300 gigabytes in the size of a DVD?

Rollie Hawk writes "Although storage space is no longer the premium it once was, physical backups and external media have been slow to catch up. While recordable DVDs may be fine for backing up a single workstation, large servers are still forced to rely on swappable drives and tape backups. But holographic disc technology could be changing all of that in the very near future. Holographic Versatile Discs (HVDs) have been in the works for some time now by various companies, including InPhase Technologies (formerly part of Lucent) and Japan's Optware (which claimed to have made the first recording of a movie on a holographic disc last year). InPhase's HVDs, scheduled for release in 2006, are said to hold 300GB of data, 60 times that of a conventional DVD with only a slight increase in size. That translates to more than a day's worth of HD-quality video. Not to mention the drives themselves can read and write at ten times the speed a normal DVD drive. One of InPhase's partners in HVD research, Maxell, is working towards even more storage on a 1.6TB disc."

Comments

~Chicken and egg?

[dada21]

Turner Network Television recently aired a commercial off of the InPhase Tapestry drive. Maxell built that drive for InPhase.

Data backup has become very expensive for some of my customers. The amount of data a company of even minimal size (50 employees) goes through in a day blows my mind. We've been investing every option but none are cost effective (except when a hard drive goes).

My dilemma is that as backup storage (such as the HVD) gets bigger, it seems that hard drives quickly outpace the new form of backup storage. 1.6TB discs sound great, yet I'm weary of having that much data on an easy to break/burn/steal disc. 300GB is more feasible as I can see making a few copies of the backup "just in case."

Nonetheless, the write speeds listed don't seem all that great, and what interfaces will let us copy data at those speeds? Moving 1.6TG of data off of a server without slowing down user access (24 hours per day with offshore employees) sounds like it will still take hours and hours to back up (if not longer). A recovery stage would take even longer.

For now, I'm happiest with redundancy backups. I don't like mirroring or RAIDx/y or clusters (too many nightmares over the 15 years I've worked with all of it), but having a server dupe itself daily has given us the best turnover and safety margins we've seen, as well as being very cost effective compared to use-once media or (shudder) tapes.

Re:~Chicken and egg?

[ERJ]

RAID and clusters are all good and well until you have a fire, or flood, or the roof collapses. That is what off site backup storage is nice for.

Re:~Chicken and egg?

[thebdj]

it will still take hours and hours to back up (if not longer)

Let me introduce you to Mr. Tape Drive. This reel of magnetic tape is quite possibly the largest method of data backup used, and last I checked, it takes hours and hours (if not longer) to do full data backup of disks. This is why most companies implement RAID 1 or 5 solutions and use tape backup as a weekly or monthly system.

Actually if I remember the procedure correctly for one of my previous places of employ, there were monthly full backups and weekly differential backups. The new system included software that even created differential backups on the disk every couple of hours, for those emergencies when someone would accidentally delete that important file they needed.

I am pretty sure none of these methods required any downtime for data. It would backup the data on the disk as it was read and stored to the tape. Now this would cause problems if you were working on file X while it was being backed up, but did not effect the other files on the system. Granted this solution would not work too well with systems with very large database files, since those files would get locked for several hours. Of course, I have also worked at locations, including one telephone order location, where access to the entry program is blocked from several hours between midnight and early the next morning, to run backups and various reports.

Once again, depending on the method(s) used, recovery is going to vary with time; however, the chance of total data recovery being needed is low. Most every large network storage solution will exist in a RAID setup and failure of enough drives to completely ruin that system is rare. The backups are most often used for those files that are missing, or to retrieve files which may have somehow been corrupted, and are typically not meant to be used, commonly, for full data retrieval.

Re:~Chicken and egg?

[richlv]

1.6TB discs sound great, yet I'm weary of having that much data on an easy to break/burn/steal disc. 300GB is more feasible as I can see making a few copies of the backup "just in case."

what prevents you from doing the same with 1.6tb disks ? create four copies, keep them in separate cities, maybe even countries - should be pretty safe for most uses. of course, becomes easier to steal one, too :)

Nonetheless, the write speeds listed don't seem all that great, and what interfaces will let us copy data at those speeds? Moving 1.6TG of data off of a server without slowing down user access (24 hours per day with offshore employees) sounds like it will still take hours and hours to back up (if not longer).

make a snapshot, take a low priority backup. it probably will slow things down somewhat, but you don't have to worry much that it takes longer to finish.
do your users really are supposed to have 1.6tb of changing data par day ? :)
maybe some restructuring of data might help...
of course, if keeping acceptable performance level and backing up required amount of data in 20 hours (from snapshot, of course) is not possible, whole infrastracture will have to be changed.

A recovery stage would take even longer.

that's something you have to count in downtime - but i guess most businesses can take slight downtime much better than a complete loss of data.
if downtime is not acceptable at all, there are other technologies (you mentioned keeping whole server for failover, maybe even in a remote location with adequate network access), but they sure will be more expensive.

Re:~Chicken and egg?

[LWATCDR]

"but having a server dupe itself daily has given us the best turnover and safety margins we've seen, as well as being very cost effective compared to use-once media or (shudder) tapes."
After the server dupes it's self then you make backups from the duped server. You make more than one copy of the back up and then you locate them in different places. Your bank has a thing called a vault and you can get a safety deposit box their for not much money. Add a safe in house and maybe FedEx to a remote location as you are good to go.

Re:~Chicken and egg?

[Anonymous Coward]

We've been investing every option but none are cost effective (except when a hard drive goes).

Do you mean investigating?

1.6TB discs sound great, yet I'm weary of having that much data on an easy to break/burn/steal disc.

I'm curious how you've grown weary of a technology which is not yet available to consumers. Or perhaps you meant wary? I'd also suggest that if you're worried about your backups being broken, burned or stolen, then perhaps it is physical security that is your problem, not media. I assume you're also keeping copies of your backups off-site...

Nonetheless, the write speeds listed don't seem all that great, and what interfaces will let us copy data at those speeds?

I can think of a few. Instead of asking dumb questions, perhaps you should do some basic research?

Moving 1.6TG of data off of a server without slowing down user access (24 hours per day with offshore employees) sounds like it will still take hours and hours to back up (if not longer). A recovery stage would take even longer.

Obviously this solution is not intended for first line backups. However it sounds like it would be an excellent solution for 2nd or 3rd tier archival stuff. That of course depends on how well these disks endure the test of time. Your question about how to get the data off the server without slowing down user access speaks volumes about your level of experience. Did you design your storage sub-system with IO in mind? Since you go on to complain about RAID0, I assume that is not the case. Or perhaps you're still living in the time before filesystems snapshots? Only an idiot (or an amature) would run their backups against a life filesystem.

For now, I'm happiest with redundancy backups. I don't like mirroring or RAIDx/y or clusters (too many nightmares over the 15 years I've worked with all of it),

Clearly you've never done any serious IT work. Your 15 years of claimed experience is sounding like it includes the time you fixed your Dad's computer and all those years answering phones on the tech-support line. Basic RAID isn't even close to complicated. If you want complicated, check out SANs using multi-diskarray plaids and all the LVM / VFS junk that goes on top of that.

but having a server dupe itself daily has given us the best turnover and safety margins we've seen, as well as being very cost effective compared to use-once media or (shudder) tapes.

If 24 hour backups to a fail-over server is the sum-total of your business-continuance regimen, then it is clear that the business you are supporting either doesn't have important data or that you have failed to express the value of that data.

Seeing posts like the parent modded +5 insightful is depressing.

Re:~Chicken and egg?

[bombadier_beetle]

Only an idiot (or an amature)

Did you mean amateur?

Re:~Chicken and egg?

[Somegeek]

Thanks for posting that. Saved me a lot of time writing it myself...

Re:~Chicken and egg?

[ChrisA90278]

Backing up a multi-tarabyte server is no as hard as you make it out to be for several reasons: 1) You do not need to backup the whole serverevery day. All you need to backup are the changes made since the last backup. So the question is NOT the size of the server's file system but the number of bytes that change each day. 2) Slowing down the server? Yes every write to the server disk means a write tio the disk, a read back and a write to the backup media. But on a typical PC server what is the write vs. read ratio? Mostly reads I'd bet. 3) You can set the backup to run at a low priority so it will run whent he server has nothing else to do

Re:~Chicken and egg?

[walstib]

what interfaces will let us copy data at those speeds?
How about BCVs on the SAN?

Re:~Chicken and egg?

[dada21]

Do you mean investigating?

I did. I type my comments on my PDA Phone and use word-completion to increase my typing speed to way more than you'd believe on a small keyboard. I hit the wrong word there, thanks for the correction.

I assume you're also keeping copies of your backups off-site...

Depends on the customers' needs. I don't back up much of my own data as I don't have much need for anything except what government requires me to keep. As for what word I meant to use, I did mean WEARY: Having one's interest, forbearance, or indulgence worn out. My interest is worn out in these huge media formats. Thanks for incorrectly correcting me.

I can think of a few. Instead of asking dumb questions, perhaps you should do some basic research?

I own a business and have employees that handle that research, yet I have yet to see an answer that I can sell to every customer. Current solutions for data bloat only cause more data bloat. Understand my original comment's subject?

Only an idiot (or an amature) would run their backups against a life filesystem.

I have an engineering customer that modifies a significant amount of their data in tiny ways every day. Snapshots have proven to be the WORST way for backing up when you consider the recovery time needed. For the product we offer, we guarantee a quick return to production.

If you want complicated, check out SANs using multi-diskarray plaids and all the LVM / VFS junk that goes on top of that.

One of my employees fixes my dad's computer. I've never answered the phone. As for complicated, RAIDs are horribly complex. I've seen so many RAIDs blow drives repeatedly that took dozens of hours to figure out the reason. I've seen clusters get confused (even recent ones) and was happy to convince the customer to dump the systems. I believe SANs are less complicated but the manufacturing and tech support side is colluding to make it complex. I wonder if you're posting AC because your job relies on creating more complex systems for job security, rather than helping make your customers more profitable (which is what we sell in our services -- profitability on investing in our time).

Seeing posts like the parent modded +5 insightful is depressing.

What is your comment moderated at, Coward?

Re:~Chicken and egg?

[Apparition-X]

Well, full disclosure first: this is what I do all day, every day. Backup and recovery, that is.

So a few comments, because some of your thoughts worry me a bit:

Backup is expensive. Backup is insurance. Ideally you never need to recover, which means that all that money spent on backup is "wasted". That is life. It is an operational cost of doing business, that many businesses pay because they recognize that the risk of not having one outweighs the expense of doing it. But there it is. And I do recognize that smaller businesses (less than 1000 employees) usually have a harder time understanding the costs and justifying them. So how do you define "cost effective" in backup? There is no conceivable way that it can be run as a profit center and make money. Backups cost the business money, just like their insurance policy. How much is your data worth? That is the core question. How much is it worth? How much will you lose if you don't have access to it for some period of time?

Point number two is that the massively dominant mechanism for backup today is tape. I would venture to guess that 99.9% of business with more than 1000 employees backup to tape. And it is easy to break, burn, and steal. Again, that is life. We implement reasonable measures to ensure that it doesn't happen, but best practices say to make two copies of any tape: one for onsite, one for off. And yes, if you are concerned about data security (credit card transaction processors, banks, etc.) encrypt the tape. Yes it is expensive, and yet it is worth it. It is not "cost effective" except when you think that you may be out of business if your courier blows it, looses the tape, and the world finds out; just ask CardSystems Solutions. That is the context in which cost effective needs to be understood.

