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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."
Corporate Data for small buisness on one Disk. Who needs tape anymore
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Hey, thats aboue two VW Beetle's worth of Library of Congresses to the hogs head!!!!
I can fit my pr0n collection onto only 6 DVDs with this new tech! Horray!
-Valiss
I son't HAVE that much prOn!
Hopefully they'll be rewritable so I can just run my computer off it. That'd be nice, one disc for each OS.
Making a clicking noise when it dies?
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
My fat finger print just erased 138 Gigs of data from my DVD!
Some stuff is just really important. I'd like a RAID-1 flash array with covered connectors for that.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
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.
Now I can get rid of my Zip drive.
Top 10 Reasons To Procrastinate
10.
raw, uncompressed audio and video take up lots of space.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
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...?
or else!
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
Of course, with 850GB per disc, a single scratch will wipe out a couple gigs of data.
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.
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.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
All of the storage capacity in my entire house could fit on two of these things. Awesome!
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
That wont even fit a quater of the data we deal with, Uncomressed video takes a LOT of space. We need 10 Terabyte discs
Admiral Trigger Happy
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.
The Crimson Dragon
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.
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.
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 /.
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.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Time to start decompressing the mp3s...
Seriously, when stuff like this hits the market, why bother worrying about compression anymore?
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.
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.
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.
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.
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
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.
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.
And no, I have no mp3s or any other multimedia files on there.
:)
you must have one hell of a porn collection
Top 10 Reasons To Procrastinate
10.
That many buzzwords in the article significantly lowers my confidence in the value of the technology.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
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.
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.
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.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
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.
~Someday, I hope to be an aspiring author.
You'll see, if you ever get a kid and a camcorder...
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.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
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.
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!
"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!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
That these new drives do not also include Iomega's patented Click of Death technology.
You are who you are, let no one tell you different. But, never close your mind to a new point of view.
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.
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.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
click of death.
850GB is a lot of data to entrust to a company with a poor storage history.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
NBC: The Complete 1994 Prime Time Season.
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)
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.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Please say this is a firmware upgrade to my $50 DVD+-RV drive.
(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
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.
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.
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
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.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
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.
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.
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
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).
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
The inevitable thing is that whenever we have more data storage, we'll fill it with more data.
Iomega Patents 850GB DVD Nano-Technology
Holy Buzzword Bingo Batman
"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.
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...
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?
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...
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
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.
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).
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
...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!
This is bullshit. Some company that invested into this research is now going to profit off of it.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
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--
You need a new keyboard, your "0" key has loose contacts.
It's a $5000 upgrade to your almost-free DVD drive.
The moon is not fully subjugated. I demand a second assault wave preceded by a massive nuclear bombardment.
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)
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
Do you tape an mp3-player to your head and pretend you're a Borg?
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
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.
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.
--
make install -not war
Maybe I can get a matrix effect view of every thrust, blowjob, and anal.
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.
~Someday, I hope to be an aspiring author.
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.
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:
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...
If all you have are silver bullets, everything looks like a werewolf.
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 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.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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 $100 using current DVD technology.
Nothing will be deleted any more. Sure, we'll click on 'Delete' but that will be an undoable operation. And tools like Apple's Spotlight will be able to search not just for all the files containing a given word, but for all files that you have ever touched in the history of your computer containing that word.
Of course there will eventually come a time when we have an abundance of space even with infinite undo and redo.
(Note also that the lastest version of MacOSX has already started along the path of making undo and redo part of the OS with Core Data.)
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
New technology, called Articulated Optical - DVD will allow 40-100 times more data (upto 850 Gb) to be stored on a DVD with data transfer rates 5-30 times faster than today's DVDs, and at similarly low costs.
And it comes with beachfront property in Arizona. You get a Statue of Liberty and and Eiffel Tower as a free gift with every purchase.
I'll believe it when I see it.
Software Wars
HI:
I am saying they specifically did not replace my drive. They reneged on their warranty. As in their warranty was worth ZERO to me.
Actually, I can't even believe the company survives. But then I can't believe you are attempting to cheerlead for these whackjobs either.
As long as they work better than iomega's jazz or zip. (I know, I know, not the same technology)
I've been burned one too many times by their products.
I'm half expecting one out of 10 of these disks to spontaneously combust upon insertion.
See subject;1
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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 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.
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.
Non, je ne veux pas coucher avec toi ce soir.
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" technology?
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.
If only we could fall into a woman's arms without falling into her hands
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.
To confirm you're not a script, please type the text shown in this image: MICroSOFt SUCks.
"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.
They Live, We Sleep
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."
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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.
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.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
'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.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
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
We did archiving that way when I was working there.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
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.
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.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
Peter Jackson's probably behind this, so the Double Secret Probation Lord of the Rings can be sold on one disk.
I drank what? -- Socrates
might actually fit on only one of these.
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".
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."
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!
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.
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.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Will that be +R -R +RW -RW -RAM or what?
That wasn't informative--it was just plain *wrong*.
No prototype is required in the US.
hawk
"Greed works"
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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.
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?
"I'd rather win in an ugly car than lose in a pretty car" - Jari Lahdenpera
Er, that's a measurement.
A law would be "... is inversely proportional to the relative relevance of the thread."
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.
Tech Public Policy stuff
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??
Self-referential sigs are rarely entertaining.
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?
Tech Public Policy stuff
~94.44 million SSNs assuming no hyphens and the usual marketing by disc manufacturers that 1 GB = 1 billion bytes.
This is why CD-Rs are much more fragile than DVD-Rs.
Tech Public Policy stuff
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.
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.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I'm surprised nobody thought of this... Unless I'm behind on HD tech
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!
You have no idea.
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.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
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.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant