Iomega Patents 850GB DVD Nano-Technology

Mike writes "US Patent & Trademark Office recently issued a patent to Iomega Corp. for its work with nano-technology and optical data storage. New technology, called Articulated Optical - DVD will allow 40-100 times more data (upto 850 Gb) to be stored on a DVD with data transfer rates 5-30 times faster than today's DVDs, and at similarly low costs. AO - DVD is a novel technique of encoding data on the surface of a DVD by using reflective nano-structures to encode data in a highly multi-level format."

Comments

Cool

[jellomizer]

Corporate Data for small buisness on one Disk. Who needs tape anymore

Re:Cool

[macaulay805]

Corporate Data for small buisness on one Disk.

I don't know about you .. but I wouldn't want all my eggs in one basket.

On a side note, I wonder how scratch resistant these things are ..

Re:Cool

[jellomizer]

Hense you have 2 disks

Re:Cool

[alexandreracine]

At last! I'll be able to insert my entire collection of torrents on half a disk :)

(No, I don't actually have that, its just a joke)

Re:Cool

[the_xaqster]

Depends on the longevity of the media, and any posible legal data-retention regulations. If I work in a business where the goverment mandates keeping data for 5 years or longer, I would choose tape for data archiving, as this has been proven to last that long. I have CD's that I recorded last year that don't work anymore.

Re:Cool

[PenguinBoyDave]

Tape is Dead. Long Live Tape. CD's and DVD's are dashboard technology. They were designed to fit in your car radio (the CD's anyway). They have no protection from scratches, etc. and a fifty-cent piece of media insn't designed to hold your companies crown jewels. I once sold a backup solution to a company who decided to go with DVD's rather than tape for the cost of the media alone. Three months later someone moving the dvd platter dropped it on the way to the vault. The DVD's that hit the floor and got scratched up was data that was not replaceable. But the time they figured out what they lost it was too late. a Company that had been in business 20 years was out of business because of one mistake and cheap media. I'd feel better putting my data on redundant hard drives or tape than on a DVD.

Re:Cool

[cafard]

What about making as many copies as baskets you require then?

Re:Cool

[CastrTroy]

I think DVDs and CDs are a completely stupid design simply because of this. Why anyone would go from tape or floppy disk, to something as unprotected as a CD is beyond me. Are they ever going to switch to more robust. I know I'd be willing to pay a little extra for media if I didn't feel like one false move could render all my data useless.

Re:Cool

[gunnk]

Have you ever dropped a DLT?

Someone over in our Comp Sci department did that a few years ago. It looked okay, though, so it went back on the shelf.

Next time they ran a restore from the tape it destroyed the DLT drive. Unfortunately, they thought the drive was the problem, not the tape, so they stuck the tape in a backup drive... oops.

The example you gave also has a couple of others problems:

1 - No matter what media you use you NEVER rely on one copy as the only copy of your data. If you do, it is NOT a BACKUP.

2 - A DVD out of it's case is easy to scratch up. Of course, magnetic tape has a pretty short lifespan out of its case as well -- the difference is only that the tape goes into the drive CASE AND ALL. When you put your backup tape in a case you are really putting your tape + case into a second protective case. I've actually seen drives that do the same thing for optical disks. It's not a bad idea for critical backups.

Re:Cool

[mobilebuddha]

until you lose that DVD.

Re:Cool

[Anonymous Coward]

At last! I'll be able to insert my entire collection of torrents on half a disk :)

Quite a few of us could put our entire collection of torrents on a 1.44MB floppy. Now the files those torrents point to...

Re:Cool

[jellomizer]

Tapes have problems to if you doing backups like that. It is just as easy for the person who dropped the tape could have broken it off its track. And when put in to restore the data snap the tape. Or if you reuse tapes after a while the become corrupted and many times a companie doesn't realize it until it is to late. With DVDs at least you basicly write once and keep. Unlike write over with tapes. so you have a good library in a small space.
10 years daily of data backups in DVDs could fit on 12 foot tall spindles. Vs A hole room of tapes.

Re:Cool

[MoonBuggy]

I'd be very surprised if writers for these were made any time soon after the media's release. To write one of these it sounds like you've got to lay down the nanotech bits appropriately to the data stored so that all the layers mesh together nicely. A machine to do said nanotech laying would probably be expensive and impracticaly for anything other than large runs - it's the same reason that people don't use highly reliable pressed DVDs for very small-scale production runs, and in this case it looks like the physical component of the media couldn't just be replaced by dye (like in DVD-Rs) or a generic base, making general purpose writers a difficult problem.

Re:Cool

[mankey wanker]

Yeah, thanks for that. Backup is all about multiple copies (including a few off site in case of real disasters).

Re:Cool

[/ASCII]

Yeah, I've heard BS stories like that one before. I highly doubt the parent is a true story, and if it is, this should not reflect badly on the DVD format. It is simply a case of incompetence in putting all your eggs in one basket. The same thing could have happened to a tape, which is why important data should be stored in multiple copies at multiple places.

Re:Cool

[NanoGator]

"I don't know about you .. but I wouldn't want all my eggs in one basket."

And you're not doing that with tape?

Re:Cool

[Taladar]

I don't know about you but floppy disks failed about one in two to three times I used one so CDs and DVDs are much more robust.

Re:Cool

[lowrydr310]

What about the old-school CD drives that required a protective caddy? These protected the disc from scratches.

Re:Cool

[Taladar]

But what would you do with 850 GB of pre-written data. What would you put on such a medium that makes sense as mass-product?

Re:Cool

[rnws]

Hate to burst your bubble their laddie, but this says "up to 850GB" well here we've already got 800GB (compressed) on Ultrium3.

So far every generation has doubled capacity and throughput to the point that generation-3 fiber-channel drives are just beginning to have their interfaces saturated by the (74.5TB) SAN in my lab. The latest Gen3 units I took delivery of are dual-ported fiber-channel (and we're only using one so far).

Gen4 should continue the doubling trend.

Currently working on a plan for a 2PB library (end of year 1) that will scale to a 5PB library (end of year 2) when disk can do that without a re-enforced floor and at as low a level (thus cheap to run) of electricity usage (not to mention heat), get back to me.

Tape is dead? Newbie.

Re:Cool

[CaymanIslandCarpedie]

CD's and DVD's aren't bad technology for the problem (I'd argue probably better than tape), but the way they are used today doesn't really lend itself to "secure" storage because of scratches, etc you mention.

A few years ago, I saw this Canon scanner with built in CD burner used to archive documents. The smart thing this did was you couldn't just pop CDs in and out. There was actually a CD caddy. The caddy was very similar to a regular CD case but actually also a bit like floppys (small hole on bottom of case for laser to read/write though and a CD mount inside the caddy so the disk actuall spun inside the caddy itself.

Seemed a pretty smart idea and the time and I expected to see CD-R/DVD-R backup devices with similar systems. However, I haven't see these yet and it seems a shame (there may be some around I just have seen them).

Anyway, CD/DVD seems actually a pretty good technology for backup, but the current method of just using the "raw" disk without some sort of caddy or perminant protection just seems silly.

Re:Cool

[Have Blue]

Optical drives used to *all* do that. Remember caddy-loading CD-ROMs? It wasn't a major gain in protection, though, because most people owned far fewer caddies than CDs and were forced to constantly swap them, thus propelling drives to tray- and slot-loading designs. Also, most proprietary formats used some sort of container, like MiniDisc or the "magneto-optical" drives that used to be popular before the age of cheap CD burners. The Blu-Ray spec also used caddies until they were dropped in favor of an improved disc material more resistant to scratching than current DVDs.

Re:Cool

[Ucklak]

I call BS.
There is no way that a company can be out of business because of a bad backup. No way. Especially one in business for 20 years.

Tape can be demagnetized.
Oxides on the tape can deteriorate and seperate.
Tapes are more fragile than DVD's.

Restoring Tapes from say BackupExec or the like is a Pain In The A$$ and can take hours if done as incremental.

Restoring tapes from a different machine other than the one that mastered it is yet another hurdle especially in a windows environment.

Having a tape archive from years ago done in a version of backup software that isn't supported anymore and newer tape machines that can't read the older format is extremely counterproductive and isn't worthy of the 'archive' title.

Backups and archives should be just that. Not dependant on 'current' software versions or technology.

How do I know?
-I've had to throw away 10 year old tapes because of software and hardware incompatabilities. The 20 year old 5.25 floppies worked but the tapes didn't.
-Years of Backup Exec (5 to current) experience.
-Years of NTBACKUP experience and don't even get me started on the XP version of NTBACKUP.
-A couple of years of the CA backup software. I forget what the name is.
-A few years of lesser known backup solutions.

Tarballing on a DVD is fast, cheap, reliable, and easy to restore. I've never had an issue with that.

Re:Cool

[Martin Blank]

Those 800GB tapes are also $125 each, one hundred or more times the costs TFA suggests. Big tape libraries are really impressive stuff, but if it can be done on smaller discs, why waste the time, space, and money on tape?

On a side note, what are you using for the library itself? Something from StorageTek?

Re:Cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Your points are very good, but cheap, high-capasity DVD is more like a solution to the problem of having to deal with multiple copies.
I didn't RTFA, so I don't know how long they hold the data realiably. If it's too short, it's not perhaps suitable alternative to using tapes.

Re:Cool

[Laurance]

Why can't you just use a raid for mass back-ups?

Re:Cool

[Mysticalfruit]

We do, it's called staging...

Writing to tape is realitively slow compared to writing to disk. We've got any array of cheap 250GB SATA disks at our DR location.

We write fulls and incrementals to that disk array. Then we destage our fulls to tape at fixed intervals, which are then stored off site.

Re:Cool

[Martin Blank]

There is no way that a company can be out of business because of a bad backup. No way. Especially one in business for 20 years.

Especially since in order for this to happen months down the road, they would have had to do only that one backup, or at least only that one full backup, and everything thereafter was an incremental or differential backup, without a single full backup.

And I think CA's software is ArcServe. But I hate that stuff so much that I don't even want to go Googling for it.

Re:Cool

[StrawberryFrog]

The DVD's that hit the floor and got scratched up

So, what you're saying is that all DVDs are bad because someone didn't keep some valuable ones in protective sleeves or jewel cases?

Re:Cool

[MoonBuggy]

Uncompressed (or lossless), high definition video. The mass-market switch to HD digital (which should happen over the next 10-15 years, a roughly plausible timescale for the introduction of this media) is the perfect time to introduce a decent quality standard for video without any nasty artifacts or problems when recompressing (you can get a much better compressed file from a lossless source than a lossy compressed source).

Re:Cool

[Anonymous Coward]

I know it's true. It happened to a friends sisters cousins who worked two towns over company .

Re:Cool

[Anonymous Coward]

"Tape is Dead. Long Live Tape"

While I understand your sentiment, you do not appear to comprehend the original line.

When folks of old said "The King is dead. Long live the King!" What they were really saying is "The old King is dead. Long live the new King!"

Re:Cool

[RevMike]

But what would you do with 850 GB of pre-written data. What would you put on such a medium that makes sense as mass-product?

Software, perhaps. A large vendor could put lots of apps on a single disc. Then, when you decide you need a particular app, you call up and get a license key.

Or libraries of various sorts could share incredible amounts of data. Imagine extremely high quality images of every painting in NY's Metropolitan Museum of Art on a single disk, which could then be shipped to every library in the country. Or single disks which contain substantial portions of the library of congress.

Re:Cool

[ProppaT]

If you designed them this archive system and didn't provide a way of having more than one backup of information that's so vital to the company that they'd go out of business if the disc was hurt/destroyed...knowing good and well that cds and dvd's have a set shelf life to begin with...you deserve to get sued. I call shenanegans.

Re:Cool

[LiquidCoooled]

A large vendor could put lots of apps on a single disc.

Or, in the case of Microsoft, they need this to release Longhorn as a triple disc enterprise set.

Re:Cool

[lucifuge31337]

"650 MB ought to be enough for anyone."

- Anonymous source, possibly modified

Re:Cool

[PenguinBoyDave]

Given the nature of their business I recommended going to Magneto-Optical. When they said "no...too expensive" we made them sign a statement releasing us from any liability because they decided to ignore the recommendation. And...It wasn't a single backup...it was an entire platter of DVD's from a DVD library. I so love it when you people think you have all the facts when you don't know shit.

Re:Cool

[dmccarty]

I'm not sure what you mean about dropping DLT tapes. The reason any tape-based disk is in a shell is because of drops, etc. And any drive worth its salt should be able to retension the tape instead of being destroyed by it. I guess you could even generalize that: any media reader should have physical safeguards in place so that it isn't destroyed by its media.

From time to time I've dropped DLT tapes and they've always read/wrote fine.

Re:Cool

[cryptoz]

Certainly modified. The original is "640KB ought to be enough for anyone" - Bill Gates

Re:Cool

[tjstork]

Yeah but what about all the failure modes of tape? I mean, I've zapped a few tapes inadvertantly because of magnetic fields, or, even modest temperature changes that cause the tape to stretch. I'd like a DVD in an enclosed sheath the way old floppy disks used to be, but to go back to tape? No thanks!

Re:Cool

[Anonymous Coward]

And this boys and girls is why there's now a "condom" for CDs and DVDs that can be read through, and will protect from scratches...

Re:Cool

[eljasbo]

This may be just the media we needed for Duke Nukem Forever to fit on and be released!

Re:Cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Within limits of course.

A floppy disk with the guts replaced with sandpaper might be hard to guard against.

Re:Cool

[rnws]

True. The tapes appear cheaper for me at around £25 each - which for 400GB native is a lot cheaper than disk (200GB, 7200rpm, 8MB cache = approx £129 retail). Tape also scales massive storage amounts easier.

I have an HP ESL E-series (with 16 gen3 drives), ESL 9000 (gen2), EML E-series (which is very nifty IMHO), and most of the other doo-dads here.

My SAN is one of these throwing data over 2Gbps fiber through Brocade and Cisco switches.

The cool thing about the ESL E-series is that you can bolt multiple units together for more drives and slots (as you see fit) I think the (theoretical - no-one's built one) maximum is 25!

Nice toys :-)

Re:Cool

[Kent Recal]

Three months later someone moving the dvd platter dropped it on the way to the vault. The DVD's that hit the floor and got scratched up was data that was not replaceable. But the time they figured out what they lost it was too late.

So, and you sold them that solution?
Sounds like a great idea. Let's write data to a single disk, delete it from everywhere else and pretend we're fine.

Re:Cool

[Taladar]

Why? HD-formats are roughly less than 16 times the resolution of todays DVDs (they are less than 4 times the height and width respectively). That means even with MPEG1/2, codecs with horrible quality/byte (xvid or divx are much better in that respect) you would only need about 30-40 GB for a normal movie. Now you say "uncompressed" but I fail to see why anyone in the industry would want the consumer to have uncompressed movies when there is no visible difference between it and the compressed variant. Not to mention the practical/technical difficulties of real-time processing of uncompressed video all the way from the drive to the screen.