Further, what interfaces let you copy data at those speeds? Well there are more options than I can outline in this post: multiple SAN interfaces? Multiple LAN segments? RAID array snapshots? Host based mirroring? etc. Lots of options, all with good and bad things about them. But again, RAID arrays are used by 99.9% of businesses with more than 1000 employees. Server duplication is *not* backup. It may suffice for disaster recovery, but it has two enormous problems: it does not preserve data as it used to be at a given point in time (say, at financial quarter end), and it does propogate errors. Corrupted tablespace? You just replicated corruption. User just deleted files? While they just got deleted remotely too. Redundancy accomplishes several things, but none of them are backup. No auditor would be satisfied with that, and if they company is traded publicly, the CIO would likely be fired if that strategy was revealed to the public.

Re:~Chicken and egg?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to agree, for short term, what do we do when a server goes down, having duplicate hardware to 'replicate' them is the most cost effective.. but for long term archival of data (something the feds are pushing for ISPs to start doing with e-mails etc) there isn't much of a choice other than holographic media.

This media has a great potential for HD video production too, why work with the video using anything other than a low cpu overhead losseless compression? lossless compression can actually speed the processing, because you now need less physical media thruput, and lossless compression will avoid the lossy compression problem of generation loss. and as another poster pointed out, these discs can be same day couriered at a fraction of the cost of trying to send 200 GB+ of data over a wlan or the internet.

Re:~Chicken and egg?

[LWATCDR]

I am all for that. Notice I said have the server dup it's self then make the backup from the duped server.
A quick run the your local banks and a safety deposit box should be good enough for most places for off site storage. Most safes are water tight so even a flood shouldn't destroy your back ups.

Re:~Chicken and egg?

[dwater]

and what makes RAID and clusters 'opposite' to off-site.

Even thought of a 3-way RAID1, with one of them being removable, exchanging it each night for a 'blank' one and keeping the good copy off site? This way, it doesn't take any time to create the backup copy and it's always a complete copy too.

Why is that any worse than what people do with tape? More expensive, perhaps....

Max.

Re:~Chicken and egg?

[obeythefist]

The 300GB disks have a 20Mbit write speed. That is an *awful* lot of time to copy data onto disk. It's not always the size that counts!

Want to back up 1.6TB with a 20Mbit pipe? That'll take roughly 7.7 days according to my calculations.

This technology is not suited for enterprise backups.

Re:~Chicken and egg?

[steve_bryan]

if your courier blows it, looses the tape, and the world finds out

I suppose this correction may be unwelcome and perhaps seem tedious but I've seen one too many loose where lose should be. This trivial error has reached epidemic proportions. This is an example where someone flawlessly spells every other word in an extemporaneous essay of almost 500 words and yet the poor lose is lost.

*yawn*

[Tyler Eaves]

This stuff has been a year or two away as long as I can remember. Someone wake me up when product actually ships...

Re:*yawn*

[Anonymous Coward]

This stuff has been a year or two away as long as I can remember.

That is not entirely accurate. I have analyzed the slashdot articles on the subject over the last 5 years and the wait time for holographic storage decreases by approximately 3 months every year. Extrapolating, this implies that by 2013 we will be talking about holographic storage to be released in 2012.

Of course, since there will be no actual product, that'll be really weird.

Re:*yawn*

[greenegg77]

"This stuff has been a year or two away as long as I can remember. Someone wake me up when product actually ships..."

You realize they'll deliver it along with your new flying car, of course.

Re:*yawn*

[bitflip]

How 'bout you wake up now and get to work, ya slacker! ;)

Re:*yawn*

[lowrydr310]

Will Duke Nukem Forever be released on this new medium?

Re:*yawn*

[JabberWokky]

It's already started shipping demo units to select big media clients. The same way they have loaner equipment for many different types of new tech (cutting lasers, backup systems, network appliances) for large corporations. It's a perk for clients, a PR tease, and a way to get quotes from "CTO of BigCorp" to be used in their sales literature.

That's usually a pretty good (but not absolute) indicator that it's about to ship. It's also often an indicator that it's priced for mid to large sized corporations, not for small companies or individuals.

--
Evan

Re:*yawn*

[kimvette]

And of course, the reason it won't ship in 2013 is because the MPAA and RIAA will complain because the media will actually allow for exercise of Fair Use as outlined in Copyright Law, despite other legitimate uses for the media as well. That is, of course, assuming that the **AA organizations still exist then and haven't given up the ghost due to their not having embraced modern technology.

Re:*yawn*

[Catbeller]

And wasn't 2005 the year of IBM's nonvolatile MRAM memory? Wazzap with that?

Re:*yawn*

[Doesn't_Comment_Code]

I'll sleep just a bit longer while all the bugs get worked out on the first wave adopters. The first wave adopters, you know, the people who spend three times as much and get a lower quality product... the ones who pay for the research and development so that the second wave products are relatively glitch free.

Wake me up when those come out.

Re:*yawn*

[mlynx]

Just don't try and continue to live you're life while you are "asleep and waiting". When you wake up and try to find out everything that happened while you were asleep, you'll be in violation of someone's patented storyline (unless of course you slept longer than the patent term).

Million Bit Parallel Data Access

[peterdaly]

It's not just that it's a fast drive. It goes well beyond the current method of spinning the disc faster and(or) putting the data closer together to increase performance.

"Unlike other technologies, that record one data bit at a time, holography allows a million bits of data to be written and read in parallel with a single flash of light," says Liz Murphy, of InPhase Technologies. "This enables transfer rates significantly higher than current optical storage devices."

That's pretty wild for a single "head" drive. I wonder if this could translate into devices similar to hard drives using similar methods. Hard disks are what I feel is holding back system performance. It's almost always the biggest bottleneck in a system, and has been more or less at a platoe for years, mainly because magnetic media can only do so much in a serial manor.

-Pete

Re:Million Bit Parallel Data Access

[Anonymous Coward]

"and has been more or less at a platoe for years"

Is that anything like Plafoot?

Perhaps you mean plateau...

Re:Million Bit Parallel Data Access

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow...I didn't even know plas had toes - I thought they had hooves.

Re:Million Bit Parallel Data Access

[mwilli]

Hard disks are what I feel is holding back system performance. It's almost always the biggest bottleneck in a system, and has been more or less at a platoe for years, mainly because magnetic media can only do so much in a serial manor.

Well, Something has to be the bottleneck. :)

Re:Million Bit Parallel Data Access

[JPriest]

HDD will always be a bottleneck because they require actual physical movement. Even on the high end it is still thousands of times slower than you can move electrons through a bus. The only hardware solution to the problem is to compensate with allot of caching, or start using solid state storage. This is partly why Google stores data on huge banks of RAM.

Re:Million Bit Parallel Data Access

[Dster76]

magnetic media can only do so much in a serial manor

You know, I have problems myself in serial manors. In fact, I find that being forced to go through the kitchen and bathroom to get the guest bedroom can be embarrassing for all involved.

Re:Million Bit Parallel Data Access

[Izmunuti]

"That's pretty wild for a single "head" drive. I wonder if this could translate into devices similar to hard drives using similar methods."

Probably not.

From what I've read, holographic storage consists of storing lots of 2D images, essentially 2D bar codes like on a FedEx package, that are read and written as a unit, all at once. The "head" in a holographic drive is more like a camera than a hard disk head. That's how they get such parallelism.

Hard drive heads are fundamentally serial. There have been attempts to have more than one head functioning in parallel but they haven't been terribly successful so far. Even then, it's a fairly small number of heads, usually two, so we're only talking about doubling performance.

Re:Million Bit Parallel Data Access

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you think you could spare a few MB on your hard drive for a spell-checker? Platoe? Manor? What are you, retarded?

Re:Million Bit Parallel Data Access

[theStorminMormon]

And what's to stop us from switching to solid-state storage?

You can already get flash drives as big as what, 8 gig? My laptop has only 40gig HDD, and that's plenty for me. I'd go down to 20 or 30 in a flash (ha ha) if it meant switching to steady-state.

There will always be *something* that's a bottleneck, but concentrating on the bottlenecks can get you the biggest bang:buck performance increase.

-stormin

Re:Million Bit Parallel Data Access

[mjinks]

Even on the high end it is still thousands of times slower than you can move electrons through a bus.

Well, I guess it would, indeed, surprise you that the typical velocity of an electron in a 1.8 VDC memory bus is (at best) a few hundredths of ONE millimeter per second, if that! So, yes, you can move a HDD head faster than push an electron through a memory buss. Try again. And no, electrons are forbidden to travel at the speed of light, c.

Einstein was wrong. God loves to gamble and He cheats too!

Re:Million Bit Parallel Data Access

[blincoln]

Flash RAM has a very low number of read/write cycles compared to a hard drive. Really, I have trouble imagining a non-volatile solid state system that doesn't.

Re:Million Bit Parallel Data Access

[Morgalyn]

Manor is actually a word... so it would pass the spell checker... unfortunately. I think one day I will have to write an article, and then replace all possible homophones. Then I'll run the spell-check!

Re:Million Bit Parallel Data Access

[anethema]

mram

Re:Million Bit Parallel Data Access

[JPriest]

Actually, I have a reliable source that electrons travel through a circuit at up to 1.2x the speed of light, or ~359751 km/sec. This is in part becasue a substance like copper has a greater density than air (this is also the reason sound travels better in water). And since the circuit is not a perfectly straight line, centrifugal force causes the electrons to speed up slightly while cornering.

Re:Million Bit Parallel Data Access

[Anonymous Coward]

bbram

seems about right

[ajdowntown]

Hmm, maybe now they can put the entire Lord of the Rings Triliogy on one disc. now, if you want to put in the extra features, that is a different story...

Re:seems about right

[master_p]

or DNF...

Re:seems about right

[Scarhead]

With the new storage capacity, I would expect an even higher-quality (audio and video) version of movie to be on it. Maybe just so one of the LOTR would fit on one disc.

Error correction and speed

[karvind]

From the Wikipedia link:

"The article notes that the transfer rate is at an average of 1 gigabit/second. That is equal to 0.125 gigabytes/second, or 128 megabytes/second, which is a large leap over earlier storage mediums, whose transfer rates are generally measured in Kilobytes/second. In comparison, a 56x CD-ROM drive transfers at up to 8.4 Megabytes/second, and 16x-speed DVDs transfer at 22 Megabytes/second."

That is impressive indeed. But I have a question regarding the random errors etc due to statistical variation. How much resources do you have to devote for error correction (eg parity bit etc) ? And wouldn't it be very power consuming to do error correction at such a high data transfer rate ?

Re:Error correction and speed

[Pieroxy]

You think actual drives do error correction at the rate you cite? Whenever an error occurs, the rate drops by a factor of ~100, the time to retry and blah blah. The transfer rate is only good if there is no error, like on any other device.

Re:Error correction and speed

[MBGMorden]

In comparison, a 56x CD-ROM drive transfers at up to 8.4 Megabytes/second, and 16x-speed DVDs transfer at 22 Megabytes/second.

Hmm. I hadn't ever thought about DVD's reading that much faster than CD's. It's off topic, but for certain games that required data off the CD (and that don't use copy protection): couldn't you get a pretty good performance increase by taking the files from the CD and just burning them onto a DVD? Lots of wasted space but DVD-R's have gotten dirt cheap these days anyways.

Of course this wouldn't be an issue if the publishers would just release DVD-versions of games instead of spread out over 3 or 4 cd's. I know of almost no one with a computer capable of playing most new games that doesn't have a drive capable of reading DVD's. Oh well . . getting into a rant again :).

Re:Error correction and speed

[Detritus]

Yes, they do. You have to distinguish between the multiple layers of error correcting and detecting codes applied to the media. Modern designs often intentionally accept a relatively high BER at the physical level to gain increased density. These errors get corrected in a hardware decoder at line rates.

Re:Error correction and speed

[Anonymous Coward]

Been living under a rock?

Most of the games that I've purchased in the past year, that were multi-disk installs come in 2 versions. A multi-disk CD version and a single-disk DVD version.

