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

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.