Re:Cool

[Guspaz]

The company went out of business because somebody dropped a DVD? That makes no sense. What happened to the companies dozens or hundreds of other DVD backups? What happened to the company's data on the production servers that had just been backed up? How did simply dropping a DVD get it so scratched that it couldn't even be resurfaced?

Your story strikes me as highly unlikely. Your story requires us to believe that the company backed up their data on to DVD, and while the backup was being walked the the vault, had a catastrophic system failure. After that happened, whoever was carrying the DVD dropped it, and somehow scratched it badly enough that it couldn't be resurfaced. Since the company had never done any backups before, all was lost.

Did this company really have a system failure while carrying the DVD to the "vault"? Did really drag the DVD around on the ground long enough to seriously scratch it? Did they then refuse to pay a few cents to have it resurfaced? Did they really not have any other backups?

It seems to me like such a company deserved to be bankrupt through gross stupidity.

Re:Cool

[Kent Recal]

Dude, how do you drop a platter of DVDs in a way so that each and every one of them is irrecoverably destroyed?

Did they drop it from the 4th floor?

Re:Cool

[Anonymous Coward]

TapeCore!!! YAAHHHH MATE!!!

Re:Cool

[Anonymous Coward]

You did a really poor job of selling them a backup solution didn't you?

I mean if the backup solution you sold them couldn't recover from the loss of one disk you really don't know what you're doing.

Selling someone a DVD burner does not qualify as a backup solution.

Re:Cool

[sbryant]

While that's true in general, there is one exception. Certainly, CDs aren't all that great, CD-RW dies (IMO) far too quickly, and DVD +/- R and RW aren't much better. The exception seems to be DVD-RAM, which so far has proven much more robust. I like the pretty pattern the hard sectors make too...

-- Steve

Re:Cool

[zonker]

i wonder if iomega has finally given up their bernoulli technology which they've been renaming the same product (with a sprinkling of updates) over and over again through the years.

heh, corporate espionage will be much easier with this technology. better keep a closer eye on the temps.

Re:Cool

[sbryant]

I know a number of companies that have had no end of problems with DLT. Actually, it's more often the drive that the media that fails, but I don't rate it at all. DAT was far more reliable than that, albeit quite expensive (and doesn't have the capacity of DLT).

One problem with DLT, and probably most tape based systems, is where they are setup to do backups from systems which can't provide data at a reasonable speed. The stopping and starting kills both drive and tape. Having a suitably sized spool area on disk local to the tape is not expensive, doesn't need to be mirrored, RAIDed, SCSI or anything fancy; it also appears to be completely un-obvious to various admins for some unknown reason.

Actually, the one of the most reliable, flexible and large backup solutions is simply an external hard drive, which gets disconnected once the data is on it. Use more drives for more safety, combined with offsite storage. These days, with IEEE1394 and USB2, you have both the speed and the flexibility. The price per gigabyte is not uncompetetive compared to certain tape solutions. Hard drives cost roughly 2-3 times the price per gigabyte of DVD-/+R solutions, but I don't think they're anywhere near as reliable. DVD-RAM is better, but ends up costing the same per gig as the HDs. Of course, the HDs eliminate the need for any other drive unit as well, which just makes HDs even more favourable.

By the way (going back to the subject of backup) - you'd be surprised how many companies diligently make backups that they never test... or maybe you wouldn't be so surprised! :-)

-- Steve

Re:Cool

[sbryant]

Being able to get a database dump onto a single medium would be nice. Plenty of companies have large databases. Some have smaller datasets than that, but including index information in the dump balloons its size (but makes recovery an order of magnitude faster).

Currently, options for large DBs include splitting the data into separate dumps, or having some sort of parallel backup medium which a number of solutions support, but like RAID0, you have an increased chance of media failure, which in turn means your whole backup is worthless if only one fails.

-- Steve

Re:Cool

[mizzoubear56]

That's what I want to know. I hope they can get them more scratch resistant. I mean, scratch resistant dvds would be an amazing breakthrough.

Re:Cool

[PenguinBoyDave]

Close...down a flight of cement stairs...

Re:Cool

[Briareos]

The reason any tape-based disk is in a shell is because of drops, etc.

"Tape based" disc?

Now that's a novel concept - I always thought discs were disc based...

*runs off to the patent office*

np: To Rococo Rot - Miss You (Hotel Morgen)

Hey

[macaulay805]

Hey, thats aboue two VW Beetle's worth of Library of Congresses to the hogs head!!!!

Re:Hey

[Anonymous Coward]

old people in south korea don't find that joke funny anymore

Re:Hey

[Mathiasdm]

In Soviet Russia, old South Korean jokes don't funny YOU!

Re:Hey

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at his UID.

It seems that half of the posts by those with UIDs greater than 800000 (except perhaps TripMaster Monkey) are attempts to be funny, either through existing memes or by spinning something in the summary. I used to do it all the time when I had just joined Slashdot and was new to the idea of moderation. I didn't bother reading the article, just tried to find any joke in the summary I could and post it as quickly as possible. I still go for funny mods today, but I like to think I'm more reserved and that it doesn't reek of desperation like the grandparent.

Finally!

[Valiss]

I can fit my pr0n collection onto only 6 DVDs with this new tech! Horray!

Re:Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget to encrypt it!

Re:Finally!

[nizo]

That trickling noise you hear is millions of geeks wetting themselves at the same time. About 1.6TB of compressed storage whoohoooo.

Umm, be back later I gotta go change my shorts.

That's a problem! ....

[TomDLux]

I son't HAVE that much prOn!

Re:That's a problem! ....

[Anonymous Coward]

http://empornium.us/

Re:That's a problem! ....

[Anonymous Coward]

loser!

Re:That's a problem! ....

[sTalking_Goat]

ha. I guess someone else beat me to the URL punch.

Re:That's a problem! ....

[niko9]

I son't HAVE that much prOn!

Don't worry. I'm sure you could fill up the rest with a spell checker, dictionary, or any one of the freely available typing tutors. ;)

Re:That's a problem! ....

[Haiku 4 U]

He who types with one
hand is bound to make mistakes.
Use two hands next time!

neat

[Anonymous Coward]

cool

Cool idea....but

[theskullboy]

Why do we need all that space? Has anyone legitamately filled up anything past 120 GB? (and by legit i mean no mp3 storage, bittorrent, so on and so forth)

Re:Cool idea....but

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

raw, uncompressed audio and video take up lots of space.

Re:Cool idea....but

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

How is storing songs you ripped from a cd you own not legit?

How is bittorrent not legit?

I have 497 total gigs of storage across 4 drives. I only have 105 gigs free at the moment.

Re:Cool idea....but

[Shkuey]

A full backup of my systems is roughly 1.5 TB, it take 6 250GB tapes that currently cost about fifty bucks a piece.

I would replace that setup with two DVDs in a heartbeat.

And no, I have no mp3s or any other multimedia files on there.

Re:Cool idea....but

[0kComputer]

And no, I have no mp3s or any other multimedia files on there.

you must have one hell of a porn collection :)

Re:Cool idea....but

[Soybean47]

Man, I remember when my 40 Mb hard drive was sufficient for my needs, including an office suite and several of the latest games at the time. CDs seemed ridiculously huge as a storage medium. Who would possibly need 650Mb on a single disk? That's crazy!

Anyway, my point is, even if we accept your wacky hypothesis that nobody legitimately fills their 120Gb drives these days, it seems obvious that our storage needs will increase in the future. If there isn't any imaginable way to use a disk like this now, there will be soon.

Re:Cool idea....but

[composer777]

Full machine backups is one legitamate use that I can think of, especially if you have a few computers. Database backups is another use. I am a programmer and an enhusiast user. I have three OS's installed on my hard drive of my desktop, and also back up 3 other computers to this machine using ghost (or dd and netcat for the mac), and multiple image snapshots of each partition in case anything goes wrong. This can take a system that's 80 GB's and easily triple the amount of space that one is using. Add mp3's, a few movies, photos, and games, and yes, you can legitamately use quite a bit of space. I think that it's great that I could now do a weekly snapshot of my entire system, and archive maybe a months worth of snapshots on one DVD. Then I can take this DVD and move it offsite to something like a safety deposit box. Offsite backups is one thing that is missing from my backup strategy, and the reason why is that at this point it is impractical to back up a hard disk to DVD and I haven't budgeted for the extra hard disks necessary to make this practical.

Re:Cool idea....but

[sprior]

You'll see, if you ever get a kid and a camcorder...

Re:Cool idea....but

[uberdave]

Why do you consider storing mp3s, bittorrents, etc illegitimate? Is time shifting TV shows a legitimate use? What about my friend's video editting business? There are plenty of ways of generating 120GB of data in legitimate ways.

Re:Cool idea....but

[MoonBuggy]

It's not hard to legally fill a 400GB+ drive if you're using lossless media for whatever reason.

Plenty of people want to rip all their CDs and DVDs so that they can shuttle them around the home network as and when they are needed. Since storage is fairly cheap, it's often worthwhile to rip once and forget rather than using the format of the day and then finding out you can get much better quality in a year's time. 400GB is only about 75 DVD images if you aren't recompressing (and I don't want to watch recompressed MPEG2 on a decent size screen, so straight DVD images are the way to go for a home media server).

Alternatively, people in the creative business obviously don't want to compress their master copies, and uncompressed SD video can easily fill several gigs for a minute of footage. If we can have 850GB discs, we might finally be able to watch true lossless HD video.

Yes, many people fill drives with media content, but quite alot of them bought it fairly or created it themselves.

Re:Cool idea....but

[Haiku 4 U]

Why do we need all that space? Has anyone legitamately filled up anything past 120 GB? (and by legit i mean no mp3 storage, bittorrent, so on and so forth)

No. No one has drives
larger than 100 gigs.
You are correct, sir!

No one makes music
or video themselves. It's
clear. We're all pirates.

Who the hell are you?
Bill Gates, with his 640k?
Get a brain, moran!

Re:Cool idea....but

[Anonymous Coward]

"640K should be enough for anybody"
-Bill Gates

Re:Cool idea....but

[arootbeer]

exactly how little do you think these discs (and associated drives) are going to cost? Besides the fact that, if it's REALLY important data, you should be making at least 2 copies, stored separately, etc., etc.

Re:Cool idea....but

[0123456]

"Has anyone legitamately filled up anything past 120 GB"

That's about an hour of storage for low-compression HDTV editing.

Even for DV editing, I have about 400GB of video from various different projects on my PC right now.

Re:Cool idea....but

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill Gates never actually said that.

Re:Cool idea....but

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll decide what's legitimate around here, thank you!

Re:Cool idea....but

[ThJ]

Get a spell checker, dimwit.

Re:Cool idea....but

[Anonymous Coward]

Sigh.

Re:Cool idea....but

[theskullboy]

Damn it, you're all focusing on the wrong part of my statement. Screw the "legitamate" portion...im just saying that for a normal non-1337 user, they are not going to fill that up...

Re:Cool idea....but

[Shkuey]

You have no idea.

Hmmm

[buckymatters]

Hopefully they'll be rewritable so I can just run my computer off it. That'd be nice, one disc for each OS.

Re:Hmmm

[Stibidor]

Talk about slow! :|

Re:Hmmm

[musikit]

does windows really require that much disk space these days?

geez. win 95 took up 100 meg with directx.

Re:Hmmm

[lucidvein]

What, are you running multiple copies of Longhorn? How much space do you need for each OS seriously...

Re:Hmmm

[NanoGator]

"Hopefully they'll be rewritable so I can just run my computer off it. That'd be nice, one disc for each OS."

Heh. Burn a copy of Knoppix, use it for a day, then come back and tell me you want to run your OS off an optical drive.

Don't get me wrong, I love Knoppix, but you really do need a hard drive for OS's.

Re:Hmmm

[Taladar]

With enough RAM you could run from there and only write on shutdown (and perhaps in between for important data).

Did they also patent...

[ad0gg]

Making a clicking noise when it dies?

Re:Did they also patent...

[Anonymous Coward]

Clicking noises indeed. Since they sold me a Jaz drive that ate disks, I have lost trust in them. What's the point of external storage if you don't believe you will be able to read it when you need to? I will never never buy from Iomega again.

Re:Did they also patent...

[Wesley Felter]

Now it's nano-clicking. The sound is so small you can't even hear it.

Re:Did they also patent...

[Anonymous Coward]

Strangely enough, this is a *different* 'Click of Death' than the one I knew about, which was only an issue with Zip drives. In that one, it was caused by a defect on the media catching a read/write head as it spun by at high speed, damaging the arm of the head, and tearing the media. From that point on, inserting any disk into the damaged drive would result in that disk being damaged by the mangled head, and moving a damaged disk to another drive would result in the damaged disk catching the head in the new drive, damaging it.

It didn't happen on the Jazz drives, because they had a metal platter.

Re:Did they also patent...

[dr_dank]

These are much more advanced than that old iomega media of yesteryear.

Now it'll say "Anon, I am slain" before it shits itself and takes your precious data with it.

Re:Did they also patent...

[Waffle Iron]

Making a clicking noise when it dies?

Yes. From the patent:

17. The disk storage system of claim 16, where said stored data may be lost to read/write head operation failure.

18. The disk storage system of claim 17, where said operation failure is further caused by read/write head encountering dirt or debris on underprotected cheap media format.

19. The disk storage system of claim 18, where driver software further issues a plurality of reset commands to said read/write head in response to operation errors.

20. The disk storage system of claim 19, where said driver software reset function further slams read/write head against mechanical stops.

21. The disk storage system of claim 20, where said mechanical stop action further causes prominent audible clicking, thereby notifying human operator that they are SOL.

Re:Did they also patent...

[Nogami_Saeko]

It was sort of funny - my first reaction to this article was "Wow, iomega creates something that possibly doesn't suck!"

N.

Re:Did they also patent...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think there is too much ADD around here for people to get that.

Oh boy..

[Anonymous Coward]

My fat finger print just erased 138 Gigs of data from my DVD!

Re:Oh boy..

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean that you couldn't see what key to press and erased 138 Gigs of data.

Integrity

[Eunuch]

Some stuff is just really important. I'd like a RAID-1 flash array with covered connectors for that.

Re:Integrity

[Rei]

Cue the server room fire in three... two... one...

Re:Integrity

[mattspammail]

And off-site 850 GB backups on DVD's.

Click of death ... on remote control?

[guyfromindia]

IO Mega was notoriously famous for the 'click of death' on its zip and jazz removable drives Check out http://grc.com/tip/codfaq1.htm this site.
I stopped using IOMega stuff a long time ago. Since this patent is just a technology, I may buy the product (if affordable) ONLY if it is manufactured by somebody other than IOMEga.

Re:Click of death ... on remote control?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because they will sure try to make certain all their new hardware does the exact same thing, just because people like you expect it.

Flame bait.

Re:Click of death ... on remote control?

[Humorously_Inept]

True enough, but they were very good about replacing the affected drives regardless of whether they were still under warranty or not. I think the quality of a company's warranty says a lot about the people running it and their intentions. Commitment to customer satisfaction is quite rare and I can only hope that Iomega still maintains that same commitment.