Re:Error correction and speed

[Anonymous Coward]

It can work very well. Those bootable live CDs, run noticable faster when burned to a DVD. It's well worth the trivial extra cost.

i'm sorry, a slight increase in size is a disaster

[Surt]

You can't fit a 13cm disc drive into a standard enclosure! Who do they think they're going to sell these to!

i bet...

[thedude13]

the Phantom will contain one of these when it comes out...

ouch!

[intmainvoid]

a 1.6TB disc

That's really going to hurt when you can back up all your photos, videos and data onto one disc, and then lose it! At least if you back up to cd destroying or losing one disk isn't a disaster. Then again, it would be cool to be able to do a back up of an entire system to a DVD 1.6TB disk, you'd just have to make sure you've got multiple copies in multiple locations. But of course you do that already. right?

Re:ouch!

[Taladar]

Multiple copies in multiple locations are impossible with current optical drives as they are so small compared to harddisks that even making one backup to DVD is a pita.

Re:ouch!

[Majostoba]

No, they're missing the real advantage to holographic storage: better data integrity. When a CD gets scratched, you lose actual bits. But with a holograph, every little piece of the disk contains the entire image. Try it with a real holograph some time... cover up the bottom half, and you can still see the entire thing. Even break it in two, and you have two identical (albeit dimmer and with a limited perspective) versions of the original. Just so long as they are smart about the way they implement it, and the sensors are a good deal more sensitive than they need to be, this kind of media should be a lot more robust than current CDs and DVDs, and maybe even hard drives.

Re:ouch!

[ichigo 2.0]

I don't see how HVDs are worse than CDs, losing your CD has exactly the same effect: everything on the disc is lost. The amount of data doesn't matter, you still would have to mirror the data on multiple copies for redundancy, even with CDs. This way it at least will (hopefully) be cheaper.

Re:ouch!

[Anonymous Coward]

Does that mean that if you snap it in half, you get twice the storage capacity?

What happens if you snap it in half a second time?

And then a third?

Re:ouch!

[RJC0708]

But of course you do that already. right?

Er, actually, yes. For my personal stuff. A friend and I had an extra computer each hanging around the house, so we tossed 520 GB (2x250GB storage, 1x20GB OS) into them and they're both hooked up to our own networks. He backed up to both of his hard drives all that he needs, came to my place where I had already done the same, and we swapped one of each. Now we both have a local 250GB backup as well as a remote 250GB one. The two machines run RSync over SSH to sync up nightly, though to be honest it doesn't even need to be that much.

So, what, an old computer + 2 harddrives you can get for ~$100 each + one equally geek friend and you're set.

Then again, I also trust my friend with my data (read: massive pr0n collection)

Re:ouch!

[Peter La Casse]

Quick, patent it!

Re:ouch!

[WuphonsReach]

It requires a bit of planning. I tend to look at DVD-R/W as a tape of infinite length, that I append to in 4GB chunks. So, every month, I pack up everything that changed or was created in the previous 3 months and dump that off to DVD-R/W. Label the disks in an organized fashion and store them sequentially..

Then I index it so I can search it without mounting the media (SuperCat in Win32 systems). Mostly I want to be able to figure out which DVD-R/W to pull out of storage if I want to recover file X.

I'd still prefer larger disk formats, however... once you get 100 disks in a particular set, pulling data back off of the disks gets to be a pain. Unless you stay organized about your archives.

I need one!

[Dark_MadMax666]

At my job we use LTO drives( $ 10k per 24 tape drive) + tapes (400 gb compressed on one tape,$50 per tape ) which is ridiculously expensive but works ok . But for home it is not acceptable solution .Right Now I am in desperate need for a backup solution for my home machine - I have 750 Gb and plan go over 1 tb in next quarter. And I am basicaly either have to go with RAID 5 ( ~$1k for 1 TB ) which I dont like since I want incrementally buy more storage - not pay upfront big bucks only to find out that half a year later cost would be halfed. Something liek 300 Gb dvd would be a god sent to me.

Re:I need one!

[markie_tm]

for backup - or " near line storage " I have taken to recommending bufalo's terastation - 600 / 1000 / 1600 GB in a 4 disk RAID 5 solution - you can then dump portions to removable USB drives etc - good value too around £500 ( UK ) for the 600gb ( 450 usable )

Re:I need one!

[slaker]

I have around 11TB of disk drives at home. You will too, within the timeframe of something like this becoming available. At that point, 300GB/disc will be just as worthless a 8.5GB DVD would be to you right now.

Besides, there's no indication that these discs will be available in a writeable format.

Anyway, a single-drive LTO and, say, four tapes would only set you back a couple grand. If your home data is important, it's not THAT bad.

Personally, I subdivide and mirror my data on a couple machines. That's good enough for my needs.

Re:I need one!

[Pope]

If you have over 750GB of "whatever" at home that's not even backed up, you should ask yourself if you actually need everything that's there. What is it all? If it was really that important, you would have backed it up on something before now.

Re:I need one!

[LurkerXXX]

Why are you talking about backup tapes at work vs RAID at home? RAID is *not* a backup. RAID doesn't save you when you delete a file you shouldn't have. RAID doesn't save you when the there is a lightening strike or your power supply fails and fries your running hard drives.

If all you are using is RAID, your home machine is not backed up. Get some backup media, even if it's cheap hard drives you can backup to, then sit on a shelf somewhere.

Re:I need one!

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I subdivide and mirror my data on a couple machines. That's good enough for my needs.

I do too, but I'm worried about someone breaking in and nicking everything. What do you do about off-site backup, if anything? Or do you never go out ?-)

Re:I need one!

[Brent_Litzer]

I have around 11TB of disk drives at home. You will too, within the timeframe of something like this becoming available. At that point, 300GB/disc will be just as worthless a 8.5GB DVD would be to you right now.

Uh, I try to keep my p0rn collection low res and portable. You should run a Gimp script to reduce the size of your images. Seriously bra, once you start spank'in, the resolution just doesn't matter.

Re:I need one!

[michael_cain]

I have around 11TB of disk drives at home. You will too...

When I go through my house, and look at all the different media, I'm not sure that I've even got 11 TB of data (assuming reasonable compression). Not that some people don't, but a half-century of accumulating stuff hasn't added up to that much. Probably says something about the type of media that we favor here. I think about this regularly, and estimate that a 1.2 TB hard disk -- something the size of a paperback book in another couple years -- would be sufficient to hold most of my life: every textbook I ever had, all the fiction on the shelves, every book I ever borrowed from the library, every paper I wrote in a 25-year career, all of the journal articles I tucked away (thinking that someday I would need them), all the e-mail I ever sent and the non-spam e-mail I received, every record or CD I ever owned, every photo I ever took, all of the photos my friends took that included me, all of the photos that were handed down from my parents. The video content might stress it, but another doubling to 2.4 TB and even that would be accommodated easily.

For most of the last 20 years, I've lugged around a little black notebook that holds 8.5x5.5" paper. None of the paper in it goes back the whole time, but there are pages that have been in there for at least 10 years. I am simultaneously elated and terrified to think that a device of comparable size will have sufficient storage to hold a copy of my life, plus a display and enough processing power to do the input and output.

Re:I need one!

[Kjella]

I have around 11TB of disk drives at home. You will too, within the timeframe of something like this becoming available. At that point, 300GB/disc will be just as worthless a 8.5GB DVD would be to you right now.

Well maybe... but Jan 2003, WD shipped 83GB/platter HDDs. Today, the highest-shipping disks I know of (Seagate and Samsung) ship with 133GB/platter. That is 60% in almost three years. Granted, it is nice but it is nothing like the recent development in optical media. When they shipped the 250GB drive, DVD recorder prices were just starting to get reasonable. We went from 250GB/700MB = 360 discs to 250GB/4.3GB = 58 discs. If you have a similar three-platter drive and DVD9, you're down to 400GB/9GB = 45 discs. If Blue-Ray can deliver in a reasonable time frame, I expect it to drop to 600GB/25GB = 24 discs. 300GB? If it ships within the next decade, it'll be a real competitor to hard disks.

Re:I need one!

[slaker]

I'm not teribly worried about having my stuff stolen.
I have a ~4 month old set of tapes (borrowed the 5-tape drive from a customer) that would get me back on my feet if I ever had a catastrophy like a fire.

Re:I need one!

[toddestan]

About the cheapest way to back up a lot of data is another harddrive. Right now, 250GB is the sweet spot, at about $95-$100 per drive. A USB2.0 or Firewire enclosure runs about $30-$35. 4 of those would back up all your stuff, and would cost about $600 or so. Plus, you can easily move the back up drives offsite, add more backup drives as needed, and having all your stuff on external harddrives makes it a lot easier to "share" your stuff with other people you know.

Re:I need one!

[tuomas_kaikkonen]

What do you keep in that big disk? And how often the data changes and how much it changes? How about doing differential backups to DVDs? Back up only what has been added or changed in the hard disk to the DVD. What operating system you are running? Most operating systems have a create or change date stored with the file information.

60 times?

[julesh]

A "conventional DVD" has two layers, and holds roughly 9Gb of data. 300 / 9 = 33 1/3, not 60. Even recordable DVDs are well and truly available in 9Gb formats by now, and have been for some time. OK, the media is more expensive than single layer discs, but the technology is in people's PCs now. And how much are these discs going to cost for the first few years of their existence?

Re:60 times?

[GotenXiao]

Right, and who releases software on Dual Layer? Who releases movies on Dual Layer? The technology is sitting right here in my DVD drive, but if I want to burn 9GB of stuff and send it to someone who doesn't have a DVD DL drive, they won't be able to read it.

Also, 9GB at £3 per disc is hideously expensive. Not to mention that the data rates are pure suckage.

As for the other comment about the bus able to transfer 128MB/s continuously, I direct your attention to SATA II, 300MB/s. Or, since it'll probably be out near when this is coming out, SATA III, at 450MB/s.

1.6TB for me, please. And if you're careless enough to lose your backup disc, you deserve it ;)

Re:60 times?

[talkingcoyote]

Most commercial DVDs are, in fact, dual layer, i.e., DVD-9

Re:60 times?

[GotenXiao]

Really? Funny, my *ancient* DVD player which came out about 2 years before Dual Layer was even conceived plays most "commercial" DVDs, i.e. those produced by bands, films, etc.

Somehow, I find your statement reeking of bullshit :P

Re:60 times?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the heck are you talking about? DVD9 read mode was in the spec since the VERY beginning, and behold, there are ***MANY MANY MANY MANY*** commercial dual layer DVD9 movies produced today AND in yester year, and pretty much since the beginning! How the fuck do you think they manage to fit a whole movie, two languages in Dolby Digital maybe another two in stereo, and maybe one or two languages in DTS and gobs of bonus material one one disc? Doh! They don't compress the shit out of the movie, so that can't be the answer!

Sometimes in older players, you can even notice a very slight pause in the movie as the read head moves to the other layer on the disc, because it dosen't have enough buffer memory for the split second that it takes! Maybe you aught to rip a few of your movies to see exactly what's going on inside them?!

And yes, before you ask, even non-dual layer *burning* drives can still *read* dual layer discs, just as **ANY** DVD player ever produced can! That player sitting by your TV can read any intact dual layer DVD9 compliant disc ever produced, guranteed, no matter how ancient the player is. So there!

Get off the goddamned smack you skank! And as for why nobody releases software on dual layer? Probably because they just don't flipping *need* to! Ever thought of that, Mr. Smartypants? Heck, most software still comes on a single CD--why would they want to press a full double layer DVD, if they just plain don't need it?! It's not fucking rocket science!

Re:60 times?

[giantmb]

Actually, Goten, he was entirely correct. Most commercial DVDs are dual layer, and some are even dual layer on two sides (those are really a pain to make backups of.)

That's why when you want to make a backup of most commercial DVDs, you have to lower the audio or visual quality or remove extras to make a movie fit a DVD-R. Most DVD-R discs and drives are only single-layer, with a capacity of about 4.7 GB. They just started releasing dual-layer writers, but they're somewhat expensive and DVD-Rs for them aren't readily available.

P.S.
Somehow, I find your statement reeking of bad figures of speech.

Re:60 times?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not bullshit, but maybe an exaggeration. If you buy a film that has extra features on it or is very long, then that will probably be on a DVD-9 disc. If you want to see what proportion actually are then go into a shop and look, most/all films say whether they are DVD-5 or DVD-9 somewhere.

Re:60 times?

[Anonymous Coward]

Acutally you're the one bullshitting. DVD-9 as a "stamped" format is completely different from the consumer burning technologies, DVD+R DL or DVD-R DL.

Re:60 times?

[anotherzeb]

Who releases movies on Dual Layer?

Let's see - Warner, Disney, erm - everyone really.. Do you know that your mate's single layer DVD recorder won't be able to read your double layer DVD or are you guessing?

Re:60 times?

[rco3]

Really? Reeks of bullshit? That's funny...
 
...because your statement reeks of ignorance. FYI, what's 2 years old is DVD *burners* capable of writing to Dual-Layer discs. Your ancient DVD player does, in fact, read dual-layer mass-produced DVD videos. IOW, you are wrong. Why is it that people on Slashdot feel the need to declaim endlessly on subjects they don't understand, and then jump all over the people who do?

This ought to enlighten you a bit, and hopefully you'll learn to shut up (and do a quick Google) when those more knowledgeable than yourself attempt to educate you. You might wait on using the word "bullshit" until you've checked your facts.

Re:60 times?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think someone forgot to inform you that the dual layer system was a part of the DVD format at its inception.

ALL DVD drives are capable of reading dual layer media. Not all are capable of writing it, though, and that confuses people's little brains.

Best of all

[blindcoder]

And best of all, LVP will support the size with just a single line of code changed!

Does size matter?

[Red Flayer]

Is 300 GB necessary? From a content producer standpoint, I don't want to be able to fit that much content on a single disc... then I can't charge as much for the special 4-disc pre-Christmas release edition.

From a consumer standpoint, I don't need this either, unless I want to archive all my files, in which case it's easier (and cheaper) to have a second hard drive.

I understand there is demand for high-volume storage solutions, but I can't see a mass market for them...

What I do see being very, very useful is the speed upgrade for r/w -- especially for gaming, but I'm sure this applies to other areas as well.

IMO, though, I don't see a big enough demand for this to become profitable for quite a long time -- especially if Bluray or HD-DVD is 'good enough' for the average user.

Re:Does size matter?

[wpiman]

If you build it- they will come.

Re:Does size matter?

[john83]

Yeah, 640K ought to be enough for anybody. ;)

Re:Does size matter?

[timeOday]

Forget the content producer standpoint. People (and companies) have their own data to store. If it were up to content producers there wouldn't be any writable CDs or DVDs in the first place. Content producers never were the driving force behind mass storage, we'd be foolish to let them take it over now with all the restrictions they will implement. Besides, as you say, they only need so much storage, beyond that they won't drive the market.

I don't agree there's no mass market for high volume storage solutions. When writable CD and DVD came along they were high volume, and people bought them. Blu-ray and DV-DVD aren't big enough upgrades, the removable discs are still too small relative to modern hard drives.

Hard drives certainly are good for nightly backups, but it's good to archive data too. Soem think joe sixpack doesn't need high-tech, but today's joe sixpack has an 8 megapixel digicam and a digital camcorder. They have a digital music collection from iTunes or elsewhere. Archiving all this stuff is much harder when you can't simply copy it off to a single disc, write the date on it and be done.

Re:Does size matter?

[dosquatch]

Is 300 GB necessary?

Who's ever going to need more than 640K of RAM? How about that world market for maybe five computers? In fact, there is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home. attributable to Bill Gates (who denies the quote), Thomas Watson, and Ken Olson, respectively

Moore's Law states that computing power and storage density at a given price point doubles every 18 months, which has roughly held to be true. This technology is filling in a required data point on the curve. The quotes above illustrate this lesson of history - just because you can't imagine the need != the need does not exist.

Besides, MS is going to need this to distribute the next version of Windows.

Re:Does size matter?

[Ced_Ex]

Is 300 GB necessary? From a content producer standpoint, I don't want to be able to fit that much content on a single disc... then I can't charge as much for the special 4-disc pre-Christmas release edition.


As if geeks everywhere won't be flocking to the nearest Best Buy to get their One-disc Star Wars Collectors Set.

Re:Does size matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

From a content producer standpoint, I don't want to be able to fit that much content on a single disc... then I can't charge as much for the special 4-disc pre-Christmas release edition.

Sure you do... Think how many DRM rootkits you can fit into 300GB?!

Re:Does size matter?

[kimvette]

Yes, back up a single unreliable 300GB hard drive to another single unreliable 300GB hard drive. Why doesn't everyone do that?

There are plenty of consumer uses for 300GB media, and system backup is only one such use. Other uses include timeshifted television shows (Windows Media Center, MythTV, etc.), photo albums (consumer digital cameras are already up to 12 megapixels, professional at 17.1, and consumer 17.1megapixel cameras are just around the corner), home videos, and heck, why not massively complex video games with truly photorealistic gameplay? It'd be like CD-I (remember those?) on steroids. With the vast amount of storage available you could intermix actual film footage with photorealistic CGI (with proper shading and blending this time around) and have really realistic gaming environments without the CPU hit of having to render the entire environment, and without the restrictive environments one had with the old CD-I games.

Plus; with 300GB media, HDTV films could be shipped with either no compression or very minimal compression - or lossless compression, with headroom to spare for extras. You wouldn't necessarily have to provide 300 hours of footage to fill up the media.

This could also open up a whole new avenue of media distribution, especially for independent music artists. Subscribe to free 300GB sample discs where the samples could be available in (uncompressed) PCM format, and the full content could be unlocked with a key, downloaded into a client app where it could be given to the customer in an unencumbered format of the customer's choice. Perhaps ALL of the content could be delivered and played at a low bitrate as a teaser sort of format (a true try before you buy music medium), from a variety of artists in practically every genre.

Don't limit your imagination with how you currently use 300GB storage devices.

The only problem with this media I see (aside from **AA entanglement destroying it before it gets to market - see Blu-Ray, HD-DVD) is this: By the time it ships, 3TB drives will likely be on the market. How the heck does one back up those suckers?

Re:Does size matter?

[ronanbear]

Just encode your mp3 collection in lossless. Or use it with Tivo to give yourself even more choice. CCTV systems with multiple cameras could do all their backing up into one small system and easily maintain all their data. 300 GB is only a little over 6 times bigger than Blu-Ray (47Gb) and is smaller than some hard drives. Its not difficult to find applications for it. In a few years the market will be there already. Might be especially useful if they sacrifice storage to get much smaller diameter. There'd be a whole new market for disks with the same capacity as Blu-Ray but that could be played in whatever generation of PSP is around at the time.

Re:Does size matter?

[WaxParadigm]

I would run to the store to buy a disc that has ALL of the Simpsons episodes in HD (assuming the series ends at some point and thus "all" is not a moving targt)...or maybe seasons 1-10 then 11-20 (later...and so on) on single disks. Same would be true for others and the Sopranos or some other hit show or content they really like.

Re:Does size matter?

[Mudbone Tosspot]

No one will ever need more than 640KB of memory.

Re:Does size matter?

[MajorYoshi]

Or a 5 meg HD.

Re:Does size matter?

[Catbeller]

Master reels of old films are being scanned in, today, at 4K (4000+) lines of resolution for archival purposes. The film media are deteriorating; it's a pity we couldn't do it before thousands of films faded away in IP vaults. Lucas recorded Star Wars 1-3 in 4K digital; movies in the future will be in 4K format.

Eventually, if a capacious enough media exists, those 4K scans will be released to the consumer market, along with 4K video systems.

Re:Does size matter?

[RISTMO]

I'd think media companies (tv stations, movie producers, etc) would be thrilled for these. I don't know if they back up every broadcast they do, but I'd certainly think that would be neat if they could do so cost-efficiently (for 100 years down the road, to teach 21st century history using interactive video). But imagine just 10 years down the road... Who knows what other new technology might be out? Compression would no longer be a big issue if you could fit 1.6 TB on a single hvd. After trying to fit everything to 700 Megs or 4.5-9 Gigs, that seems like a LOT of space, but if we had the ability to store 30-60x that much on a single disc, I'm sure we could find ways to produce content to store on them. Even dvd's would become outdated in a matter of years. Remember the quality difference between a vhs tape and a dvd? Imagine that same difference between a dvd and a hvd... The reason 1.6 TB seems like so much space is we're judging it based on current standards. But with hvd's, our standards won't have as many limitations.

Re:Does size matter?

[NeMon'ess]

Episode 3 was shot at 1K, not 4K. Yep, 1920x1080, the same as HDTV. There are 4K cameras available, such as from Dalsa, but they haven't been adopted by Hollywood in part because there aren't 4K projectors in theaters. The only reason digital projection looks pretty good these days is the lack of jitter, which blurs away the extra detail in standard 35mm projection.

Re:Does size matter?

[Catbeller]

Interesting. Well, okay, but "4K" scanning is used for archiving old films. And all that data will just fritter away on hard drives, until media and home video tech catches up and then we'll see some use for super-ultra-mega-etc sized media. Won't be for a while tho.

Re:Does size matter?

[fbartho]

How the heck does one back up those suckers?

Two 1.6 TB disks?
*ducks*

Re:Does size matter?

[shmlco]

They'd probably sell five times as many if they could sell a season of "Lost" for $19.95, while at the same time reducing the number of discs down from seven discs to one. And I'd prefer not having dozens of extra discs wasting my shelf space.

Re:Does size matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

640k ought to be enough for anyone! --bill gates
The world need only require two or three computers --TJ Watson
I don't see why we need this much space --you

I could eat up 1.6TB like (sound of fingers snapping) that!
I could scan old photographs at high resolution, and store them.
I could do the same with old films and videos. It all depends on what your needs are. From the free software point of view, you could archive everything over at sourceforge on two or three disks. Another for everything over at GNU, and one more for wikipedia (plus project Gutenburg). There are two main types of storage you can put on these disks: 1. your personal data and 2. public data. Both overwhelm this storage media as 1.6TB is not enough. Every year people keep asking for more storage, and computer companies keep delivering more. Usually they don't deliver 'more' in increments this large, but where do we go from here?

Price sucks though

[locnar42]

I like the part where the discs are going to retail for $100 each. The 1.6TB potential might make it worth it though.

Re:Price sucks though

[Fractl]

$100 for 300GB isn't too bad (about what I'd expect to pay for in a HDD, though). My main concern is the cost of the reader/writer. When DVD burners first came on the scene they'd set you back a few hundred...whenever I'd have enough to get one I just bought a couple 120GB Drives instead. Odds are Hard Drives will remain the cheapest Dollar-per-GB option, and thats what sells me.

Re:Price sucks though

[publius_jr]

Damn, them gonna be some expensive coasters.

Re:Price sucks though

[kimvette]

WORM (CD-R) media once sold for almost that much. Look how quickly the prices came down as defect rates decreased and production increased. Now a CD-R disc can be had for a tiny fraction of the cost of a floppy disk, which has remained at pretty much the same price level for nearly 15 years.

Re:Price sucks though

[Kingrames]

I remember back when zip disks were pretty expensive...

I sure as hell wouldn't mind paying $100 for a floppy that could store my computer's data... what? 10-100 times over?

Re:Price sucks though

[WuphonsReach]

$100 for a rewritable 300GB disc wouldn't be bad. Too expensive for my tastes if it's WORM.

The bigger question is how expensive the drives are going to be.

ASICs

[Andy Dodd]

Plenty of people already do error correction at line speed on gigabit communications links with low power costs. To someone developing coding schemes, storage devices can just be modeled as another communications channel.

It Won't see light of day: Thank you Hollywood

[denis-The-menace]

Once the MPAA, RIAA and every other cultural cartel gets a hold of this, it will die like the DAT tape.

They should just release it as a means of backing up data and then figure out the copy protection.
-We get a new storage medium.
-They squable for 5 years.
-Then *MAYBE* they come out with a larger capacity disks with DRM for TVs/movies

Re:It Won't see light of day: Thank you Hollywood

[wpiman]

It is quite possible now that standards could be developed where they simple ignore the US market. Certainly it is the biggest in the world right now- but if they got flack from the RIAA/MPAA cronies in Congress-- they could simply say- ok- you can't have this great technology. They could sell in Japan, Europe, China, India, etc.... Companies and individuals would see these things saving money/time provided by this media in their overseas operations-- and then they would start hitting their Congresspeople ever harder than the media industry ever could.

Re:It Won't see light of day: Thank you Hollywood

[Taladar]

Yeah, who cares about fucking Very Extreme Super High Resolution Video Bullshit. We just want recordable data media bigger than a percent or so of the largest available harddrives.

Re:It Won't see light of day: Thank you Hollywood

[Zphbeeblbrox]

I don't know about you but if I can store xvid videos at really high resolutions on this and display them on a computer monitor that gets better resolution than my television screen then who cares if there is a "player" for it. Data is Data. I don't technically need a DVD player for my television anymore. Especially since when the television finally dies I'm replacing it with a media PC possibly with a projector. The TV DVD VCR combo setup is on the way out.

Re:It Won't see light of day: Thank you Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

and then they would start hitting their Congresspeople ever harder than the media industry ever could.

Ehh, it seems marketing is all that matters in politics anymore. Let's say a large geek base is pissed we can't get the new 300GB disc. Does congress care about our votes? Why should they when the RIAA/MPAA/etc are happy to give them as much marketing money as they need to gaurentee the votes of the average redneck here in the states. People here don't even seem to care that the current party in power is pro-outsourcing. "They took our jorbs! But at least that fag couple down the street can't get married!"

"But the commercial said this guy is pro-choice! *gasp* I guess I can deal with the collpasing of our economy and bleeding borders as long as that child has the opportunity to grow up in a broken family, free of homosexuals, jobs, and privacy!"

I wish Canada wasn't so freaking cold and socialist.

Re:It Won't see light of day: Thank you Hollywood

[wpiman]

My hope is that companies see their overseas operations operating much more efficiently.

IT Guy: Our pipe is full because we are backing up our systems to our office in Hong Kong.
President: Why don't we back them up here.
IT guy: I can't buy the necessary media legally here.
President: Why not?
IT Guy: Congress passed a law to protect the media industry
President: Let me mention this to Ted Kennedy when I play golf and get liquored up with him on Tuesday.

Re:It Won't see light of day: Thank you Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

This is /. You're supposed to say "Congresscritter," even though it sounds like a weak redneck slur equivelant to "city slicker."

Re:It Won't see light of day: Thank you Hollywood

[denis-The-menace]

I wish Canada wasn't so freaking cold and socialist.

Well there is global warming...

And the only socialist stuff we have is Health Care, welfare, High School and partial funding for Post-HS studies. You can still buy politicians just like in the states but for cheaper and we have fewer watchdog organizations.
Canada, yours to corrupt!

Still not enough to hold my pr0n collection

[gasmonso]

Once someone breaks the petabyte mark, let me know.

gasmonso http://religiousfreaks.com/

Re:Still not enough to hold my pr0n collection

[ichigo 2.0]

Just out of curiosity, where are you keeping your petabyte-sized porn collection ATM? Because if I had a petabyte of data on 116 508 DVDs I would be very interested in moving it to a smaller amount of discs.

Re:Still not enough to hold my pr0n collection

[Anonymous Coward]

"Once someone breaks the petabyte mark, let me know."

Petafiles are nasty people.

Re:Still not enough to hold my pr0n collection

[morgajel]

so if you made an iso, would that make it a peta file?

Slight Change in Size?

[DaedalusLogic]

Even if it is a small change in physical size for the media I'm not too hot on that. I like how our DVD storage is the same size as the previous generation of CDs. The result is that all of my data recorded on CD-R from 8 years ago is still readable and I use it from time to time on our new drives... You can't say that for many other optical or magnetic storage media of odd sizes. Zip Disks, SuperDisks, Jaz Drives... Maybe they're going for a different market, but you think these folks would leave their options open.

There are also good things to be said about leaving the past behind, and not keeping the same physical form factor.

Opinions?

Re:Slight Change in Size?

[birge]

I suspect there's no way to make their drive ever read CDs or DVDs. They are such fundamentally different optics, that it probably doesn't make sense. In fact, there may be no room for it. Unlike a regular CD reader, their holographic optical "pickup" will have to consist of an imaging chip, like the CCD chips in cameras (except my guess is that it will be CMOS). This would make it pretty impossible to cram in extra optics to read CD/DVD discs. So, perhaps they just figured it's time for a clean slate. CDs are way too small anyway! Just when the data density per unit of radius gets good, the damn things stop.

Re:Slight Change in Size?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the holographic disc must be thicker, inserting a 12-cm version into a standard drive could damage it. By making it 13 cm they will prevent people from doing that mistake.

Re:Slight Change in Size?

[tfranzese]

Shouldn't change a thing. As long as the disk is larger, any HVD player could accept DVD/CD as long as the hardware was there for the backwards compatibility. Can your CD/DVD player not play mini variations of the media? Point is, the option is there size difference or not.

Re:Slight Change in Size?

[Anonymous Coward]

Size differences and read/write laser wavelength doohicky issues shouldn't matter at all. Doesn't anyone remember the last generation of Laserdisk players that could also play CDs. Basically there was a smaller indentation in the tray to hold a CD centered, and the transport mechanism had an adapter for grabbing and spinning the CD. Hell, some Laserdisk players had a completely separate mechanism for playing the CD, and subsequently they had 3 indentations in the tray for holding 3 CDs.

Re:Slight Change in Size?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm wondering why they'd bother changing the size. They come up with this super-dense storage that holds way more than other removable discs anyway, and they decide that's still not quite enough so let's make the disc bigger? What's up with that?

Re:Slight Change in Size?

[platyduck]

Backwards compatibility on my DVD drive allows me to read CDs, but not only because they're the same standard size. The mini CDs (for example, three inch ones), used for promotional purposes and such, read just beautifully in most drives, regardless of their smaller size. In the same way, an HVD drive would theoretically read not only larger HVDs, but also the slightly smaller CD/DVDs as well.

Re:Slight Change in Size?

[Generic Guy]

There are also good things to be said about leaving the past behind, and not keeping the same physical form factor.

Personally, I'd prefer if they started making these ultra-dense storage formats smaller. The big pain for me is doing a backup to removable media to store off-site (used to be CD, nowadays DVD) and being able to easily carry it around. A 3-inch format would fit better in a pocket and would still hold probably half at 150Gig.

I know making the disc bigger is the easiest way to holding more data. But once it's not a "convenient" size which won't even fit in a PC drive bay, you may as well take the plunge and make it even more larger. I can imagine a multi-terabyte version on a stack of 18-inch platters much like the old (removable) "hard disks" in 1970's mainframes, with handles on top and everything.

Re:Slight Change in Size?

[log0]

Same here. They should have started by making DVDs 10.3cm in diameter (put a ruler against a VHS cassette if the reason isn't obvious) and consumer high-def video formats should've been held back until using 8cm discs became feasible (the market isn't ready for HD yet anyway).

Ah, they days of microfloppies and compact cassettes. Fit right in your shirt pocket. If only those 8cm DVDRs were cheaper and more abundant.

My MP3 Collection...

[doublem]

I could back up my entire MP3 and iTunes archive on ONE DISK!

WAHOOOOO!!!!!!!!!

Re:My MP3 Collection...

[Anonymous Coward]

300 gigs of music? So you figure what that is probably 60,000 songs or so, if you use 5mbs a song. Then you must have paid errr....$59,400 for all of that music. Right?!!? ^_^

Re:i'm sorry, a slight increase in size is a disas

[Anonymous Coward]

If you could angle it at around 15degrees you could fit it in. Not sure how that would affect the centripetal force as the disc spins though.

Format no longer an issue

[Billosaur]

From vunet.com: The discs, holding 300GB each, use so-called Tapestry holographic memory technology to store data by interference of light. They are also able to read and write data at 10 times the speed of a normal DVD.

From New Scientist: The discs, at 13 centimetres across, are a little wider than conventional DVDs, and slightly thicker. Normal DVDs record data by measuring microscopic ridges on the surface of a spinning disc. Two competing successors to the DVD format - Blu-ray and HD-DVD - use the same technique but exploit shorter wavelengths of light to cram more information onto a surface.

Safe to say that the fight between Blu-ray and HD-DVD has now become moot. The only issue will be getting people to invest in the hardware to play the new disks, but heck, all the guys with huge p0rn collections will drive this market if nothing else.

From New Scientist: Although holographic memory was first suggested in 1963, it has failed to find commercial success so far.

Imagine that. A useful technology sits on the shelf, because business didn't think it was a good idea. 1963! Can you imagine where we would be if this technology was around in the 80's?

Re:Format no longer an issue

[TheSync]

A useful technology sits on the shelf, because business didn't think it was a good idea...imagine where we would be if this technology was around in the 80's

Remember that laser video disk systems were introduced in the 70's-80's and failed to sell. The problem was that the red helium-neon gas lasers required were expensive, and that people wanted recordability. So they bought videotape machines instead.

It is only very recently (last ten years) that we have affordable semiconductor red (and now blue) lasers, and have developed optical systems that are easilly recordable (from the home CD-burner).

Losing all your data

[TeXMaster]

Cool, now I can lose all of my data by just misplacing a single disk. Ain't that grand?

Re:Losing all your data

[cakesy]

Yeah, if only data wasn't some physical quality, and you could copy it to a disk... that would be great!

Re:Losing all your data

[Mondorescue]

That's why you have the grandfather/father/son backup scheme. If you lose one disk and find that another is corrupt, at least you have one good disk. The odds of all three disks being flawed are very small indeed.

Reliability ?

[Wudbaer]

I could imagine that those things would be great for doing backups, but: Will they be reliable ?

When writable DVDs and DVD burners got affordable I was thrilled at first: Finally being able to backup several GB of data to one not too expensive disk instead of on a stack of CD-Rs ! But then reality hit: Compatibility problems between individual brands of burners and brands of media, quality problems with media, even worse durability than CD-Rs; altogether more or less a total gamble if you want to do backups with that stuff. Now my DVD burners collect dust or are mostly used as CD burners only. So what is a high capacity medium good for if it is not reliable besides making expensive coasters and wall clocks ?

Re:Reliability ?

[berck]

Whatever. If you buy decent stuff, there are no problems with DVD media or burners.

Re:Reliability ?

[Wudbaer]

Thought so myself. But the usually very reliable German computing magazine c't ran several tests over last couple of years that showed great quality problems even with expensive brand name media and writers. The results they got strongly depended on the combination of burner and media, and considering that even brand name media often is manufactured by changing OEMs makes selection of a working combination mere luck. Apparently it's slowly becoming better, but still.

Re:Reliability ?

[sbryant]

So what is a high capacity medium good for if it is not reliable besides making expensive coasters and wall clocks ?

That depends on your definition of high capacity, but if you're happy with the amount of data that would fit on a DVD-R, then your answer is DVD-RAM. It's significantly more durable, and it's the only format that drives can read and write at the same time. The +/- RW format disks die eventually, but I've not yet had a DVD-RAM die on me.

