. Excimer lasers are gas lasers that produce output in the near-UV. The 193 nm light used for photolithography a generation or so ago was from frequency-doubled argon fluoride excimer lasers.

We have UV LEDs, and so presumably low-power UV laser diodes are available in research labs, but getting something that can reliably make holes 70 nm wide would probably take frequency _tripling_ at this point. So I'd put money on a gas laser at the moment, with a tripled blue or violet diode or a doubled intermediate UV diode laser "some time really soon now, honest".

Producing light of the needed wavelength without frequency doubling would take a pretty exotic material with a bandgap that puts it well into the "insulator with extreme prejudice" range (lots of doping required).