Re:Click of death ... on remote control?

[mankey wanker]

Not in my case. They reneged. Iomega will NEVER see another penny from me.

From where I sit you are talking out your ass. What ever happened to companies not making enormous errors of this type in the first place?

I am currently wrapping up a similar problem with OCZ RAM. Sure, in this case they are making good on swapping bad for good RAM sticks, but do you know how much time I have lost testing their crap RAM? Corsair from now on I guess...

Re:Click of death ... on remote control?

[Humorously_Inept]

Iomega replaced my 1.5 years out-of-warranty ZIP drive and gave me 2 free ZIP disks for the click of death. No questions asked. Fact is that not every problem can be forseen. Modern hardware and software systems are far too complex for every single possible contingency to be accounted for, tested and designed out. Product quality is important, but so is warranty quality because the worst of problems can happen to the best of companies.

Re:Click of death ... on remote control?

[Chibi]

True enough, but they were very good about replacing the affected drives regardless of whether they were still under warranty or not. I think the quality of a company's warranty says a lot about the people running it and their intentions. Commitment to customer satisfaction is quite rare and I can only hope that Iomega still maintains that same commitment.

I agree with you to an extent, but they'd be much better off to just make quality products from the start, rather than replacing a defective product with another potentially defective one. I'm more concerned with the quality of the product that with the quality of the warranty. If it's a great product, then I might not even have to care about the warranty.

Taken from a link provider by another /.er:

Minutes, hours, or days after the clicking is first heard, the drive -- and usually one or more of the user's cartridges -- suddenly dies without warning. And since people tend to rely heavily upon their Zip and Jaz cartridges for the storage of their important data, this typically results in spontaneous, catastrophic, irreversible, loss of all their data.

So, it's great that I have a new drive that might betray me like its predecessor, but what about all of my DATA? Oh, I see, I'm SOL...

Re:Click of death ... on remote control?

[mankey wanker]

HI:

I am saying they specifically did not replace my drive. They reneged on their warranty. As in their warranty was worth ZERO to me.

Actually, I can't even believe the company survives. But then I can't believe you are attempting to cheerlead for these whackjobs either.

Re:Click of death ... on remote control?

[Anonymous Coward]

Commitment to customer satisfaction is quite rare and I can only hope that Iomega still maintains that same commitment.

ROTFLMAO!

Do you realize that Iomega is one of the few companies that was so uncommitted to customer satisfaction, a judge forced them to display the (negative for Iomega) results of a lawsuit for the fact that they basically left their repair hotline unmanned? Inside the lawsuit you will see a judges order requiring them to keep their hotline working. Sad that's what it takes to get a company in gear nowadays.

It would take over 1 1/2 hours to talk to someone there, and that is long distance to Utah during the bad old days of phone companies charging ungodly rates. It cost me over $90 in TELEPHONE CHARGES just to get my drive repaired! I may as well have just thrown it out at that rate. With the speed at which these things were going out of date I thought it'd be old technology by the time I was off the phone.

All in all, Iomega realized something: You can get a 100% repair rate when you only have enough staff manning phones to deal with 0.0001% of complaints.

Re:Click of death ... on remote control?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they didn't take your complaints seriously because they were coming from a guy who names himself "mankey wanker".

Re:Click of death ... on remote control?

[evilviper]

they were very good about replacing the affected drives regardless of whether they were still under warranty or not.

Buttshit. Click of death was a problem for YEARS before IOmega finally said "our fault, we'll replace them"... and even then, you had to fight with the phone techs for a long time to convince them that the CEO actually said that...

I call that false advertising, not commitment to customer satisfaction. After several years of putting their customers through loads of crap, they finally had to get their act in order, but it was very late in the game, when they were already on the downfall.

Does a protoype exist?

[NightWulf]

I'm reading the articles mentioning that they have been issued two patents, but is there anything tangible to these patents. So they have a working 850GB DVD using nanotech, or is this just another patent for tech that *could* be made in 2025.

Re:Does a protoype exist?

[Anonymous Coward]

or is this just another patent for tech that *could* be made in 2025

Lets hope... after all, the patent will expire in 2022!

Re:Does a protoype exist?

[coop0030]

I've been reading articles on how this will actually compete with the next-next generation of media (after the HD DVD, and Blu-Ray debacle).

Let's hope that this technology can actually be manufactured cheaply.

Also, what type of error correction will they have in this? If I scratch my disc, am I going to lose a gig of data (ouch, if true).

Re:Does a protoype exist?

[NanoGator]

"I'm reading the articles mentioning that they have been issued two patents, but is there anything tangible to these patents. So they have a working 850GB DVD using nanotech, or is this just another patent for tech that *could* be made in 2025."

I doubt they're thinking that far in advance. The main reason Iomega is around today is that their 100 meg zip drive came out at a time where hard drives were barely that size. They came damn close to becoming a standard must-have device until the CD-RW came around.

Iomega would certainly LOVE to get into that market again, so I seriously doubt it'll be a 2025 thing. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it were only a couple of years away. However, you're right, there's nothing tangible right now.

Re:Does a protoype exist?

[maxwell demon]

Also, what type of error correction will they have in this? If I scratch my disc, am I going to lose a gig of data (ouch, if true).

Well, with 850GB, you could use 2/3 of the disk for error correction data and still have plenty of room left.

Re:Does a protoype exist?

[cpt kangarooski]

their 100 meg zip drive came out at a time where hard drives were barely that size

Meh. When Zips came out, about 10 years ago, I had a 750MB drive, and that wasn't unusually large. Where Zips excelled was in price. SyQuests and Bernoullis cost a lot more.

Re:Does a protoype exist?

[Laurance]

normally, patents require that you have atleast a working protoype

Re:Does a protoype exist?

[Gadzinka]

or is this just another patent for tech that *could* be made in 2025.

No, it's a new trend: companies patent problems without a solution anticipating that some court in a couple of years will grant them license fees from someone that's going to actually put the money and effort to solve the problem.

I remember seeing in this category patents for ethical AI[1], Sony patenting virtual reality games via ultrasound stimulation of a brain. None of this thech is or will be available in foreseeable future.

So what?

Fucking parasites.

Robert

[1] "Three laws" anyone?

Re:Does a protoype exist?

[HiThere]

But look on the bright side...this means that they patent will expire sooner.

Re:Does a protoype exist?

[Anonymous Coward]

they came out 10 years ago. and when i bought one (the scsi model, which IIRC didn't have the 'click of death' issue) i was still using a 400 mb hd. 750 MB hds were not as common then as you'd like to play them up to be. It may be true they had larger, more expensive discs but if you wanted to pay less than $400 for a hd, your options were pretty limited in 1995.
Yeah they HAD 2 GB hds then, if you happend to have $1,100 in cash to blow on a HD... the 420 MBs were only $200, which made them the most common size in 1995... I do see an ad for a 720 MB WD hd for 299, in my march 1995 issue of PC/Computing magazine, but still, that was the cheapest ad in the back pages. The iomega drive cost like $300, and media was like $20-30 a blank depending on you bought the 10 pack or individually... so really, iomega wasn't that much cheaper than hard drives of the day, but you could bring the drive with you to any pc, which made it great.
iomega was a victim of faster cheaper better, they couldn't keep up with expanding hds, and cd burning quickly took over, with it's super cheap write once media, etc.
Even the floppy drive is dead, people use flash memory cards or cd-r or the network to transfer files between computers... some people buy special usb thumb drives that work with any computer out there nowadays, because flash memory readers aren't quite standard yet...
850 GB should be large enough for a removable media for the next few years, but as hd and shd video starts to become more common, even 850 GB will start to seem small...

Personally, right now all my digital data would fit on one or two of those discs.. if internet bandwith becomes cheaper, and people with higher upstreams become more common, i could easily fill two of those discs a year with downloaded content ^_-

Re:Does a protoype exist?

[Anonymous Coward]

Patents require no such thing. All that is required is that you include a written description of the invention or discovery and of the manner and process of making and using it, in such full, clear, concise, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the art or science to which the invention or discovery appertains, or with which it is most nearly connected, to make and use the invention.

Re:Does a protoype exist?

[Anonymous Coward]

10 years ago I had a Conner 1.25GB drive. First kid on my block to have one and it cost me right under $500. Most everyone I knew had drives ranging from 200-250MB up to a couple of 750's. The 100MB Zip drive didn't gain it's ground because it was 100MB when hard drives were about that size. It became so popular because it was the first real portable/affordable format with a lot of space.

That was the in-between time where 1.44MB sucked but CD-R's weren't out yet. You could put a lot of stuff on it. For instance if you had a zip drive when they first came out then copying your friends installed DOS games was easy to do. Prior to the arrival of the Zip drive there was always that one file in there that wouldn't fit on a floppy. The Zip drive made that no big deal. Not long after the Zip drive showed up install directories for games started getting silly big. Once you got into Windows 95 then just grabbing the directory and copying it to your own computer stopped being practical anyway.

Re:Does a protoype exist?

[Anonymous Coward]

the scsi zip does have the click, doesn't seem to cause any problems at all though, mine is still going strong, even if it seems very slow these days to write a full disk worth of data. the only zip drive I haven't had clicking on is an IDE one, having experience with scsi, parallel, IDE, and laptop module IDE varieties.

Re:Does a protoype exist?

[numbski]

Fucking parasites.

I thought parasites were asexual...

Re:Does a protoype exist?

[PW2]

It also did well possibly because of the parallel port interface connection it used which gave people like me who acquired old machines more storage and OS installation options.

Re:Does a protoype exist?

[axis-techno-geek]

Doesn't matter , this is Iomega, king of the flash in the pan proprietary removable storage market, soon after this comes out, a real standard will emerge and this will be fated to the big pile of obsolete technology with all the Zip, Click, Jaz, and Bernoulli drives.

Re:Does a protoype exist?

[Anonymous Coward]

--
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.

You were my lawyer but you failed me - I got the death penalty - and am posting this from a Wyse terminal connected to a 300 baud acoustic modem in HELL! Thanks a lot!

Great!

[0kComputer]

Now I can get rid of my Zip drive.

form factor?

[nilbog]

Is it still on the same less-than-perfect form factor? Seriously, I have casette tapes and 8-track tapes, and VHS tapes that still work, but my DVD's skip every dang time. How about we work on something durable...?

Yea well...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got a patent pending for a terrabyte DVD drive and a 100 terrabyte DVD drive. So, there!

Of course, just like the Iomega vaporware, you can't get one of my drives yet either but, I'll have the patent Real Soon (tm). I think I'll release Duke Nukem as the first title on my new world dominating format.

TTFN

Re:Yea well...

[ultramk]

...even better, these new discs will be a critical tool in the War on Terra.

Or something.

m-

Re:Yea well...

[stewarsh]

Interesting considering that to file a patient you need to have a complete description of the device not just the idea. I would venture based on the spec requirements that you need something working to get the right level of detail

Re:Yea well...

[utexaspunk]

duke nukem? that wouldn't be very impressive, because IIRC, that fit on a 1.44MB floppy. i recall playing that, along with commander keen, on my PS/2 back when a PS/2 was a computer...

maybe you meant duke nukem forever...

Re:Yea well...

[Anonymous Coward]

shut ur h0l3, wannabe collegeboy punk!

wanking queer puffta, needs to get tha b00t!!!!

Re:Yea well...

[mink]

PS/2 is still a computer. PS2 is a game system.

Scratched discs?

[adisakp]

Of course, with 850GB per disc, a single scratch will wipe out a couple gigs of data.

Re:Scratched discs?

[0kComputer]

Unless they put in redundancy, for example, 425 for storage and 425 for redundancy. Of course thats going to reduce the amount of storable data.

Re:Scratched discs?

[gunnk]

And a single break in a 100m tape will also make the tape completely unreadable.

Of course, a scratched optical disk usually won't eat your drive, while a broken tape can do so in a heartbeat.

Keep optical disks in good cases and make redundant backups and you actually have a pretty robust backup system.

Re:Scratched discs?

[peragrin]

with that much storage redundancy is ideal.

heck i would even go so far as make the drives have 3 partitions of identical storage.

What is needed is a durable shell. modern storage works on the surface of the medium. Why can't we manpulate an inner layer? Even if the two layers are seperated by the few nanometers. Think Bablyon 5 data crystals, or Star Trek isolinear optical chips. Data is stored in a matrix surrounded by a more durable structure.

What is needed is a semi-hard material that is always transparent to the laser reader/writers. That way the outside milimeter would need to be scratched off before damage could be done.

Re:Scratched discs?

[Anonymous Coward]

I certainly hope they're smart about this and enclose the disc inside a protective plastic box-like thing, like Mini-Discs.

Re:Scratched discs?

[NanoGator]

"Of course, with 850GB per disc, a single scratch will wipe out a couple gigs of data."

They will most likely have a cartridge around them. I just wish the DVD industry was that smart. I'm tired of getting a finger print on the disc from TAKING IT OUT and having my brand new f'n movie freeze half way through. I hate to sound like an old fogey, but I have serious reservations about going to HD-DVD.

Re:Scratched discs?

[hass]

I could be wrong, but I don't think the data is stored on the surface of the medium. When the surface is scratched the lazer is refracted differently, so the data below is useless.

Re:Scratched discs?

[CharlieHedlin]

We have this. CD data is etched on the lable side of the disk, the rest is just plastic.

The problem is that you still can't read through a scratch, whether the data is there or not. That and a scratch on the label can destroy the disk.

If you have a scratch on the non lable side of a CD or DVD, it can be polished out.

Re:Scratched discs?

[milimetric]

Actually, that's not true. The more space you have on the disc, the more space you have for error correcting information. This is already present on normal CDs and DVDs. My CDs are scratched up beyond all recognition (subar) and they have no info loss. Error correction is awesome.

Re:Scratched discs?

[Axiom_1]

No, these things are nanotech, and operate at the quantum level. If the disk is scratched, your data will quantum probability cloud. Solving Schrodinger's equation for the disc will reveal a 50% probability that your data is still there, and a 50% probability that your data is now a dead cat.

Re:Scratched discs?

[peragrin]

CD's you buy (music, games,etc) are coated with a thin film. It increases durability and life of the disc, as well as making it harder to scratch.

CD's you burn personally don't last because they don't have the final coat.

We can make substances that completely block specific wavelengths. What is needed is a substance that is completely transparent to specific wavelengths of lasers.( IE if you place this material between the laser and the target the laser passes completely through.

Or a two way mirror style. with the read points built into the inside of the device, and the Laser shoots through with the data being sent out from the shell.

Re:Scratched discs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Use the new TDK ArmorPlate coating, for example at:

http://www.tdk.com/recmedia/dvd/armorplateddvd.htm l

Re:Scratched discs?

[greed]

_Some_ CDs you burn don't have the final coat.

I used a batch of unlacquered CD-Rs for a bit. Until I discovered that the glue on a Post-It note was enough to peel the recording surface right off the top of the disc.

I went back up a notch in the price range. There's a reason some discs are really, really cheap--it's 'cause they're not made as well. (Unfortunately, not cheap discs aren't necessarily made well.)

Actually, I keep two piles of blanks around: really, really, really cheap discs for one-shots, test burns, and abusing in the portable MP3 players. And some nice lacquered surface ones for things I want to keep around for a bit. I've got discs 6-8 years old that are reading back at full speed, no problems at all. And some 6-8 weeks old that are toast.

I haven't found the "peeling media" thing to be as big a deal with DVD blanks. But I do have a pile of DVD-Rs which failed after a few months of service. But I couldn't figure out just what the common thread was--several different kinds of disc from a couple of makers. I eventually decided it was possibly the use of adhesive labels that killed them, as unlabelled discs from the same batch were OK.

But discs made both before and after that run have been fine.

Re:Scratched discs?

[aaronrp]

Yeah, since 640K^W850Gb should be enough for anyone.

Re:Scratched discs?

[PDA_Monkey]

Here's a hint... Don't touch that part of the disc.

Re:Scratched discs?

[NanoGator]

"Here's a hint... Don't touch that part of the disc."

I'm guessing you've never tried to remove a stubborn DVD from its case?

Re:Scratched discs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a hint: When trying to insult somebody, try not to become embarrasingly ignorant to make your point.

Re:Scratched discs?

[Anonymous Coward]

InkJet printable media tends to be a bit more durable (and weighty). For CD-R, the printable side tends to be thicker in order to absorb the ink from the printer.

finally... clone your entire drive

[johnpaul191]

maybe with media this large people will be more likely to back up (clone?) their entire hd? maybe not.... but it would make it a lot easier than picking the important files.

even of the slightly more responsible people i know... a few lost their entire mp3 collection when the drive died. i guess they did not have a 200 gig backup drive.

Re:finally... clone your entire drive

[owlstead]

Even though I plan to put my MP3 collection on a raid drive, I do not think my music counts as irreplacable. Of course, if you bought them from Apple or Sony at 1 dollar a pop, you might think differently.

Re:finally... clone your entire drive

[CustomDesigned]

By the time these 850G drives come to the consumer market, hard drives will be 80T (terabytes).

Re:__

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

OSR programs can read the text in the image. It takes about 4 tries, but it can.

And hey, want to get around that? Register an account.

Wow, 850GB?

[Ignorant Aardvark]

All of the storage capacity in my entire house could fit on two of these things. Awesome!

Re:Wow, 850GB?

[bunco]

You're _so_ cool.

Damn only 850

[Admiral Trigger Happ]

That wont even fit a quater of the data we deal with, Uncomressed video takes a LOT of space. We need 10 Terabyte discs

Re:Damn only 850

[dave420]

Then it's clearly not for you :) Do you complain you can't use floppy disks or CDRs for storing lots of uncompressed video? :)

Re:Damn only 850

[Admiral Trigger Happ]

what else needs this kinda space? I for one would be reluctant to put all my important stuff on one disc, I would rather have a couple of smaller discs.

If the disc get damaged all your data is gone.

Re:Damn only 850

[Ignorant Aardvark]

It'd be very foolish to put all of your data on one on of these discs, wouldn't it? Just make lots of copies!

Another shot...

[Crimson Dragon]

This is yet another crucial shot across the bow for the coming media wars. With 850GB storage, however, competing formats have an interesting road ahead of them.

Don't be surprised

[RealProgrammer]

... if the drive it's in starts to make a certain clicking sound.

Not news

[SkinnyPapa]

Every few months, some new technology pops-up with promises of greater storage capacity (all simpsons episodes on 1 disc!!1!1one) on today's or future optical/magnetic media.
Be it some variation of Holographic storage, which has been promised over 10 years ago or something different.
This is this generation's Cold Fusion.
Besides, seeing how much trouble there is with the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD war, I doubt we'll see any other format come up in the next 7-8 years.

Re:Not news

[PoorLenore]

Wasn't this generation's Cold Fusion, Cold Fusion?

Re:Not news

[SkinnyPapa]

Cold Fusion has been promised by scientists for decades and used to appear in the news as the answer to all our energy problems every so often since the fifties.
Lately, it seems this doesn't happen as often as it used to (I at least don't recall such an incident for some years now).

Re:Not news

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't remember "Cold Fusion" before 1989. "Practical Fusion", sure, but not cold fusion.

Re:Not news

[PoorLenore]

Yep, have to agree with the AC on this one.

Too bad its iomega....

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it going to require you use special iomega $400/unit media?

I'll wait 5 years..

[Adult film producer]

850 gigs ? Wow.. nice but how about reliability and longevity? (I'm sure the press release will promise the heaven and sky.) I'm reminded of this by people setting themselves up as guniea pig experiments for laser eye surgery. I'll wait another 10 years before diving into that one too. A lot of theory suggests everything will be okay but I'll let father time be the judge of that.

Re:I'll wait 5 years..

[Maxo-Texas]

I hear you about the eye thing. I waited about 10 years before I got mine.

In the five years since then, I do not regret that I waited but I have really enjoyed them. I can see when I go to the beach, when I play sports, when I ski. If I wasn't physically active, it wouldn't matter so much.

I agree on the shakiness of their claims. I've had sleeved CD's that were supposed to last 70 years that can't be read after five (with light use).

Now I use DVD's AND multiple USB hard drives. And I still occasionally lose data.

Re:I'll wait 5 years..

[duggy_92127]

I'm reminded of this by people setting themselves up as guniea pig experiments for laser eye surgery. I'll wait another 10 years before diving into that one too. A lot of theory suggests everything will be okay but I'll let father time be the judge of that.

How much do you require? They've been doing laser eye surgury for something like 30 years now; when I had mine done in 1999, the 20-year trials had been complete for years already. That's one of the reasons why it became so popular in the late 90s.

Point taken on this media, though. It doesn't look like it's even a product yet, lets see how long the media lasts before we commit all our backups to it...

Doug

Re:I'll wait 5 years..

[Anonymous Coward]

They started looking at laser eye surgery in the early '80s, the first actual treatments in '87 or '88, LASIK in '91. Heck, RK (non-laser) has been around only since 1978, other than early experimentation. So we're not even at 30 years for RK, much less laser eye surgery. In 1999, you probably did LASIK, so it was about 8 years old at the time.

And, they keep changing it, coming up with new and better methods that have fewer side effects and better chances of no complications. So now you have to trade off on whether to go with an old-and-proven (to not work as well as the new techniques do) method or go with the new one that MIGHT have some unknown problems, but seems to be working just fine, seems to have lower levels of complications, seems to improve your vision better with fewer side effects, etc.

Re:I'll wait 5 years..

[Anonymous Coward]

So... taking this thread even further off-topic *hehe*
What's the current "best" technology / technique, for someone with fairly severe short-sightedness (not that I'm talking about myself here, oh no, this is purely a hypothetical question)?

And yes, I realise that the risks involved in any of the techniques pale in comparison to the risks of taking medical advice from an AC on Slashdot :-)

Good 'ol Iomega ...

[Fookin]

So what's the equivalent of the "click-of-death" for optical devices? Some sort of "permament-scratch-on-a-lens" or a "blink-of-death"?

Good stuff to look forward to ...

Re:Good 'ol Iomega ...

[Anonymous Coward]

the spin up spin down swirly of death.

stock price

[cosmo7]

Iomega's stock is still suffering from analysts obsessed with declining zip drive sales. Should be interesting if this has any impact, not that analysts ever read /.

Re:stock price

[stlhawkeye]

Iomega's stock [yahoo.com] is still suffering from analysts obsessed with declining zip drive sales. Should be interesting if this has any impact, not that analysts ever read /.

Why would they? Slashdot is basically a collection of links to various web sites followed by vapid commentary that is propped up by an arbitrary moderation system. Why read Slashdot when you can just read the news sources to which Slashdot links? I enjoy commenting and reading other people's comments and debating stuff with you guys but I find no compelling reason why an economic analyst would read this web site.

Somebody will probably say that the perceptions of this community are valuable market research, but this is the same group that can't even admit that maybe piracy actually has a negative net impact on the various afflicted industries, on the grounds that we don't pirate anything, thus nobody else does either.

Re:stock price

[Anonymous Coward]

"I enjoy commenting and reading other people's comments and debating stuff with you guys but I find no compelling reason why an economic analyst would read this web site."

So what you're saying is, subjective uninformed commentary is of little use to individuals who base their analysis on facts?
I find your ideas fascinating and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Re:stock price

[deragon]

This 850Gb technology is vaporware for the moment. And even if they succeed, if the product come out late, say when HD are 20Tb and other competitors offer simillar products, then they have no serious advantage.

Buying Iomega in the hope that this technology succeeds is pure speculation. I would wait until the products is seriously about to come to market, and is relevant.

mp3s

[kjeldor]

Time to start decompressing the mp3s...
Seriously, when stuff like this hits the market, why bother worrying about compression anymore?

Re:mp3s

[cosinezero]

Because an 850gb r/w drive is going to cost an armload more than your iPod's 40gb magnetic drive...

Re:mp3s

[Zeebs]

Because, if you just decompress the mp3s the only thing you get back is the larger file, the quality is gone forever. Re-rip the track or leave it compressed otherwise you just found the best way to waste the space, perhaps other then archiving slashdot.

As cool as this is...

[Gardenhead]

It's a step in the wrong direction. The great minds behind all this new technology need to meet up AGAIN so these things can make it into the consumer's hands. I don't want 3 different optical drives in my tower. This could either start DVD doomsday or this technology could take the path of everthing else that Iomega has made; they tend to overcharge for media, which is ultimately their downfall.

Re:As cool as this is...

[SomeGuyFromCA]

> I don't want 3 different optical drives in my tower.

i happen to have three different optidrives in my tower. DVD-ROM for dvd playing and sourcing cd copies. CD-RW for cd reading and writing. DVD+-RW for dvd burning.

Re:As cool as this is...

[mobiux]

Wow,
Talk about redundant.
Your single dvd +- drive can do all that.
Plus, who really copies cd to cd anymore,
I mean it takes a whole 2 minutes to copy the source disk to the HD and burn off that?

Re:As cool as this is...

[SomeGuyFromCA]

except my single dvd +- drive cost much much more than the cd-rw or the dvd-rom.

IT's New Nightmare...

[__aaclcg7560]

Just when IT managers thought that their data was safe from walking out the front door, Joe "Blow" User comes in with a "Zip DVD" drive and copies all the servers over the network before leaving at the end of the day.

The "Zip DVD" drive... another soon-to-be banned item from the workplace.

Re:IT's New Nightmare...

[ColaMan]

Except that copying 850GB is a non-trivial event for just about any connection currently in use.

For example:

850GB, 100Mbit network at 5MB/sec = 47 hours

Time for IT to notice network load pinned and one light on the switch constantly lit.... a day, tops.

Time for everyone else on the network to complain to IT about "slow outlook" = 5 nanoseconds.

Even a raid array delivering to an utra-ata133 backup device on the same system at 50MB/sec... that'd still take 5 hours.

Re:IT's New Nightmare...

[__aaclcg7560]

Except that copying 850GB is a non-trivial event for just about any connection currently in use.

By the time this technology hits the marketplace at affordable prices, 1Gbit (and maybe 10Gbit) network connections should be common. Assuming, of course, the user is downloading that much data. Most companies have data much smaller than that but still larger than a single DVD. I worked for one company where a portable DVD burner was considered a serious threat since all the mission critical data could fit on a single DVD.

Space abundance

[Council]

The inevitable situation is that we will have unlimited space -- that is, more than we can fill. So what happens when we can quite easily put every piece of digital media we've ever even thought about owning -- all the movies, all the games -- on a single disk, without ever having to delete anything?

I really don't know -- it's an interesting question, both similar and dependent on the question of what happens when we have bandwidth abundance. I don't know the answer. What do you think?

One thing that I think is likely is that we will stop trying to organize our data with a tree metaphor and move more toward a search-based system, like how iTunes organizes music. It seems a likely possibility.

Re:Space abundance

[Soybean47]

Inevitable? Are you sure? Seems to me, we find ways of filling however much space is available.

Bigger disks just mean higher-quality media files that fill them just as fast. More bandwidth? Higher-quality media can flood that pretty quickly too.

I dunno. I just don't see storage media growing faster than consumers' ability to fill it with stuff.

Re:Space abundance

[justdrew]

"search" is bullcrap, I browse when looking for things, rarely search. Often when looking for music I dont even know what I'm looking for 'till I find it. how do I search for that? *

Re:Space abundance

[hardaker]

The inevitable situation is that we will have unlimited space -- that is, more than we can fill.

Never underestimate the ability of microsoft to always require a slightly larger disk than you have.

(linux, my normal environment, isn't much better because I install all those extras because I can. I've never yet had a disk that I've not had to wonder at somepoint "where did all my space go")

Re:Space abundance

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorta like something I remember hearing about a little while ago. Gmail I believe I remember it being called. Don't delete, just search!
I was skeptical about that too, until I used it. I rarely delete anymore.

Re:Space abundance

[diggem]

One of the uses for all that storage is for memory enhancing systems. See wearable computing.

Basically, the computer records and stores your daily activities. Say earlier you met some nice young chica, or a friend with a great business oportunity. Whatever, it's been recorded for you and is indexed and searchable.

"What was her number?" Play it back later on, you have it. Etc..

At least, that's one use for mega-storage. You need speedy processing to go along with it to enable face and voice recognition. I always forget names, it'd be nice to have a cue when I see somebody the next time.

Re:Space abundance

[sprag]

I believe its similar to Do-what-I-mean (DWIM) called Find-what-I-want (FWIW).

Re:Space abundance

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

The inevitable situation is that we will have unlimited space -- that is, more than we can fill. So what happens when we can quite easily put every piece of digital media we've ever even thought about owning -- all the movies, all the games -- on a single disk, without ever having to delete anything?

850gb is more than anyone will ever need...

Re:Space abundance

[pjl5602]

Yeah, and I happen to know that you run Emacs and KDE and we all know what resource hogs they are :-)

Re:Space abundance

[Monoman]

Unlimited space might take a while. The more abundant space becomes the more we can turn up the quality of digitizing audio, video, etc.

* Regarding search-based system *

I was first exposed to a search/tag-based filing system by Opera's M2 mail client. It wasn't until Gmail and del.icio.us that I realized the advantages of search/tag-based filing systems. It finally hit me like a brick and I felt I had to tell all of my friends and get them on board.

Now however, the more I think about it the more I start to think this won't be the panacea it looks like at first. Think about having ALL of your files in ONE folder in a few years. When I say ALL, I mean emails, documents, music, video, data files, etc. What happens when you need to manually find something because for whatever reason searching won't do the job?

Imagine looking through tens of thousands of files with counter-intuitive names (file001.jpg, readme-542.txt, etc). Imagine how slow the "old" tools (dir, explorer, ls, etc) will work with those tens of thousands of files in one folder. Frustration will set in very very quickly.