-- Steve

Once upon a time...

[Scotteh]

Wow... I used to have a computer that had 10 MB of storage, and now there's discs that have waaaay more than that. Even more than my computer now. Wow...

1.6TB?

[xmedar]

Thats only half of todays UseNet feed, I guess it's going to be one for alt.boneless and another for the rest, then again by the time they arrive the UseNet feed will probably have doubled, I think I'll hang on and wait for a Positronic Matrix to hold a years worth of UseNet, assuming it doesnt come with a Sony Rootkit(TM) of course.

Delete

[Anonymous Coward]

Delete your pr0n.

Bangin' Bucks

[Doc Ruby]

In 1982, I had an Atari 400 (5MHz 8bit 6502) with a tape drive which cost $500. I upgraded its 16KB RAM to 48KB (replacement) for $500, and the tape to an 88KB (double sided) floppy for $500. Now I can get a P4/3.0GHz for $300, a $104 300GB HD, and 1GB RAM for $60. That's 1440x the CPU bandwidth, 16.4Mx the storage, 10.4Mx the memory for a dollar - which is itself worth less than half its value (in noncomputer goods) of a quarter-century ago. And the HD is 1/10th the size (volume), while the other components are about the same size. So it's clear that storage technology has advanced the most during the "PC revolution", by a factor of a thousandfold. The only competing tech is the transformation of my $500 300bps modem and $50:month Compuserve account to a $50 6Mbps DOCSIS modem at $50:month, which is 20-200Kx cheaper for WAN.

I'm all for putting that 300GB into a cheap, tiny device. All the other cheap, even mobile networked computing has created mainstream demand for archive, beyond memory and storage. But I'm betting on it not because storage tech is somehow lagging. I'm betting on it because that industry is by far the highest performing personal computing innovation we've got.

Bah!

[lakrids]

640mb is enough for anyone

if not

delete some porn

Form Factor

[Saint37]

128 megabytes/second should be able to back up without disrupting user experience very much. However, for home PC use with the move to small form factors like the shuttle, I don't see to many people wanting to mess with this unless its cheap and external(i.e. portable). That way I can hide it somewhere and not have to look at it.

http://www.stockmarketgarden.com/

Long as it is a backup device w/o DRM screwups..

[Anonymous Coward]

A backup device like this without DRM features screwing up the design would be most welcome. Let it grow so, solving many backup problems and fostering filesystem search techniques which will make it easier to find things in all that space. Then it may well happen that movie or music companies will want to use a device like this that's widespread, and have to deal with business model changes in order to deal with an open medium. It would be very welcome if such changes could occur (depends on some not-very-original executives having uncommon foresight, alas) and lead to copyright changes to make it possible to in effect have everyman's Library of Congress so that older works of all kinds might be preserved. The only way to preserve culture reliably seems to be to have lots of copies of what is to be preserved, widely distributed enough so that suppression becomes difficult. That is why the Bible has survived, for example, where many works of Sophocles, Anaxagoras, Archimedes, Pythagoras, Eratosthenes, and many others far less well known have not.

Great

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Now I'll have to buy the White album again.

Re:i'm sorry, a slight increase in size is a disas

[vertinox]

You can't fit a 13cm disc drive into a standard enclosure! Who do they think they're going to sell these to!

SysAdmins with turntables?

Re:i'm sorry, a slight increase in size is a disas

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not? Old floppies are 13.33cm in diameter.

Not really

[everphilski]

Safe to say that the fight between Blu-ray and HD-DVD has now become moot.

Not really. The media is bigger - it won't fit in a standard 5 1/4" drive bay. Which means a new (bigger) drive bay or only external drives. Neither appealing options. Or shrinking the drives (which is also acceptable and will probably be done). Also this has only been done on a lab scale and no research has been done on the data loss / skip / durability whereas BlueRay/HD-DVD are using CDROM/DVD processes which are well known and well quantified. Its also not known whether the supporting hardware for a holographic drive will fit in a standard drive bay once they shave the discs down to size. Don't place any bets on it beatint out BlueRay or HD-DVD.

-everphilski-

Re:Not really

[Billosaur]

Its also not known whether the supporting hardware for a holographic drive will fit in a standard drive bay once they shave the discs down to size.

Why does the technology have to be a slave to a drive bay's size? If this technology is robust enough and delivers the performance/storage gains enumerated, then why won't computer manufacturers go to the expedient of updating their cases to accomodate it? 300 Gb of storage is too seductive to simply let go because of the inconvenience of the media size. And I suspect they can refine the media to fit current technology if it proves cost effective. Of course if they had to shave 300 Gb down to say 250 Gb, how a great a loss would that be?

I think it's easy to say that Blu-Ray and HD-DVD may temporarily have to tangle, but if this technology pans out, they won't have to fight for long. The whole holographic concept is light-years ahead.

Re:Not really

[everphilski]

Why does the technology have to be a slave to a drive bay's size?

Because it changes the size of the PC's case. The 5 1/4" disc drive hasn't changed since I was a child... it has outlasted so many changes in media, PC slots, etc... the disc will be resized before the drive is. But again, also note no mention is made as to the size of the support hardware. If we are really pulling millions of bits of information at a time (versus 1 bit in a traditional drive) you'd think the head would be bigger, along with the cabling, the mount, the motor, and the hardware required to interpret the data... it may not fit in a drive bay any way you slice it.

The whole holographic concept is light-years ahead.

Light years of development don't happen overnight.

-everphilski-

Re:Not really

[Billosaur]

Because it changes the size of the PC's case. The 5 1/4" disc drive hasn't changed since I was a child... it has outlasted so many changes in media, PC slots, etc... the disc will be resized before the drive is. But again, also note no mention is made as to the size of the support hardware. If we are really pulling millions of bits of information at a time (versus 1 bit in a traditional drive) you'd think the head would be bigger, along with the cabling, the mount, the motor, and the hardware required to interpret the data... it may not fit in a drive bay any way you slice it.

The holographic drive is still using lasers for read/write, just in a new way, so I doubt the head will be that much bigger, except for the necessity of a beam spliter used to create the interference patterns. I really don't see anything here to indicate a major change in the way the technology works, just how its applied to the medium and the medium itself changing to accept the patterns. As a matter of fact, given that file sizes are large but not that large in most cases and the drive's supposed write speed, the head may not have to work as hard. There's not enough in the article to tell, but I'm extrapolating from current design.

And while the 5-1/4 inch drive bay still exists the drive that gave the bay its name is long gone. So why is it so important to stick with it? Give designers some more flexibility, and who knows what kind of desktops they might create. And in case you haven't noticed, very few laptops have 5-1/4 inch bays and they pack the same number of features into more compact forms, including CD/DVD drives. The need to miniaturize and make components fit into new configurations is a great driver of technological innovation and should not be discounted.

Re:Not really

[Anonymous Coward]

13 cm is 5.12 inches. Now why wouldn't this fit in a 5.25 inch drive bay?

Re:Not really

[everphilski]

And in case you haven't noticed, very few laptops have 5-1/4 inch bays

If you measure the width, on most notebooks its the same as their desktop counterparts. The height is obviously condensed. My point is, look at history. While the software moves rapidly and the electronics move at a slightly slower rate the actual physical hardware moves at a very slow rate. I could stick the PC I bought 2 months ago into the 8088 case in my basement. Only mod I'd have to do is make screwholes for the motherboard.

-everphilski-

Think about a misburn...

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't tell you how many times I have had malfunctions burning CDs and DVDs over the years. Not to count the number of CDs that have been scratched, dropped, or broken. Luckily the media has always been relatively cheap, so even to lose a DVD or two back in the early days wasn't the end of my bank account. At 100 USD a pop the cost of losing one of these is just too great...

Count me out until generation two...

Thinking, boxes, ect...

[Kattana]

People are thinking about this the wrong way, do not think of it as a oversized DVD, think of it as a write once hdd. You put a 1.6TiB hdd in and send journaling/logging data to it, or dump backups or static files. When its full swap it out, putting it in a zip disk type casing to protect the TiBs of data might be a good idea in this case. Or if they are cheap enough just swap out the entire holohdd. Finaly all the /.ers will have an easy way to access all their pr0n. But seriously thats exactly what this is good for, keeping vast ammounts of static media/data accessable.

What?

[george_slater]

I'm a little confused by some of the responses I'm seeing here. It seems most people think that this new technology would be a bad thing? The largest complaint I've seen so far is: "What if I lose the disk?" I don't know about you guys, but for me this isn't much different then anything else in the world. If your backup is important... don't lose it!

If needed, I have some handy solutions to solve the "How do I not lose my disk" problem.

1. Put it some place that you can remember.
2. If it's super important, make two backups.
3. Tie a string around your finger to remind you to always remember where you put your disk.
4. Ask somebody more responsible than yourself to watch over it for you.

And if none of these work...

5. Buy a small cable. Run the cable through the hole in the center of the disk. Buy a small padlock. Padlock the cable around a large object. Make multiple copies of the padlock key and tape them in various places.

Obviously this is not practical, but it is about as practical as thinking that a new technology is bad because you might misplace it.

Re:What?

[insignificant1]

I agree, the response to this incredible new (as in consumer-ready) technology on this forum is completely ridiculous. Like people are offended at something new...

But offense at something truly new may actually be a common thread on this site; even self-described computer nerds are, analogously, too caught up in religion to accept heliocentricity!

Re:What?

[Generic Guy]

It seems most people think that this new technology would be a bad thing? The largest complaint I've seen so far is: "What if I lose the disk?"

It's even more silly an argument when you think about current backups schemes.

• If you're current system spans several discs... "What if I lose a disc?" -- Answer: Well, you're still pretty screwed.
• I use tape... "What if I lose the tape?" -- Answer: Well, you're still pretty screwed.
• I use redundant mirrored RAID drives, and swap them out periodically for archival, "What if I lose a HDD?" -- Answer: Well... you get the idea.

The fact that your entire backup can fit on one disc doesn't really change the main issues of backups. In fact, I'd think a single disc is much easier to make sure the backup actually runs and finishes (especially for un-attended backup) and can be easily duplicated to a second 'backup backup' disc.

Redundancy != backup

[mangu]

I want to archive all my files, in which case it's easier (and cheaper) to have a second hard drive.

That works fine until you erase the wrong directory and the same directory in the second drive gets automatically erased at the same time. Or your computer catches fire. Or a virus. There are many ways a redundant disk can be fried.

"Backup" means having copies outside of your computer. Ideally you should store indefinitely copies for each year, so you can go back to the status you had in the past, if needed. For the last twelve months you should have one copy for each month, for the last month one copy for each day, making it 42 different copies of your system for the last year alone. Better yet, have two different sets of backups, the other held at a secure remote place, to be used in case a fire destroys your installation.

Of course, from a consumer point of view one need not be as careful as that, but I do have several different backup copies of my files from the past. The oldest versions are in diskettes, when my data volume grew too much to fit in a reasonable number of diskettes I switched to Zip drives and later to CD-R. I still keep my old Zip drive in a drawer, to be used if for any reason, I feel the need to recover one of those disks.

It's an unfortunate fact that backup media never seems to keep up with storage media capacity, I would gladly buy a drive capable to record 300 GB in a disk the size of a CD/DVD.

Laser Disc

[paco3791]

"Are said to hold 300GB of data, 60 times that of a conventional DVD with only a slight increase in size."

So the real question is will it fit in my laser lisc player.

Expert doubts it's on track

[fedrive]

http://p2pnet.net/story/7124

The drive is huge!

[Anonymous Coward]

Go watch the 'inside the box' video on the inphase website - the drive they're demo-ing is bigger than one of those small-form factor computers. And it doesn't matter if the disc if slightly bigger or not - it's encased in a big ol' shell, like dvd-ram discs were.

