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

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...?

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

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

[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

[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: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.

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!

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 :-)

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.

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.

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).

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: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:Cool

[lowrydr310]

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

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.

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. :)