I am still a proponent of the search/tag-based approach but I think it will need to be incorporated into the hierarchical system currently in use.

and what do I really know.

Re:Space abundance

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe that will never happen, neither from a product-marketing-economic-IT nor phycologycal point of view.

Manufactured products are by definition never limit-less or nobody would ever buy a similar product again. The life span of any product is part of the specification. An example is of course software which... is never finished nor complete.

Lastly, comes human desire, which (as Freud explained) always renews itself. All examples that come now to my mind seem quite obvious -- and explicit... :-)

My point is... don't worry, we'll always want more.

Re:Space abundance

[Monkelectric]

The inevitable situation is that we will have unlimited space -

One of the basic presmises of engineering is function will expand to meet capacity. On a disc like that -- why not store uncompressed HDTV content? Medical Records? I have about 600GB of hd space, I could do a complete backup on 1 disc :)

Point being -- you can always use more space.

Re:Space abundance

[Anonymous Coward]

"Never underestimate the ability of microsoft to always require a slightly larger disk than you have."

Wait until MS comes out with the 3D Clippy.

Re:Space abundance

[Anonymous Coward]

If we get enough space we can walk around with cameras on our heads and record our entire lives. It would be a boon for court rooms and probably a terrible embarrassment for your kids when you die.

Re:Space abundance

[Overzeetop]

That's the danger of embedded file identifiers: no way to manually search, aka "browse" your system.

Also, to get the right search, you need to create fields. But what if the default fields aren't quite what you want, or you change the fields to something else, then chnge them again later to your "new" needs. Now where do you search? Cna you remember the field, is is spread over two or three field designations? Do you have to update every field (manually or automatically) for every change in storage?

I'd like to have a good searchable filesystem, but I can't yet envision one which would make me give up my heirarchical system. And, yes, I still file my MP3s in folders - because I can find them faster (and I've tried iTunes...it didn't work wel with my collection)

Re:Space abundance

[ziggy_zero]

Well, that's not really memory enhancing, since studies show that people with PDA's have a harder time recalling dates, times, names, etc. because they don't have to anymore - they can just look it up. The more you rely on something else to supply you with information the worse your memory gets.

Re:Space abundance

[Matimus]

The organization of data using a tree metaphor is not a function of the amount of storage, its a function of the work required to do the search. What an abundance of space does do is alleviate the need to delete anything. Processors are getting faster every day, but I don't think that anybody is really looking to throw data organization schemes out the window just yet. Gmail works because all of the data is the same type (emails), and the advantage is that you never delete anything, reducing the amount of time you spend organizing data. For most types of data the user spends considerably less time organizing the data anyway, so the advantages of a search based system aren't there.

Re:Space abundance

[solios]

I think if disk got to that point, I'd still have multiples.

One to work off of and several for backups, Just In Case.

Since it currently takes something like 30-40 DVDs to do a Full Backup of my workstation (not always necessary, but I still have to do a Full Backup a couple of times a year just to clean shit out), I can honestly say I'm very much looking forward to the day when backup media is as large as or larger than system and data disks.

And no, "buy another hard drive!" isn't an answer. I can drop a box of DVDs and they still work.

Re:Space abundance

[Admiral Ackbar 8]

you met some nice young chica

Oh come on, this is slashdot...

Re:Space abundance

[Esion Modnar]

we will stop trying to organize our data with a tree metaphor

The tree metaphor is a remnant of the filing cabinet days. It needs to go.

Imagine that, for example, you have some objects, and you wish to organize them by shape and color. You could create top level folders: round, square, and triangular. Under each of these folders you might have orange, blue, and green.

It would be equally valid to organize by color then by shape. Either way, you end up creating a lot of folders at the lowest folder level. Much better that each object have attributes upon which you can search: show me all objects that are triangular and orange, or, all objects that are round and not blue. Important thing here is that these attribute dimensions are essentially independent of each other, and do not suggest a hierarchical structure, such as say dogs (top folder) and breeds of dogs (collie, spaniel, terrier, etc.)

I don't think that the tree metaphor is going away anytime soon. People like their metaphors. But there are better ways to organize large collections of stuff than by using a concept which predates computer technology.

Re:Space abundance

[Princeofcups]

> The inevitable situation is that we will have unlimited space -- that is, more than we can fill.
> So what happens when we can quite easily put every piece of digital media we've ever even thought about
> owning -- all the movies, all the games -- on a single disk, without ever having to delete anything?

I've already done that. I put over 100 floppies, all of my games and files, onto 2 zip cartridges. That's back when a cutting edge game fit on a single floppy.

The point is, movies, games, graphics will keep increasing in size/resolution in order to fill up your media, whatever size it is.

jfs

Re:Space abundance

[j-cloth]

We already have a system with unlimited space. How do you use the internet? Do you do cd www.slashdot.org;ls then look for the article you are after?

Or do you do one of:

a) use the browse system provided by the application?

b) use the search feature provided by the application?

c) search all of the data available on the entire system

A system like this would use different tools than current directory based systems in the same way that gmail uses different tools than Outlook.

Re:Space abundance

[evillorddan]

640K is more than anyone will ever need... Hmm.

Re:Space abundance

[mrchaotica]

Do you worry about finding your information manually when ls breaks? No? Then why would you worry about the search command breaking once it's as stable and ubiquitous as ls?

Re:Space abundance

[kesuki]

Dude, I have 850 GB in files right now on 200 burned DVD-r... I can and do burn 4-8 DVD's a month with just downloaded content.

And this is low resolution (640x480) video, I mean cmon, If I had 850GB per blank, I could have about 45 seconds of Ultra high definition content per disc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_High_Definition _Video

Now if you had said 850 TerraBytes was enough for anyone I might have agreed. 8 1/2 hours of UHDV is probably most acceptable for a removable media of the future...

Re:Space abundance

[harvardslacker]

Imagine trying to look through ALL of your files manually because for whatever reason browsing by folders won't do the job. Imagine how slow the 'old' tools (checking the bits one by one) will work with all of the excess data associated with these so-called 'folders' getting in the way!

I don't see any reason why having good metadata in the filesystem would be any more problematic than the current system.

Then again, that BeOS didn't get very far.

Re:Space abundance

[mach16411]

right, one day we will not compress video or audio any more, and we will actually "expand" video/audio files.

Re:Space abundance

[harvardslacker]

Note that even the 'browse system' mentioned above isn't really like browsing with ls. Articles are all referenced by an article id... I assume that they, or at least information on where to find them, are drawn from a database.

How would you browse that database if the search function broke?

The real problem here is a limited understanding of 'search'. In the same way that iTunes/Tiger/etc. can organize things into 'smart folders' based on stored searches, there's no reason that the end user even needs to know how data is stored or accessed on the media.

Of course, shipping an 850GB DVD with no folder-style organization and assuming that people have an OS that can read its metadata and provide that sort of virtual folder organization wouldn't work at the moment, but there's no reason to think that it won't become the norm by the time we start carrying around 1TB flash drives or whatever.

Re:Space abundance

[Anonymous Coward]

Whooooosh! Right over your head....

Re:Space abundance

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on man even Google stores it's search-based data in trees, or more technically compacted treaps.

Re:Space abundance

[ignorant_coward]

So what happens when we can quite easily put every piece of digital media we've ever even thought about owning -- all the movies, all the games -- on a single disk, without ever having to delete anything?

Civilization stops advancing, because we would become so obsessed with recording the present. Our children could spend the second half of their life watching the first half, and they will probably be looking for people to blame for their miserable existence (hey, I _was_ dropped on my head as an infant!).

Re:Space abundance

[ignorant_coward]

I actively delete email, even with the huge inbox quotas, because a full inbox is ripe for identity theft. If a cracker can pick up lots of details about you from archived e-mail, it's likely they can social-engineer their way to the rest of your assets.

I don't even put things like account numbers on my PC, because all it takes is a new type of worm to e-mail a spreadsheet or Quicken file to some offshore server.

IMO, people are extremely complacent about information security, and it will burn society even further than all the recently publicised data compromises.

Re:Space abundance

[Anonymous Coward]

640Kb should be enough.
-Bill Gates

850Gb should be enough.
-Saeed al-Sahaf

Re:Space abundance

[anakin876]

ha ha ha ha! Slashdot's "search" feature is totally useless! Sometimes it can find recent articles, but in the pastit has proven to be fairly useless for anything more thana month old.

Re:Space abundance

[kristopher]

850TB with the physical size of a zip/floppy would be enough for anyone! If not, I will beat them mercilessly with my cane when that distant time comes.

Re:Space abundance

[pla]

How do you use the internet? Do you do cd www.slashdot.org;ls then look for the article you are after?

Two points...

First, I would point out that the web, as it exists, stores quite a lot of material that I've never seen, and didn't choose where to file it. So yes, to find something I've never seen before, I would go to Google first. However...

For something I have seen, however, yes, I would get to it pretty much the same way I traverse a directory hierarchy... So to get to a particular FP on Slashdot, I might traverse the tree:
Bookmarks
News
Tech
Slashdot (At this point, the navigation moves from local to remote)
YRO
Change the URL bar to the date I want, such as "http://yro.slashdot.org/index.pl?issue=20050418"
"PayPal deals blow to Freenet"

Of course, this has the distinct disadvantage that not all websites have as logical of a layout as Slashdot, but the same idea holds. And, for totally factual info such as guides, references, or the like, I don't even read it live on-line - I make a local copy and file it away neatly in my own directory hierarchy, so I can always find it quickly and reliably, even if I lose my net connection or the site itself ceases to exist.

Re:Space abundance

[Council]

Data mining and all that stuff are fascinating topic but that's nothing to do with the interaction that they, as humans, have with the computer when trying to find the stuff. I'm not talking about how the system is implemented under the visible layer.

Re:Space abundance

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why I like what iTunes does. It creates a mix of the two. It lets you do search based file storage, but it also keeps your files in a constantly updated tree structure. When my grandmother wants to listen to the track I recorded of me playing the piano, I can just go to my music folder, look for the artist "Me", look to see which album its in, and there it is. As long as you remember a few things about it, you can get to it, which is pretty much as good as you can get with a tree setup. I think it would be foolish of a developer to just have the OS store everything in one folder. But maybe that's just me...

Re:Space abundance

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, I knew it was the 640k thing ;) just didn't think it was funny or clever ;)

Re:Space abundance

[j-cloth]

Of course, this has the distinct disadvantage that not all websites have as logical of a layout as Slashdot, but the same idea holds

This is basically the point that I didn't make very clearly initially. Each application (website) has its own data and each application can have its own way of finding its data. Some will be better than others and you have to hope that those ones are the ones that survive.

On your home PC next year? not likely. In a large scale content management system? Why not?

Re:Space abundance

[jrexilius]

I think what you are describing is actually a problem in input design. If you look at some of the ideas the future gnome filesystem desktop is toying with (among others) it shows some a few examples.

As you create or manipulate files, having a system be able to tag them with more context and provide multiple heirarchal views (as well as more search parameters) will provide a more managable system.

Re:Space abundance

[Wesley Felter]

You can "browse" by any attribute, not just filenames. Consider Lifestreams where the "primary" attribute was date/time instead of filename, and all the data appeared as an ordered stream.

Re:Space abundance

[Twinbee]

And if the processor is capable of searching though those 10s of thousands of files very quickly? A simple flat database would do the trick. Processors are getting faster too.

• with counter-intuitive names (file001.jpg, readme-542.txt, etc)

The problem would still exist with folders. Also you would give the files more/better metadata then file001.jpg, especially if they were important files.

Re:Space abundance

[evilviper]

So what happens when we can quite easily put every piece of digital media we've ever even thought about owning -- all the movies, all the games -- on a single disk, without ever having to delete anything?

Long before that happens, 3D video will come around, requiring ungodly ammounts of space, and bringing back the current status-quo...

Music will come with 255 different audio tracks, with thousands of pre-defined mixer-settings to chose from, with the video on there, artwork that changes from minute to minute... Commentary on the song ;-) etc.

Re:Space abundance

[Overzeetop]

What date identifier does it get? Photo taken, mp3 ripped? Moved on system? Touched? What about bad identifiers? Heck I think I've got a mess of MP3s that are only identified by their rip date and filename, cause the cddb didn't get the info correct.

Oh shit, another breakthrough

[base_chakra]

Are you lot as frustrated as I am with the heaps of proprietary DVD technology? The deluge of overlapping advances seems to be non-stop. At this point, it's clear that the heterogeneity of DVD hardware and media goes well beyond the DVD-R vs. DVD+R battle, and I find myself perpetually postponing my DVD+RW drive purchase for this very reason: There doesn't ever seem to be a confluence of the best technologies in the DVD hardware market.

Looming product obsolescence is a fact of life for consumers of computer technology, but I'm starting to wonder if I'll ever find that perfect high-speed, high-capacity, dual-layer, SATA- or FW800-based burner.

Re:Oh shit, another breakthrough

[Anonymous Coward]

Just buy a DVD burner for $50 Cdn and get on with your live. Dual layers are under $70 Cdn. 8x media is around 0.50 each.

Re:Oh shit, another breakthrough

[mink]

LG makes a drive that does everything. I've had one since they released the first one. The first drive died in 3 months so it was replaced by newegg, replacement was the new released model and has performed well for the last year.

Imagine a DVD...

[voss]

That could hold 280,000 MP3s or
150 full length movies at 480 progressive.

I could store my entire media collection on
one disc and still not be able to find anything ;-)

Thats pretty cool.

Re:Imagine a DVD...

[intangible]

Since you've done the math already, about how many .mids will it hold?

FOR THE WIN

[sintacks]

Atleast we know it will be outta kinda soon. My entire FLAC collection would fit perfectly. Internal Harddrive storage seems to get less and less appealling every year. Harddrives only seem to burn out because of heat and such. DVD storage FOR THE WIN!

Too little too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Hasn't someone (sorry can't remember who) already come up with a 1TB storage solution on some kind of optical disk that is near market ready ?

And what's going to be the point of things like Bluray and HDDVD if much better faster capacity drives and media are just round the corner ?

Smoking detector

[QMO]

That many buzzwords in the article significantly lowers my confidence in the value of the technology.

Nostalgia alert

[TomorrowPlusX]

God, I just sort of assumed Iomega was dead at this point.

If this is for real ( and not as a previous poster suggested patent-guarded future-ware ) Iomega might actually be relevant again. How odd that would be.

Re:Nostalgia alert

[Drakonblayde]

Yeah, I wonder if they'll try and charge me for OS/2 drivers again ;)

NOW we're talking!

[Anonymous Coward]

I want at least 6hrs of the highest-res HD *UNCOMPRESSED* video on one disk. 850GB is almost enough, so we're getting there. 1 TB or bust!

Re:NOW we're talking!

[Anonymous Coward]

Only 1TB? Try this

Re:I see Iomega has finally caught on...

[Anita Coney]

"Redundant"?! I'm shocked and outraged. I'm obviously TROLLING guys!!! If you're going to mod me down, the least you could do is to GET IT RIGHT!