Another step forward

[Justifiable_Delusion]

People keep wondering what the next big thing will be that drives computer one step forward again. CD Roms were one of those steps. Big harddrives were a big step. Routers that could easily be setup at home. Wireless. Badass soundcards. Kickass 3D graphics. The list goes on and on of significant things.

This potentially, if moved correctly, could change it again. A 1TB drive mid to late next year. Access speeds blowing everything out of the water. The harddrive bottlenexk could dissapear soon. Imagine near instant read write speed.

I am enjoying the technological march forward. Flash memory harddrives just might get left in the dust...so sad...not really...but sorta.

Go tech!

Re:Another step forward

[Anonymous Coward]

ooh ooh when do you think the cassandra hd will com out? you know the device that sits in your computer and by predicting the future will already have every bit you need as soon as it is manufactured, no data storage required it simply predicts the future and maybe the interface will be a 1gig hd so your current pc can read it and it will simply put the data you require on that drive 10 secconds before you need it. no transfers either, it will predict what you would have transfered had it not already been on your computer already. the mpaa and riaa must be sitting on this technology to prevent you from having the entire cut of any future film or song and producing the band your self before any label has even heard of it. just be sure not to lookup your death date as it may cause some stress in trying to figure a way to prevent it.

speed

[Tom]

Not to mention the drives themselves can read and write at ten times the speed a normal DVD drive.

They better do. If they hold 90 times more data, then 10 times more speed isn't a feature, it's required.

Post Office Bandwidth

[goombah99]

Once again, the post-office will become the king of high latency high bandwidth. Hollywood should quake in their boots over this, not on-line file sharing.

  If these things are inexpensive enough ond can imagine peer-to-peer postal networks popping up. Say you record half of something on on DVD, and you send it to someone. They send you back half of something, and then you send the other half and so-on. tit for tat.

The problem with the above concept is that it requires the sender and the receiver to actually haveing something each other actually wanted to exchange. But if the disks get big enough you could easily put many things on them increasing the probability that one or more things on their will be something someone else wants to share. It costs you no extra postage to send 1 thing as 100 things now.

So this might blow that wide open. And sharing 100 to 1000 movies per 32 cent stamp, or sharing every single top 40 song for the last 100 years on a single Disk and it wont take long before everyone has every song and movie.

Re:Post Office Bandwidth

[Samus]

Something tells me there are pretty bad punishments for using the U.S. Post Office to commit a crime. Uncle Sam tends to frown on using him to commit a crime unless of course you are a member of congress or the president. Then it's only a problem if the people find out.

Re:Post Office Bandwidth

[Anonymous Coward]

It's already 5 years in jail for copying a dvd per incident. If you sent 100 movies that's 500 years. How much worse can using the post office be after that?

Re:Post Office Bandwidth

[Surt]

Sharing your personal recordings of shows off tv isn't a crime. You can even legally lend or give as a gift your dvd movies to your friends.

Re:Post Office Bandwidth

[lawpoop]

"Once again, the post-office will become the king of high latency high bandwidth. Hollywood should quake in their boots over this, not on-line file sharing."

This kind of networking has probably been going on unabated during the whole P2P revolution. However, I don't think anyone who was getting songs off of napster will now start hooking up with people to trade data over the post office. For one, you are now entering a realm of federal bad mojo. The post office has a long history of traking down and punishing any kind of shady dealings happening in the post office. Compare this with the untraceable wild west of anonymous internet P2P networks, with no legal precedent.

" If these things are inexpensive enough ond can imagine peer-to-peer postal networks popping up. Say you record half of something on on DVD, and you send it to someone. They send you back half of something, and then you send the other half and so-on. tit for tat."

That involves a lot of busy work that the computer used to be doing for you while you slept. I'm sorry, I can't see anyone taking that up except for compulsive nerds trying to complete their collection.

Re:Post Office Bandwidth

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering it takes a days to download a typical imperfectly popular 4 gig movie over bittorrent, not to mention tieing up my computer, i'd say or getting 100 movies delivers in days for a 37 cent stamp is a lot less busy work.

Re:Post Office Bandwidth

[crlove]

You know the postal service is in trouble when no one notices that a stamp has cost more than 32 cents for several years now.

Re:Post Office Bandwidth

[Fordiman]

Better version of your sig:
I'm getting really tired of people bitching and whining endlessly about the lengths of signatures. Isn't 120 chars enoug

(Actually IS 120 chars long)

Re:Post Office Bandwidth

[Guppy06]

The FBI has other things to take care of, everything from organized crime to "counter-intelligence." The Postal Inspectors, though, are an independent law enforcement arm that literally has nothing better to do than investigate crimes that involve US mail.

On the other hand, unlike with your friendly neighborhood ISP and DMCA notices, so long as those discs are sent First Class, Priority or Express Mail (i. e. not Media Mail), it's going to take an honest-to-God warrant from a federal judge before they're allowed to see what it is you're sending. Even with Medial Mail, I'm pretty sure they're only allowed to inspect the contents to ensure that you really are sending media.

Re:Post Office Bandwidth

[Guppy06]

"So this might blow that wide open. And sharing 100 to 1000 movies per 32 cent stamp,"

Yeah... the fact that you don't even know the price of a stamp for a first class letter (currently $0.37, going to $0.39 next month) demonstrates just how prevalent this thinking is: little to none.

The problem with the USPS is that it requires people to get out of their chairs and walk out to their mailboxes, thereby exposing themselves to actual sunlight. People are inherently lazy.

It doesn't matter the size of media for movies

[Sonar]

For data backup purposes, 300GB would be great. I find myself burning off about 5 DVD's a week worth of data and I can't keep up.

However, once we start thinking about the new kinds of technologies for video distribution, therein lies the problem. For now, say you can put 4 episodes of a television show on 1 DVD. So now, we have 7 DVD's for one television season, plus 9 seasons. Movie studios will not give up that business model. Each of those 4 episodes sells for $35-$50. What happens when all of the sudden you can put the entire series on one HVD or HD-DVD or Blue-ray disc? It won't happen. They will make "higher quality" versions of the same media and still find some way to put 4 episodes on one disk.

What I really want is to spend $50 on an entire television series, with 1 - 5 discs. That is all.

Re:i'm sorry, a slight increase in size is a disas

[Surt]

Wow, actually that's an interesting idea I hadn't thought of, thanks for posting, even if AC.

FMD?

[Urza9814]

Does this remind anyone else of FMDs [webopedia.com]? Didn't those kinda fail completely?

Yet another reason not to choose Blu-Ray

[Misagon]

If content providers and hardware manufacturers are going to invest a whole lot of money on BluRay they are not going to be very keen on investing in HVD for some time..
HD-DVD costs less right now, so that would be a better choice right now.. if at all.

Why rip CDs anymore?

[Hao Wu]

It will soon be just as economical to store one's albums as AIFFs and not degrade them with compressed formats.

Sharing them will still be an issue (due to bandwidth), but still....

60 times the size, 6 times the speed?

[Short Circuit]

So, what, it'll take 10 times longer to burn than a full DVD?

Great...And I still haven't bothered to get a DVD burner, partly for the same reason with respect to CDs.

Re:60 times the size, 6 times the speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

At 10x the recording speed, that's still only an hour - not too shabby for the amount of data being written.

I remember when it took almost 30 minutes to write a CDROM!

Re:60 times the size, 6 times the speed?

[Short Circuit]

It still takes me 30 minutes to burn a CDROM, because SCSI emulation doesn't seem to work on my computer.

Well, lately, neither the SCSI nor ATAPI methods seem to work. I suspect a bad drive, but don't have a replacement drive to test with.

Until we get the writers, this is 100% irrelevant.

[DroopyStonx]

Hell, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD don't even have writers yet.

Until they do, the storage capacity is completely irrelevant. Otherwise, how is it useful to the counsumer?

10 years ago

[imsabbel]

I could make TWO complete backups of my Hard drive on a single CD-r.

Today, i would need 50 Dual layer DVDs....

I, for my part, would welcome 300GB discs, or even 3TB discs.

Also, there is no need to push them everywhere. Or do you see all those cds dying out because of dvds (who could also store the audio)?

What happened to BlueRay and HD-DVD

[guru8376]

Is this the tech that will replace BlueRay and HD-DVD? It's funny that this big format war might be over something that is already obsolete.

Do we need BluRay if we've got this?

[sstidman]

If this is really coming out in 2006, is there any point to BluRay or HD-DVD?

For the love of God...why BIGGER physical size?

[IWorkForMorons]

It seems for the past 20 years everyone has been stuck on the size of CDs. Even with DVDs and now these HVDs, the physical size has stayed the same. I know...everyone is use to that size. But that's not what I've been promised in all the not-so-distant-future movies. Discs used in those movies, if they use discs at all instead of some SD stick looking thing, are the size of GameCube discs. THAT's what I'm waiting for. Small, easily carried, easily pocketed. Sony's MiniDiscs weren't a bad idea, but that flopped. So we're stuck with these huge discs. When is someone going to bring out small discs and then work on storage capacity from that point on?

Holy Holographics! 8,000GB Hard Drives!

[transami]

Might we expect Hologrpahic Hard Drives in a few years? Lets see... a 5 layer drive, 1.6TB x 5 = 8TB = 8000GB! Eight Thousand Gigabytes!

Then again given the nature of Holograhics, why mess with disk layers? Just use a holobrick. I can't even imagine how much more data that would hold.

Re:Holy Holographics! 8,000GB Hard Drives!

[beeps]

Might we expect ...8000GB!

Obligatory countdown statement: Nah, 300GB discs should be big enough for anyone.

Hey, WTF?!

[Eli Gottlieb]

I submitted this story on Friday, and it was rejected! Is there a high-karma requirement on getting an article accepted or something?

Re:Hey, WTF?!

[MaskedSlacker]

No, but you do have to give CowboyNeal a few favors first.

Re:Hey, WTF?!

[Eli Gottlieb]

Well fuck me harder, nepotism on Slashdot.

Re:i'm sorry, a slight increase in size is a disas

[Cochonou]

5.25" = 13.34 cm.
Why wouldn't you be able to fit a disc having a diameter of 13cm in a 5.25" enclosure ?

Re:i'm sorry, a slight increase in size is a disas

[hackstraw]

You can't fit a 13cm disc drive into a standard enclosure! Who do they think they're going to sell these to!

Laser disk diehards!

Great

[TarrySingh]

all I need is a thin Disk to smuggle all of the corporate data to it's rivals ;-)

Missed the point.

[DrYak]

I think you missed the point of holo-discs.

Holographs contains lots of different view of the *same* object (depending on the angle) to provide a 3D effect.
Holo-disc contain lots of *dirrerent* data sets (depending on the angle) to increase the data capacity.

If a holograph is broken in one part, you can still see the *same object* from another point of view by looking at a different angle.
But if you read a holodisc "from another angle" you get another *different* part of the 1.600 Tb.

FLAC

[Anonymous Coward]

Some people already use FLAC and similar lossless music compression algorithms. It's unlikely you'd go with AIFF when you could half the space needed.

Backup technology is dead

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

Sorry, but even a 300gb holographic disk, as cool as it sounds, is too little, too late, especially with a 20mb/s transfer rate. This would take 40+ hours to backup a typical desktop hard drive, this is NOT exceptional by any measure of the word.

Simply put, tape and physcial media backup is a dead concept. With the fact that most common desktop drives exceed the storage capacity of a tape backup, and the fact that it is dirt cheap to get a 200gb+ hard drive, the 'new' way to backup is to setup an offsite SAN and stream your data over the internet.

With the cheapness of hard drives, it is easy to setup terrabyte RAID systems, completely with stripe sets, mirroring, and redundancy to create a robust and efficient "live" backup system, have your data uploaded during off peak times, or even in the middle of the day. As long as someone keeps an eye on the fitness of the drives in your system, there is no reason to perform physical backups to static media.