Let us just pray

[Solr_Flare]

That these new drives do not also include Iomega's patented Click of Death technology.

What's the use you ask?

[Gardenhead]

Industries and individuals have uses for these disks. The photo studio that I work at is starting to digitize a lot of their medium format film. Each frame takes about 120mb. Imagine thousands of photos from a variety of jobs. We could definitely use these discs. And I hope they come in cartridges, even if it is from Iomega.

Re:What's the use you ask?

[HeelToe]

Medium format takes only 120MB? I've been scanning 35mm wedding photos at 4000dpi/48bit color and that comes to about 120MB each.

Re:What's the use you ask?

[Gardenhead]

Whoops! My mistake. I was scanning in 35mm yesterday, and I got confused. Medium format at 3200 dpi take up about 250mb of non-interpolated data using a Imacon Flexscan. 4x5 film is outrageously large and takes forever to scan.

Re:__

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

When they first added it that was for logged in accounts to, Not sure what they're doing with it because CmdrTaco believes in security through obscurity (Why isn't the lameness filter in cvs slashcode?). It's just as easy for a bot to login, or for that matter automaticly sign up a new account for every N posts.
As for the captcha's themself, pwncha (c)GNAA will take care of slashdots captchas a bit more reliably than that. Hey taco, next time you're silently responding to gnaa floods, 1) Be a man and admit changes, 2) Don't use tech thats been broken.

click

[Cheeze]

click of death.

850GB is a lot of data to entrust to a company with a poor storage history.

Re:A eunuch still sees a use!

[Anonymous Coward]

Can mods please go back into this guys post history, he tries to hijack EVERY thread to have something to do with transhumans.

And while I appreciate he has no balls (literally, check his posts and his name) and that he likes to focus on other things because of this, there is a time and a place for transhumans, and it isn't every post. It's the loony bin. Seriously transhumanists are by and large loonatics who fail to realise that these issues are being dealt with in fiction, bioethics, philosophy, biology, AI research, psychology and related mind disciplines. None of these "transhumanists" even engages with those discourses, they are full of shit.

And personally while I feel sorry for the guy I think he should be modded appropriately, straight to -1. Every time.

Coming soon

[saddino]

NBC: The Complete 1994 Prime Time Season.

what?

[cg0def]

I can't believe this. Slashdot readers always have to whine about something. You know guys noone makes you use anything. If you want to you can even write things down on paper. That way a *scratch* won't wipe anythign else and meanwhile the world will keep moving forward. Oh yeah and as far as the click-of-death is concerned, you are an idiot dude. The new patents concern DVDs and NOT zip disks and hence your post is absolutely irrelevant.

I think this technology is great becasue it finds new uses for technology that is currently available. The DVDs that are in use today can be adaped to this new technology very easily and very very cost efficiently unlike blue ray and HD DVDs. The only concern is that Iomega does not have very much industry sayso and they are probably shooting too far ahead in the future. Today there are very few uses for huge single use disks like the ones proposed but I am sure this will change. Only it most likely wouldn't be Iomega that brings nano technology to the DVD world. And I really really hate companies that live off of patents. Thompson anyone? (well Thompson did a lot of r&d but patenting mpeg is really gay if you ask me)

Re:what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdotters are catered to by the editors, so that the (sometimes truncated) blurb that you see on the front page will always have just enough information for anyone to rush in and shout out the lowest common denominator of opinion.

If you get a story in you're quite likely to see this happen.

There is answer why desktop search IS important

[Pecisk]

Many people have asked: "what is all fuzz about this desktop search?". Well, here you have answer. Storage will grow larger and faster. And it is a GOOD thing. In such large space, ordering records/files/movies/music/whatever will become too much for person. And there Spotlight, Google Desktop Search, Beagle, Microsoft "next best thing" comes in action. I have seen Spotlight in action and if fact, I'm impressed.

It is interesting how fast other botlenecks in computer systems will catch with storage - memory, cpu (oh, yeah, there comes Cell), io.

Of coarse, actual question is - do people need all this stuff? Maybe not all, but mostly it is good to have "unlimited" storage option.

Re:A eunuch still sees a use!

[Jozer99]

Please say this is a firmware upgrade to my $50 DVD+-RV drive.

DVD's as backup

[phorm]

(some of these apply to tape as well)

a) Burn times are a big factor here, sure 850GB is great... but not if it takes almost a day for a backup run. Current DVD burning is fairly fast though... so hopefully we get good speeds (5-30 times faster than today's DVDs sounds promising)

b) If (a) works out well, and discs don't cost a crapload... you can burn multiple DVD's just in case of disc-rot. Store both in good conditions. Media is still subject to reliability, but many a company has relied on tapes as well only to find them demagnetized, etc at restore time (TEST those tapes, people).

c) Storage space could be saved big-time with this, and a multi-disk burner could be fairly easy to setup too

d) Tapes may not rot as easily, but DVD's don't get mad if you post 'em up using hard-drive magnets :-)

Note that this is just a PATENT...

[cosinezero]

This isn't necessarily saying they can do it, or even if it's ever going to be cost-effective enough to manufacture.

There's a lot of "blu-ray is pointless with this right around the corner" statements that really need to be re-thought.

What's that sound?

[FirstTimeCaller]

Let's hope this new drive never emits a "click, click, click" sound.

Actually, I'm shocked to see some innovation from IoMega -- I had written them off as dead. I hope it works out well for them.

that's nothing!!

[Anonymous Coward]

My attorney is getting ready to file my patent for.. wait for it.. my 851GB DVD!! That's right folks, 850GB is yesterday's fish.

But wait

[Anonymous Coward]

I can patent an 851GB disc, sell it for cheaper, and reap the benefits.

Space -vs- Time: Space pulls way ahead

[ch-chuck]

In the beginning of the PC, time was ahead of space. CPU's ran 1,2 or 4.77Mhz whereas space was only 180K, maybe 360 or 720K. However, space quickly pulled ahead with 5, 10 and 20Mb disks, leaving cpu's in the 4,8,12 and 16Mhz range. The trend continued, and when cpu's finally caught up to 25, 50Mhz, disks were way ahead at 120, 200Mb. In the late 90's, it continued, with time struggling with 100, 333, 500 and tackling the 1Ghz milestone, space had widened it's lead, blasting thru the 2Gb barrier and easily conquoring 4, 8, 20, then 40 and 60Gb. So here we have an extension of the trend, with time lagging along at 3, maybe 4Ghz, space has left time hopelessly behind in the dust, approaching 1000Gb per disk. Sorry time, space is clear and away the winner in this race.

wait wait wait

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait shouldnt we be complaining it's patented?

Dumb Questions

[cagle_.25]

FTA: Iomega is working to investigate the commercial feasibility of this format and other nano-structural data encoding formats. One possibility being investigated, termed NG-DVD (Nano-Grating - DVD), uses nano-gratings to encode multi-level information via reflectivity, polarization, phase, and reflective orientation multiplexing.

1) What is the difference between polarization and reflective orientation?

2) How are they measuring reflectivity? From the amplitude of a reflected beam?

This is some impressive technology.

First "Patents are Bad" Post!

[Anonymous Coward]

That took longer than I thought!

This isn't a "bunch of random obvious stuff". It is a brand new, very complicated method of encoding data on existing media.

Rare response to AC

[Eunuch]

Transhumanists are simply ahead of their time. I know I am.

By the way, you forgot to say "take your medication". Other than that, it's all been said. Many times.

Re:Rare response to AC

[/ASCII]

Do you tape an mp3-player to your head and pretend you're a Borg?

This is great!

[Anonymous Coward]

This way, when a bank loses one DVD, 850 gigs worth of customer data can be stolen! How many social security numbers make up 850 gigs?

Re:This is great!

[sagenumen]

~94.44 million SSNs assuming no hyphens and the usual marketing by disc manufacturers that 1 GB = 1 billion bytes.

from the dept.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice dept name there.

Smaller discs!

[ardor]

The 6,5" CDs are annoying. I like the smaller ones, but with only ~250 MB capacity the usefulness of these is limited. However, a small version of these DVDs would be fine. Easier transporation, less danger of being broken...

Besides, it just looks cooler. Would remind me of the Johny Mnemonic 320GB discs (the movie was crap, but the disc and the drive were cool).

Inevitable...

[Anonymous Coward]

The inevitable thing is that whenever we have more data storage, we'll fill it with more data.

Woah...

[MagicDude]

Iomega Patents 850GB DVD Nano-Technology

Holy Buzzword Bingo Batman

Re:A eunuch still sees a use!

[Anonymous Coward]

You should just mark him as a "Foe" and set Foes to -6 reading in your preferences. Then you won't be bothered. Moderate at 0, you won't even see him then. Maybe some folks just can't wait for the next transhuman post. Maybe it's an "ilovebees" meme scurrying through the mists of Slashdot and you're missing it. Move on, man. I'd rather read this than folks that spend their days finding innovative ways for me to see prolapsed anuses.

but it's the laser that matters

[mapmaker]

AO - DVD is a novel technique of encoding data on the surface of a DVD by using reflective nano-structures to encode data

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the limiting technology in optical storage was the laser, not the media.
Isn't the hard part making a laser beam narrow enough to read the smaller reflectors? And making the reflectors smaller is the easy part?

Re:I see Iomega has finally caught on...

[justforaday]

I'm obviously TROLLING guys!!!

Well, glad you cleared that up. I guess that's why your posts are now being marked Informative and Insightful... :-/

Sounds good, will Iomega be able to sell it?

[Secrity]

Of all of the proprietary formats that Iomega has, I don't think that any of them was really a success. I wonder if this one will be any different.

Never erase anything again

[G4from128k]

850 GB is a 1 MB/sec, 8 hours per day, for an entire month.

With disks such as this, we may never have to erase anything again. Every web-page that I have ever visited could be cached. Every "save" of every document could be retained for version control. Every change of a config file could be retained for roll-back.

The only thing we need is a OS/file system that automatically retains everything, organizes it, and keeps pointers to the DVD backup (replaced monthly).

Re:Never erase anything again

[narcc]

With disks such as this, we may never have to erase anything again.

I thought that about my first 40mb hd...*sniff* it was so cutting edge that the manual that came with it was for a 20mb model ... had an insert that included the changes for the 40mb...

Since it's Iomega....

[Slashcrap]

...allow me to translate the press release into reality :

New technology, called Articulated Optical - DVD will allow 40-100 times more data (upto 850 Gb) to be lost from a DVD at a speed 5-30 times faster than today's DVDs, and at a truly ridiculous cost. AO - DVD is a novel technique of destroying data on the surface of a DVD by using reflective nano-structures to completely fuck up your data beyond any means of recovery in a highly multi-level format.

Click, click, click, grrinnd, crrruunnncchh. FUCK!

Re:Since it's Iomega....

[dan dan the dna man]

I do believe that is the first comment I've read on Slashdot in years that actually made me laugh out loud. Since I have no mod points all I can say is Slashcrap++ and thanks ;)

Re:Since it's Iomega....

[b1t r0t]

Actually, "Since it's Iomega...", that means that by the time they release this, we'll have already 1 terabyte UV-Ray[tm] discs by then. Iomega has a great track record of being beind the curve.

Re:Since it's Iomega....

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll back this up by saying that even IoMega's Zip drive format was inferior in every way to the LS120 "SuperDisk" format (120MB *and* the drive could read standard floppies), which was available at around the same time. The only drawback was that BIOSes of the time couldn't boot from such disks, but then again neither were the external zip drives. Even with it's quirks, IMO it comes ahead of zip drives in terms of reliability

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LS120

According to Wikipedia, IoMega developed and then *abandoned* the technology only to have it refined by 3M. Go figure.

Re:Since it's Iomega....

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey! Just because my single 250MB Iomega "big Floppy" disk costs the same as a 50 pack of CD-R disks, doesn't make it bad. I mean sure I'm paying 120 times as much to store 1 megabyte on Iomega as I am storing data on CD-R, it doesn't make it bad, just really really really overpriced and expensive. I mean what's a 12000% markup between friends?

Insert ignorant rant about the patent system here

[stlhawkeye]

This is bullshit. Some company that invested into this research is now going to profit off of it.

Buffing compound

[ka9dgx]

A good friend of mine does service for Auto Dealers. They had a similar situation with critical data on a CD. He took the CD, went out to the body shop, put some buffing compound on it, buffed it up, rinsed, and it was as good as new.

Letting a company go out of business because they don't understand the basics of the technology speaks volumes about the loss of American Inginuity.

--Mike--

Re:Buffing compound

[EvilBudMan]

--He took the CD, went out to the body shop, put some buffing compound on it, buffed it up, rinsed, and it was as good as new.--

Actually I have waxed scratches out of a CD and could then read it. Rinsing would be bad though.

Re:Buffing compound

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it means the parent is a seller of backup solutions. Salesmen lie!

Re:Buffing compound

[drkich]

Letting a company go out of business because they don't understand the basics of the technology speaks volumes about the loss of American Inginuity.

Where in the original post did it say anything about America? It could have been Mexico, Canada, etc...

Re:Buffing compound

[LiquidCoooled]

Your (perfectly reasonable) solution is to fill in the scratches, and of course rinsing would clear the wax right back out.

The grandparent decided to polish the scratches right out of it, so rinsing it afterwords would be beneficial (this is also a more long term solution for slight scratches).

Re:Buffing compound

[Albio]

I thought the writable surface on CDs was on the "outside". (And thus, buffing it would be a bad idea.) I heard this while someone was explaining to me that the writable surface on DVDs was sandwiched between two plastic discs. ...am I mistaken?

Re:Buffing compound

[nozzo]

A typical CD-R has a recordable layer sandwiched between a polycarbonate disk and an acrylic disk on which is the label. If you take an old CD-R and scrape the label off you will see that what you are left with is the poly disk which in context is quite thick. I use buffing compound to restore disks for clients with amazing success although I would recommend scratching and repairing an old CD first. The same method for regular music CDs which is great if you have piles of them our of their cases (like me)

Re:Buffing compound

[PW2]

You're right but the other guy desperately needed mod points today and knows the easy way to get them.

Re:Buffing compound

[Anonymous Coward]

What about American education?

It's spelled ingenuity.

Yeah yeah, spelling errors are easy to pick on, bla bla, but you've got to pay attention to the details - all of them!

Re:Buffing compound

[Mskpath3]

Great CD restoration home remedy : Take a Kleenex and put a dab of toothpaste on it. Rub vigorously on major scratch on a CD. Wash off and test. Repeat until done. You'd be shocked how bad of a scratch can be fixed just by levelling out the plastic with this method.

Re:Buffing compound

[lateralus_1024]

Did he do the Delux, Special or Premium? I just can't justify paying an extra dollar for the special pink soap.

Re:Buffing compound

[Anonymous Coward]

> The grandparent decided to polish the scratches right out of it, so rinsing it afterwords would be beneficial (this is also a more long term solution for slight scratches).

The long-term solution for a CD/DVD with any scratches is to copy it to a scratchless disc.

And, of course, always have at least two copies of everything.

Re:Buffing compound

[evilviper]

I thought the writable surface on CDs was on the "outside". (And thus, buffing it would be a bad idea.)

The writable surface is the underside of the label. You can buff the clear-plastic side until the CD is as thin as a sheet of tinfoil, and it won't hurt the actual data.

Man this thing

[neypo]

Is bigger than my harddrive!

Yea well...Patent LAST!

[Anonymous Coward]

So let me guess. You want them to come out with the product? Let people reverse-engineer it? Then patent it? Are you certain you don't work for a competitor?

Re:A eunuch still sees a use!

[MSZ]

You need a new keyboard, your "0" key has loose contacts.

It's a $5000 upgrade to your almost-free DVD drive.

Streaming Driver Support

[bigredradio]

Hopefully they come up with drivers that allow the user to stream the data to the DVD like a tape drive (with filemarks).Otherwise you will need to have 850GB of free space on your system to create the giant ISO image before you can burn it. That is a current problem with using DVD as backup media on Linux. (Dunno is this is a problem on WIN/OSX)

Patenting the obvious

[91degrees]

I mean, if you have relfective nano structures, then surely it's obvbious that you're going to use them for a multi-level optical disc.

Shame nobody ever patented the concept of a "plurality". They could get royalties for every patent ever.

Unholey Density

[Doc Ruby]

They need to get rid of the hole in the middle. That gap, at these new densities, could hold an entire movie's data. When they shrink the discs to fit media libraries into tiny mobile devices, that huge hole would consume most of the capacity.

Sweet, more porn angles.

[demonic-halo]

Maybe I can get a matrix effect view of every thrust, blowjob, and anal.

Close

[Eunuch]

Bluetooth headset. Throw science texts into a nice text-to-speech, and learn while you walk! Good stuff.

what! an optical drive?

[ShineyMcShine]

now I can get rid of my realistic tape player...gonna miss the blistering I/O. maybe i can find a home for it on ebay.

Space Aliens are Behind the Technological Curve!

[TheNarrator]

Remember when a 90 gigabyte drive was considered so advanced that it could only have been created by extra-terrestrials?

http://www.dbpd.com/vault/9807ddw.htm

Well, Jack Shulman of the American Computer Company claims that the first transistor (made 50 years ago at Bell Labs), which led to the development of computers as we know them today, may have been reverse-engineered from alien technology. He also claims to possess the means to build a "transcapacitor." According to UFO Magazine (which ought to know), the transcapacitor stores "vast amounts of data while consuming very little energy." His company plans to "manufacture a 90GB hard drive from the transcapacitor by late 1999 or 2000." Their speculation is that "clusters of transcapacitors may have served as a neural network in the alien computer from Roswell.

I call bullshit

[autopr0n]

I once sold a backup solution to a company who decided to go with DVD's rather than tape for the cost of the media alone. Three months later someone moving the dvd platter dropped it on the way to the vault...a Company that had been in business 20 years was out of business because of one mistake and cheap media.

If it was on the way to the vault, why didn't they just do anther backup? Why didn't they just restore from an older backup?

Also, DVD's do have protection against scratches, the layer of accrylic covering the data layer. If that part gets scratched, it dosn't really matter, because the laser dosn't focus on that part. Scraches and imperfections 'dissapear' from the POV of the DVD player.

They also put a lot of redundant data on the disk, so that if some of the bits are lost, the disk is still readable.

Re:I call bullshit

[PenguinBoyDave]

Call bullshit if you'd like. I use DVD's at home for my own stuff...I can't afford tape. But I have been in the business for some time, and I am not kidding you...it really happened to a client of my companies. They didn't think there was much damange initially. It took several months to realize what they had lost...Account Payable, Accounts receivable, HR stuff, proposals, etc. Go ahead and call it bullshit. I'm not trolling...like I said, because I can't afford tape I use DVD's at home...but it isn't critical data. BIG difference.

Re:I call bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry bud, it's bullshit. No company goes out of business because 1 backup went bad.

Re:I call bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, again: not the media's fault. Dropping tapes is very bad too. And they have additional vulnerabilities such as magnets. I'd rather only have to worry about protecting my backups from things coming into contact with them, than have to worry about protecting them from invisible magnetic fields that could be several feet away.

Longevity is actually a bigger issue than durability. I wouldn't want to rely on any current media that was over five years old. A five-year-old DVD should be fine, but at 10 they get sketchy. Tape lasts longer, but I still wouldn't trust it. Better and cheaper to keep DVD's in multiple places and replace/check them often.

Lastly, you are not even talking about backups in your story. You are talking about archives. A backup is a redundant copy of information. If they simply took a snapshot of their data, archived it, moved on for a while and eventually lost their current data, then discovered the archive was no good, they were screwed because they had no backup.

Re:I call bullshit

[Kent Recal]

Whether the story is bullshit or not. IF it happened like that then the company deserved what they got and it had nothing to do with what media they used (be it dvd, tape or papyrus scrolls) but rather their backup strategy was faulty.

A single media can fail at any time so if you don't have multiple full backups available at any given time then either your data is not worth backing up or your IT team has no clue.

...similarly low price

[4/3PI*R^3]

LOL, we're talking about IOMEGA here. The company that still thinks it can charge $10-$15 dollars for a 100MB magnetic disk that only works with their proprietary drive.

I quit using my zip drive years ago. Everybody has a CD-ROM drive any more; almost nobody has a Zip drive. CD-R media costs a whopping $0.10 for 650MB of data. I can burn 100 CD-R's before I incur the same cost as one Zip disk.

IOMEGA's biggest problem is that once they set a price for their products the rest of the market be damned they will not lower their price to compete. All this patent is going to do is ensure that IOMEGA will be able to charge 50 quakazillion dollars for their DVD media when you can do the exact same thing for under $100 using current DVD technology.

Undo and redo!

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

I predict that just when we think we have an abundance of storage space 'undo' and 'redo' will become integral parts of our operating systems. Every operation that we perform will be persistently undoable.

Nothing will be deleted any more. Sure, we'll click on 'Delete' but that will be an undoable operation. And tools like Apple's Spotlight will be able to search not just for all the files containing a given word, but for all files that you have ever touched in the history of your computer containing that word.

Of course there will eventually come a time when we have an abundance of space even with infinite undo and redo.

(Note also that the lastest version of MacOSX has already started along the path of making undo and redo part of the OS with Core Data.)

Re:Undo and redo!

[mrchaotica]

Or as a slightly better analogy*, we'll be using CVS for our entire body of data.

*better since CVS does more than undo and redo.

Re:Undo and redo!

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Unlike CVS because I expect "checkins" to be made at every stage, not just when you ask for them.

But like CVS because we'll be able to do things like fork and merge branches. (Actually, I think undo and redo in all applications should implement something like this. Sometimes you need to redo what you did yesterday but in a new context.)

Re:Undo and redo!

[mrchaotica]

Don't forget tags and comments too.

Re:Undo and redo!

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Do we have enough ideas to file a patent yet?

Re:Undo and redo!

[mrchaotica]

I really, really hope not. With even just CVS as prior art, this shouldn't qualify as novel and innovative. Let alone looking back to VMS, which had a versioning filesystem...

Re:Undo and redo!

[ignorant_coward]

"*better since CVS does more than undo and redo."

CVS isn't better. In fact, CVS is worse. It places odd and unhelpful restrictions on the file history, such as the classic problem of restructuring directories under CVS.

In the FOSS world, I'm convinced that CVS is used because no one could muster replacing it until recently. Now, CVS simply has inertia carrying it on for many projects. It is gradually being phased out for better options as they mature.

CVS to version control is like using a small flat screwdriver to drive a phillips screw if left no other choice. The flat screwdriver can get the job done, but it might end up bent, the screw stripped, and the user injured due to it slipping when torqued.

Re:Undo and redo!

[mrchaotica]

Ah. Well, in that case replace every instance of "CVS" with "version control." I'm not really aware of its shortcomings because I'm just now learning how to use it (in fact, I'm in the middle of working on the "CVS and Ant" lab for my CS class right now...).

Uh-huh

[mshiltonj]

New technology, called Articulated Optical - DVD will allow 40-100 times more data (upto 850 Gb) to be stored on a DVD with data transfer rates 5-30 times faster than today's DVDs, and at similarly low costs.

And it comes with beachfront property in Arizona. You get a Statue of Liberty and and Eiffel Tower as a free gift with every purchase.

I'll believe it when I see it.

The Unstoppable March of Progress

[Anonymous Coward]

Now the Click of Death can destroy 40-100 times more data at once!

Click of death

[fakedupe]

As long as they work better than iomega's jazz or zip. (I know, I know, not the same technology)

I've been burned one too many times by their products.

I'm half expecting one out of 10 of these disks to spontaneously combust upon insertion.

Stop taunting the VMS geeks.

[bill_mcgonigle]

See subject;1

Distributed error correction

[Anonymous Coward]

You use error correction, distributed error correction so the error correcting bits aren't wiped out by the scratch also. Sort of like RAID with the other parts of the data at a different physical location on the disk.

So, do they have it?

[russotto]

Does Iomega actually have this technology? Or is it just something they are hoping some other company will (independently) develop so they can reap the royalties?

THE BIG PROBLEM...

[Laurance]

The big problem is that burned disks only last 1 to 2 years at most after Finalized. So the best solution for mass data back-up is still to use a 1394 HD or a Raid of some kind. Besides this crazy format will just end up the Zip disk of DVDs.

Re:THE BIG PROBLEM...

[Anonymous Coward]

1-2 years? Are you serious? Then what's a good way to store my music in a more "decade-safe" manner? Not mp3s I downloaded, but music I make. I'd sort of like to keep all that hard work.

Slashdot's Law

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot's Law: The time between a comments topic being started and someone using Star Trek as an example.

Re:Slashdot's Law

[cosinezero]

Er, that's a measurement.

A law would be "... is inversely proportional to the relative relevance of the thread."

MOD THE PARENT UP!!!

[triffidsting]

I was thinking the exact same thing. I will never buy an IOMEGA product ever again. They not only produced shoddy crap, but they treated their customers with contept as well.

They now sell things under other brands as well, surrepticiously dropping the Iomega name and using cyberhome or some such instead.

The only proper response:

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha ha. Iomega.

Real video

[owlstead]

850 GB? It's nowhere near enough! Just like the audio freaks wanting 24 bit 9600 herz audio, video freaks will like to have full, uncompressed video at decent framerates and resolutions. Lets say 1600 x 900, 24 bit color, 50 frames per second, 3 hour video. Here we go:

> echo "1600 * 900 * 3 * 50 * 3 * 60 * 60" | bc
2332800000000

That's 2.3 terrabyte for the minimal specifications, never mind 32 bit color encoding or really high resolutions at 100 Herz. Mind you, (9.1 channel, uncompressed) audio is missing as well. Then think 16 camera's, 50 languages, 150 subtitles...

So for the guys that think that unlimited data recording is just around the corner, think twice :)

Will it include their patented "Click of Death" t?

[melted]

Will it include their patented "Click of Death" technology?

Charge for Blank Media

[Punko]

Hmmm with 850 GB if data per disc, at 4 mb per song, I guesstimate that the music & video boys are gonna want some serious cash. If approximately 212,500 songs fit on a single disc, and they want a blank disc tax of $0.01 per song, or $2,125 per disc.

Kinda silly when the media will worth only pennies per disc.

I don't trust Iomega

[deejer]

To many problems with the backup drives they had. I remember many instances that these would only last 2-3 months, then go out.

To many problems with the Jazz drives and writing half the files with 0 bytes. The other half would copy fine.

Zip drives were ok.

Yeah, right.

[Anonymous Coward]

New technology, called Articulated Optical - DVD will allow 40-100 times more data to be stored on a DVD with data transfer rates 5-30 times faster than today's DVDs, and at similarly low costs.

Maybe for production, but I think we all know what kind of mark-up the industry is going to put on something like this.

Write twice, read once - can you say "redundancy"

[JCOTTON]

The cure for the "scratch syndrome" would be simple reduncancy. Write all data twice, in different sections of the disk. Yeah, so a 800GB disk now becomes a 400 GB disk. So what? Now you really have to scratch it up to make it unreadable. You still have 400 good gigabytes of space, which is a lot more than today's 4 to 8 GBs per disk. Or, all you Computer Science types can work up a good bit check algorythm that can put those scrached out bits back.

To confirm you're not a script, please type the text shown in this image: MICroSOFt SUCks.

What? No

[Anonymous Coward]

Libraries of Congress jokes?

From the article

[Anonymous Coward]

"Iomega is working to investigate the commercial feasibility of this format and other nano-structural data encoding formats. One possibility being investigated, termed NG-DVD (Nano-Grating - DVD), uses nano-gratings to encode multi-level information via reflectivity, polarization, phase, and reflective orientation multiplexing."

Hmm.. Have I seen this guy posting on slashdot recently?

Simply NOT true...

[korbin_dallas]

"and at similarly low costs."

Iomega NEVER sold any media at anything near similar low cost. In fact their media was always a premium cost. I think they were just mad they never got in the champagne, er ink business. :^)

Re:Simply NOT true...

[Anonymous Coward]

Obiviously they must have meant the production costs. Perhaps someone just accidentally slipped in a slide from the presentation they made for the managers.

So Much For Obviousness

[John Hasler]

Ok. All you guys downloading MP3's to your Ipods have to stop. You're infringing Iomega's patents:

"The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has confirmed that Iomega invented the broad concept of exchanging data between a computer and another digital device using removable data storage."

Re:So Much For Obviousness

[John Hasler]

s/downloading MP3's to your Ipods/burning CDs for your car CD players/

Yeah too bad UMD is closed

[denjin]

The UMD used in Sony's PSP hold 1.8GB and are really tiny. Just too bad since you can't get a UMD burner or anything.

Re:Insert ignorant rant about the patent system he

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a bit different story from these morons who file in patents for the goddamn crazy-ass freaking buttons on computer screen, which they didn't even invent themselves in the first place. Or some other crazy shit like that.

The difference between 'consumer' grade &

[crovira]

industrial (or beter yet military grade,) is that all of the handling issues are taken care of 'up front' and you out very little data at risk.

The difference between a commercial grade slot loading whatever and an industrial grade slot loading whatever is not what happens when the whatever is loaded in thye drive but before and after.

A consumer grade system stops at the drive, an industrial one goes all the way to the remote backup facility.

The difference is the difference between backups 'for real' and 'assuaging your conscience' that your data might be recoverable (but you hope like Hell you dont ever actually NEED to find out.)

Backups are treated like toilet paper. Hope you don't ever have an 'emergency'. (But one day you WILL. I can garantee that.)

Re:So Much For Obviousness - piano rolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

There have been lots of examples of data exchange
between digital devices and computers. Piano rolls are an early noncomputer example, but folks with Amiga 1000s were sending MIDI files to pianos and keyboards, for example, back in the 1980s. USPTO patents the wheel again!

Except that you had to slip 'em in and out.

[crovira]

'Protective' cases are a myth if your medium is unprotected at some point.

Shit always happens and unprotected media are an accident to happen (even tape reels.)

Re:Except that you had to slip 'em in and out.

[JetTredmont]

Er, yeah, you had to slip them in and out of the protective caddy if you were a cheapskate and only bought 1-2 caddies for your library of disks. The idea is to spend the extra $0.50 on a caddy per disk so that you gain 100% protection 100% of the time for your data. Caddy-based systems would spin the disk inside the caddy inside the drive ... they'd never leave the caddy (although of course you had to worry about damage to the caddy causing physical damage to the disk).

'Course, the alternative is to back up to multiple disks and store in multiple locations which also has positive aspects.

Re:Except that you had to slip 'em in and out.

[zeno_2]

You could try something like this: D-Skin

Re:Except that you had to slip 'em in and out.

[evilviper]

...which only provides a tiny fraction of the protection of a caddy.

DVD-RAM, M.O. discs, Minidiscs... Optical media in caddies are incredibly reliable... Optical media without caddies are notoriously unreliable...

Rewritable?

[Sparohok]

Holy jumping to conclusions, Batman. Apart from all the posts about how much porn and torrents you could fit in 850 gigs, and proclaiming the death of tape backup, has anyone considered that this seems to be a read only technology?

I briefly skimmed the patent and I didn't see anything to suggest that these discs are rewritable. All the usage examples in the patent are bulk distribution related. I didn't see any mention of how the data could be changed on disk. My (admittedly poor) intuition for how this works and how rewritable media work makes it seem farfetched that this could ever be made rewritable.

Can anyone with good knowledge of the patent or optics or materials science comment on whether this technique could be adapted to rewritable discs?

Martin

Yay! Somebody who gets it.

[crovira]

We did archiving that way when I was working there.

I dropped a Floppy disk one...

[Anonymous Coward]

and all the bits shifted to 1 side...

Scratches and nanotech

[TwistedSpring]

CDs and DVDs currently contain tons of error detection and correction data. People typically don't realise just how much you can punish a DVD/CD before it becomes unreadable. Get an old CD and chuck it around the room, jump on it, bite it, even rub it with sandpaper, and it'll probably still read OK.

With nanotechnology I expect this error checking and correction will only improve. The effects of a scratch probably deminish in magnitude as discs are read with higher-frequency lasers (as you increase fequency, the effects of refraction are minimised). Since the density of the data is much higher, scratches will also have less of an effect. Imagine the reader is a car and the data is a road. A scratch on a DVD will act like a ditch across the road, creating a big bump that'll probably throw the car off course. A scratch on this medium will appear like a mile-long decline and subsequent incline in the road, which won't affect the course of the car at all. What might really affect this media more is dust that totally obscures large chunks of the data. Some redundancy will obviously have to be built in to combat this.

When will somebody develop an optical media that does not require mechanical parts? Why isn't it possible to read the data with a cathode ray that scans the surface of a translucent media or something. That'd be awesome. But the drive would be huge.

Contextual Computing

[mrchaotica]

Only temporarily -- in the longer term the computer device won't be external. It'll be cybernetically integrated into your brain and will become your memory.

Besides, the goal of isn't just a wearable PDA; it's a device that has the "intelligence" to sense your context and provide the information you want without you having to ask for it. Look at Dashboard (the GNOME app, not to be confused with the Apple one) to see an early primitive example.

Forget compression!

[LesPaul75]

Yeah, I know, this is probably just another article about vaporware. But, if it were true, imagine what you could do with an 850GB DVD:

- A single frame of 1080p HD video is 1920 x 1080 pixels, or 2073600 pixels.
- Each pixel is 24 bits of RGB, so 2073600 x 3 bytes = 6220800 bytes for each frame of video.
- at 30 frames per second, one second of video would take 186624000 bytes.

So with 850GB of space, you could store about 80 hours of completely uncompressed, high-definition, true-color video. Wow... Is my math right there? I didn't expect it to be that much. Anyway, that would look pretty spiffy on your fancy 60" HDTV. Plenty of room left over for a few dozen tracks of completely uncompressed digital audio, too. :)

Re:Forget compression!

[Sparohok]

No, your math is wrong. It would store about 76 minutes of uncompressed high def video.

186MB/sec * 60 seconds/minute * 76 minutes = 848MB.

Martin

Re:Forget compression!

[evilviper]

First, your math is completely wrong.

Second, what in the hell is the point of uncompressed video? Very high bitrate MPEG-2 is pretty close to lossless already. Even the best of the best eyes couldn't spot the difference. MPEG-2 has so little compression that it takes more power to DISPLAY it than to decode it... If your HDTV MPEG-2 video looks poor, it's almost certainly because the lossless source was quite poor as well.

Besides that, there's no way you could read data fast enough...

So, tell me again why would you even want an uncompressed video stream?

Re:Forget compression!

[LesPaul75]

First, your math is completely wrong.

Yeah, it's 80 minutes, not 80 hours. Still, it's almost enough for a full-length film. And I'm not sure I'd call that "completely wrong." I'd call it missing one division.

Second, what in the hell is the point of uncompressed video? ... MPEG-2 has so little compression that it takes more power to DISPLAY it than to decode it ... If your HDTV MPEG-2 video looks poor ...

What's the point of uncompressed audio? What's the point of spending $30000 on a pair of speaker cables? What's the point of spending $500 on a twenty-year-old bottle of wine? What's the point of spending $200K on a Ferrari when the speed limit is still 65MPH on the highway? Who said that there was a point? I was just pointing out what you could do. And anyway, people spend lots of money on audio/video/gaming/automotive/whatever technology that they don't need, just because it's better "in theory." Who knows why. Who cares.

Besides that, there's no way you could read data fast enough...

Over what interface? Yeah, current DVDs can't read 186MB/s, but we're talking about this imaginary 850GB DVD, so who knows what the transfer rate will be in 2075, when it actually hits the store shelves. Current 16X DVD drives are within an order of magnitude of that speed. The transfer rate of IDE and SATA drives is already fast enough. Hell, gigabit ethernet is almost fast enough.

So, tell me again why would you even want an uncompressed video stream?

So tell me again who said that they "wanted" an uncompressed video stream? I was just pointing out that it's possible. And besides, audio CDs that you buy in the store are uncompressed, even though the most sensitive, highly trained ears in the world can't tell the difference between high bit-rate MP3 and pure CD. Why compress if you don't have to?

Re:Forget compression!

[LesPaul75]

Yeah, thanks, I Left out a divide-by-sixty there. I knew 80 hours seemed like too much. Guess I'll have to wait for the 2TB blu-ray disks. :)

Re:Forget compression!

[evilviper]

I was just pointing out that it's possible.

It's possible to put peanut butter on a couple DVDs and eat it like a sandwich too... but it's banal to mention it if there's no reason to do so.

Re:Forget compression!

[LesPaul75]

Of course. All posts should be restricted to discussing only the most common, practical uses of technology. Things like this and this simply have no place in this world.

Re:Forget compression!

[evilviper]

All posts should be restricted to discussing only the most common, practical uses of technology.

I didn't say that at all.

Your post is just particularly bad. Somewhere between "obvious" and "duh".

"Oh look! This 850GB disc can store 850GB files on a single disc!"

Re:Forget compression!

[LesPaul75]

Somewhere between "obvious" and "duh".

"Oh look! This 850GB disc can store 850GB files on a single disc!"

Yeah, true. Everyone on Earth knows the painfully obvious bitrate of uncompressed 1080p video. You can hardly find a thread these days about HDTV without a dozen posts droning on about "186624000 bytes per second, blah blah blah."

Re:Forget compression!

[evilviper]

Everyone on Earth knows the painfully obvious bitrate of uncompressed 1080p video.

Funny... You couldn't figure it out either. Yeah, real informative post there...

You're also basis this on the idea that knowing how much uncompressed HD video can fit on it is somehow useful to people... We've already gone over how pointless using uncompressed video is, so no dice.

LotR

[Gilmoure]

Peter Jackson's probably behind this, so the Double Secret Probation Lord of the Rings can be sold on one disk.

Longhorn...

[msdschris]

might actually fit on only one of these.

10-1 against it ever reaching market

[swb]

How often do we see stories about new storage tech on Slashdot? At least once a quarter, and I don't think any have made it to market, with the exception of BluRay and for some thin definitions of "to market".

Outside the physorg sandbox, last November!

[argent]

One of MIT's Inventor of the Week pages last November mentioned this technology... along with the comment "In recent years Iomega has reduced investment into new optical data storage technologies, thus, according to Thomas, AO-DVD is still in want of corporate support to bring it to market. It is an idea that is a bit ahead of its time."

Change in business model?

[jmcwork]

So I suppose you would just have to request one disk from Netflix. You then pay for the code to unlock the movie(s) you wanted to watch. No waiting!

DLT

[glrotate]

Our policy is to chuck a DLT if it's been dropped. (Actually I take it of the trash and sell it on EBay).

But, I doubt the drive was actually destroyed. Tape drives, except for the heads, are actually fairly rugged. You should have taken it apart and fixed it.

Re:DLT

[jmcmurry]

I'm sure that the data on that tape was destroyed beyond recoverability when the tape hit the floor, so your company and its customers have nothing to worry about.

Would you trust Iomega with this much data?

[Digital Pizza]

I lost a ZIP drive to the "click-of-death", but was able to persuede Iomega to replace it. The new drive arrived dead. They replaced that one, and its replacement was also dead. The third replacement worked.

My experience with Jaz drives has been, in short, horrible. Never had one that didn't eventually destroy its disks.

I'll never trust Iomega with my data again.

The REAL question with this technology

[sblanky]

Will that be +R -R +RW -RW -RAM or what?

I look forward to...

[Anonymous Coward]

...Iomega building such a drive, then writing horribly buggy drivers, offering no customer support, and finally discontinuing the product after 3 months.

no

[hawk]

That wasn't informative--it was just plain *wrong*.

No prototype is required in the US.

hawk

Just another nail in the coffin

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

"Greed works"

how long will it take..

[brianthestiguy]

for you goofs to give Iomega a break? for quick and dirty backups of some small but volitile data I've been round robining with a set of 250mb zip disks for 3 years. same drive, same disks, restores tested and used, all's well. they screwed up with the "click of death", took their medicine, and make decent stuff for the masses now. give it a rest and look at the tech for what it is.

Oh Great!

[TheRealStubot]

Man, I hope they have better reliability than the ZIP or JAZ drives. Most of the time, the media was ruined before it was ejected from the drive. I hope the drives are USB or FireWire and not that insane Parallel-to-SCSI nonsense too. Am I the only one who remembers this stuff?

no protection against scratches?

[alizard]

That's CD-R... DVDs have outside plastic layers on both sides.

No, DVDs are no more invulnerable to gross physical abuse than tapes are to stray magnetic fields. Though tapes aren't exactly immune to gross physical abuse. Step on a tape cartridge, are you 100% sure of getting all your data back afterwards?

That's why one stores them in jewel cases.

The advantage of 50 cent media is that redundancy is a lot cheaper to manage. What are the chances of TWO backup sets in different physical locations getting smashed?

Personally, I use a mirror drive on a mobile rack and DVD-R for on/offsite archiving. While I have many concerns, losing my data isn't one of them.

New Patent

[ZB Mowrey]

A method for increasing the storage space available on a disc.

Abstract: This method will enable any producer of CD/DVD/etc media to increase the total available storage of said media, as well as allowing the master device to read and write to said discs in a faster fashion. The Method: make the bits smaller. 3. Profit??

How much tape experience do you have?

[alizard]

I tried restoring from tape to a new system once using a 400Mb Travan drive... the result wouldn't boot.

Second try was a couple of years later with a Sony Superstation... something in the tape formatting went bad and the restore after a hard drive crash went haywire. I count myself very lucky that I only lost about 5% of my files.

BTW, I ALWAYS use read-after-write verification with tape and it always passed. For all the good it did me.

Why should I take your word for it that I should repeat the same mistake of depending on tape backup a THIRD time?

I've got a HP 20G 8mm tape drive... which I've never even bothered to power up.

I back up 3x a week to a drive mirror via rsync and monthly to a stack of DVD-Rs. I never lose sleep over the chance of losing data. Can you say the same?

you confused CD-R with DVD-R

[alizard]

The NIST publication "Care and Handling of CDs and DVDs - A Guide for Librarians and Archivists" says CD-R has the soft acrylic layer under the label, data layer, and polycarbonate layer and DVDs have a polycarbonate layer on both sides with the data layer sandwiched inbetween.

This is why CD-Rs are much more fragile than DVD-Rs.

Not a big deal.

[glrotate]

I just work for a Fortune 50 financial services firm, there's nothing all that important on those 220GB tapes.

BTW, I was joking. My point was about the drive.

there is ONE possibility...

[alizard]

Let's say that the entire platter of DVD-Rs is a single compressed archive volume spanned across all the individual DVDs so that one major disk defect on any DVD means that the whole set is trashed. So... if one drops the backup set off the 4th floor, breaking or cracking a single disk as a result would produce the effects that guy describes.

But setting something up that way indicates gross incompetence on the part of whoever's STUPID idea this was.

Personally, I like and recommend dar because dar compresses individual files within a dar archive file so that if there's a disk defect in any individual file in a backup set, ONE file is affected, and one might even recover that file.

Hard Drives?

[pcnetworx1]

What about using this 850 GB DVD tech inside a hard drive to get perhaps an economical (and small) terabyte+ drive?

I'm surprised nobody thought of this... Unless I'm behind on HD tech

Data black holes

[CustomDesigned]

He wasn't talking about uncompressed for the consumer, but a standard lossless format for creators. A musician records in 24 or 32 bit format, then mixes down to 16 bit CD audio and MP3. Similarly, video creators want a standard format for their original takes - before it is edited and compressed down to a DVD movie (or its successor).

At first, digital audio recording equipment had proprietary formats for the 24 bit data - and you could only get mixed CD audio out of your recorder. My brother still has one of those beasts. Naturally, you would like to be able to import your 24 or 32 bit data to new generation equipment or software - even if it is not the same brand. It really bites when you can't export your own recording.

In 1999, I made the mistake of doing 10 hours of recording in a studio with a 24 bit recorder and high quality mike and piano lent by a friend. Only after I spent the time, did I learn that you couldn't actually get the data out of the system in a usable form (other than by buying their brand of equipment). It even had proprietary Windows drivers to back up the data. All it could export was a 16-bit copy protected CD. After I got a CD out, I eventually found a MAC program to bypass the copy protection so I could RIP my own music. I was mad, but I couldn't complain to my generous friend about the free studio time. So here I am, getting it off my chest on /. after all these years!

Anyone remember the Jaz drive by Iomega?

[Anonymous Coward]

Those suckers would get HOT. One time we were backing up files and the darn thing started smoking. No kidding.

I can attest to this

[toadlife]

Machine polish, and a high speed rotary polisher for cars (not the $29.00 walmart kind) can transform a CD from unreadable to perfect condition...as long as there are no scratches on the non-data side of the disc.