This announcement comes about 5 years too late. And while there may be some applications of this technology, I think it will fail to catch on and simply become one of those technologies that has been leaped frogged before it even hits the shelves.

Re:Until we get the writers, this is 100% irreleva

[physman_wiu]

They already have Blu-ray writers out in Japan dumb-ass. They've had tehm for the better part of a year now.

Stability?

[Sw0rdfiche]

The capacity and speed issues are wonderful. But how stable is the medium? Magnetic media was good for five years minimum. DVDs are good for about twenty before delamination issues threaten the data. In truth there is no stable medium for data. Paper has a better longevity. The best longevity is still clay tablets, but not very practical for the volume of data we need to secure.

Having dealt with data retention for a good 20 years now, I am concerned that whenever there is news of a breakthrough in storage media, it is all about capacity and speed and nothing is said about stability and longevity.

It's great to know how fast the car will go and how much you can haul, but when will the wheels fall off?

How much critical data from our era will acutally survive? I know, how much of it SHOULD survive? That is a different issue, one also faced by data archivists. Let's leave that one alone for now. The burning issue for me is, if I WANT it to survive 200 years, is there a storage medium I can use to insure that? Or do I just make sure there is a clean printout that I seal in a zip lock bag. ( almost joking here...)

How many...

[Cunjo]

then, would it take to hold the Quasi-ultimate Star Trek Collection?

It will never be cheap enough

[unfortunateson]

Even if it fits in current enclosures, it will never be a consumer-grade product like DVD-RW is now. Home DVD-RW for home theater just dropped below $100, and internal drives for desktops are under $30. Blu-Ray/HD-DVD could get there in 5 years (doubtful, as HD will remain a premium item for most of that time).

Until there is a demand for prerecorded media with 300GB on it, there won't be the impetus to make these items cheap. They'll remain in the computer-room-only expensive category.

What might make this technology fly is not a 300GB, 13cm platter, but a PSP UCD-sized disk for portable media with, day, 20GB on it. However, I suspect that falling flash memory prices will overtake this too quickly for it to have much impact on portable media players, camcorders, etc.

It will be valuable and marketable to the server room customers, but don't expect Dell to include these babies in a $399 desktop for at least 6 years.

How is read/write working ?

[Cochonou]

In holographic media, read and write operations are usually done using different laser wavelengths. You use a "recording" wavelength to record an interference pattern in the media, and a "reading" wavelength which will diffract into the interference pattern and restore the original image.
These wavelengths need to be different because holographic materials work like photographic films. If you try to read the hologram with a wavelength to which the holographic material is sensitive, you will destroy the interference pattern, and therefore the data.
Wikipedia states that a 532nm laser is used for both reading and writing operations. That means they use a different way to store the hologram. Would anyone have more information about this ?

Re:How is read/write working ?

[StikyPad]

From this article, it sounds like two beams (well, 1 split beam) are used for writing, whereas only 1 beam is used for reading. Also "By varying the reference beam angle, wavelength, or media position many different holograms can be recorded in the same volume of material."

Of course it's written by a reporter who may or may not have a firm grasp of the material.

Re:i'm sorry, a slight increase in size is a disas

[Surt]

That leaves you only .34 cm cushion, or .17 cm cushion per side. That's a very tight fit, and doesn't leave much room for vibration cushions. So assuming they overcome that, they then just have to deal with the fact that everywhere in creation that sells or packages media is set up for cd/dvd sized media, and now they'll be left fighting against that. In all seriousness, they should have cut back to 280GB and gone with standard format size. When a small company is trying to launch a new storage product, doing battle in the realm of physical format is stupid, particularly if your strategy is 'bigger' rather than 'smaller'.

By the time this is ready, it won't be enough

[davidwr]

1982 - 10GB HD, 360KB floppies, ~30 units/backup
2005 - 80GB HD for typical box, 4.7GB DVDs, ~17 units/backup

By the time the 300GB holo-dvd rolls around, typical PCs will have at least 3TB of storage.

Re:By the time this is ready, it won't be enough

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no way you had TEN GIGABYTES of storage in 1982... your 8 bit cpu couldn't count that high anyway.

Re:Until we get the writers, this is 100% irreleva

[DroopyStonx]

They already have Blu-ray writers out in Japan dumb-ass

Does it look like I'm from Japan?

Personally, I wouldn't go around trying to insult people when you obviously aren't too bright yourself ;)

The new portable hard drive

[Eli Gottlieb]

With these things around - and given the read/write speeds we're being promised - I think they're angling to just replace magnetic hard drives. Think about it: you carry all your data on an HVD in your wallet with you which contains software that can adapt itself to different hardware configurations and just boot "your computer" on whatever machine you damn well please!

And imagine what we'll be able to do with multiple layers!

Or even wilder, what about using holographic media as nonvolatile RAM?

Re:i'm sorry, a slight increase in size is a disas

[CubicleView]

I'm sure if you asked a woman she'd disagree... but back on topic it'd be nice if it was smaller but I don't see any particualar reason to limit them to DVD size. You can't fit a tape backup into a standard 5 inch bay either. Its not a DVD, so it has it's own standard for size. And since it's for data backup I'd go for bigger is better. At 13 cm its still smaller than a tape at least.

I, for one, welcome our Oversized Overlords.

[Anonymous Coward]

These things come in cartridges. They really do not care about existing media.

10 times the speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

10 times the speed divided by 60 times larger = 6 times slower. And as these disks will probably be terribly expensive, you won't be writing anything les than a full disk. Let us hope they are multi-session capable at the very least. But otherwise, onward and upward!

p.s.: if the word in the image isn't even human recognizable, then you should probably figure something else out.

Burn two discs, you moron

[irritating environme]

Yeah, that's "Funny"

Re:Until we get the writers, this is 100% irreleva

[Widowwolf]

Hey idiot its called doing some research before opening your yap. Next time use some common sense before trying to make invalid points.

Definitely not meant for home users.

[Dual_View]

I'm sorry, but this sounds more than a little problematic. At ten times the write speed of a normal DVD, it sounds like buffer underruns would be the rule rather than the exception, unless you were able to use a medium-sized hard drive as a buffer. That means that you're looking not so much at the problem of disc errors from the drive's own hardware, but rather from disc errors because existing hardware can't keep up with it. It would be nice if write speeds could be decreased for compatibility, but this topic hasn't seem to come up yet AFAIK. ((I am not an expert; I'm just saying what I've read.) CD and DVD burners have this ability, but if HVD's depend on such a parallelized method for writing data, then who knows?)

And yes, I agree with the person who complained the loudest at the fact that the discs are larger. (I'll let you argue among yourselves over which of you that was.) After you invent a disc that can hold that much information, making the concession of perhaps even 20% capacity per disc so that the drive fits in existing computer cases is an excellent tradeoff. An important thing about all the other well-known breakthroughs in computer hardware is that it didn't require everything else to radically conform to the new standard it offered. If I want to build a state-of-the-art box with one of these drives in it, I should not have to make major allowances for this device like I would for...say, the motherboard and processor (32 or 64 bit?) or the graphics card (PCI-Express? Maybe also an AGP port for a legacy card?).

If the drive has to be larger, then so does the case. Consequently, you have to have specially-resized versions of existing CD and DVD drives, and other optical devices that were originally designed for another size. (At the very least, you would need an adapter kit to make a smaller device fit properly inside a larger bay.) Only a manufacturer with arrogance that rivals that of Microsoft would require perfectly-good standards to be rewritten just for them.

So, while I would be one of the first to welcome this technology, I still think it requires a bit more thought before the public should get their hands on it.

Re:i'm sorry, a slight increase in size is a disas

[FlyByPC]

**measures a nearby DVD-RW drive**

14.8cm across. Giving you 9mm on either side for clearance. Sure, you'd have to redesign media holders, but a drive for these things could fit nicely in a standard 5.25" bay. No problem at all, and no need to angle it.

To back up... what?

[Dr. Spork]

I looked over what's on my hard drives and realized that all the data that I need (original stuff I couldn't replace) fits on a 4.5GB DVD, or five if I really relax my standard of what I mean by "need" and "couldn't replace". I bought blank DVDs at US18c/each on sale at Best Buy. I'm really not itching for a better home backup solution. Am I really that different from the typical home user?

I'm not saying that this technology would find no customers. People that work with images or video need to save raw backups sometimes, and I've heard of terabyte databases, sure. But what are we ordinary people supposed to do with this at home? Look, it's already easy to be a pack rat when hard drives cost 30c/Gig, but making backups of all the stuff I rat away seems downright neurotic.

Recently I thought I lost my hard drive with 320 Gigs of data. All I had was a backup of my OS/programs partition (1.5G compressed) and a DVD of personal files. I was unhappy about losing the data, but not miserable. It felt like my basement flooded and destroyed all the junk that I never use anyway. Well, turns out that I rescued the hard drive and all the data - and now the data just sits there again. But am I not really typical in having this blase relationship to data?

Re:Until we get the writers, this is 100% irreleva

[DroopyStonx]

Funny, do a lil search on Google for them. There's a reason they don't come up for sale in Froogle or any other retailer. Know why? They aren't out for general consumer use yet. I swear you people are fucking retarded. How can you sit there and try to tell me something exists that doesn't *laugh*

If you feel the points are invalid, by all means, prove them wrong instead of being bitter little ass about it. Go on, provide a link to a place that sells blu-ray writers.

Vaporware does not count. "But they'll be out soon," does not count.

My original point is actually pretty valid. You have to use common sense, basic reading comprehension, and rather common knowledge in technology to figure it out and make sense of it. Here, I'll repeat it for you:

Hyping the next best thing in thinking it'll be out in "just a few years" is pointless since the next best thing (blu-ray/HD-DVD haven't) even made their way into mainstream use. Does your home player play blu-ray/HD-DVD? Nope, nor do the majority of consumers.

If you don't agree with it, provide insightful comments and your position, otherwise move the fuck on. No need to make yourself look like an ass by throwing a cyber-tantrum "OMFG THAT'S NOT TRUE U IDIOT ROLFL".

Re:Until we get the writers, this is 100% irreleva

[Widowwolf]

Funny within 1 minute i was able to find this ... http://www.blu-ray.com/faq/#1.11...as you see from thier own FAQ it says they are availible in japan and several companys have them for sale (that are not prototype models..All that in less then 1 minute..

Slow down, buddy...

[tgd]

5mhz?

The 400 and 800 were tied to the NTSC clock, and were 1.8mhz.

What a dream 5mhz would've been back then! That would've nearly tripled the amount of stuff one could do during a HBI or VBI.

I still have all that stuff in storage, but the serial cables to plug it all together have gone bad over the years.

Re:Slow down, buddy...

[Doc Ruby]

Yes, and thanks for the excuse to revisit _De Re Atari_, the original hacker's cookbook. The initial experience programming such a little multiprocessing OS definitely set me off on the right track. And the dearth of documentation of its powerful facilities (until and excluding De Re Atari) gave me the DIY hacker mentality that I cherish to this day.

The data you store is the deciding factor.

[bigtallmofo]

Recently I thought I lost my hard drive with 320 Gigs of data. All I had was a backup of my OS/programs partition (1.5G compressed) and a DVD of personal files. I was unhappy about losing the data, but not miserable.

Just a guess here - you probably lost a ton of MP3s that you downloaded off the Internet, maybe some commercial movies, stuff like that? I wouldn't be so heartbroken over that either.

On the other hand, I have 5 gigabytes of pictures from my digital cameras going back to 1998. I can't imagine losing that history. Since my son was born 15 months ago, I have over 90 gigs of movie files from my Mini-DV camcorder. Again, I can't imagine losing that history. How do I back up? I have a workstation and server at home. The workstation is the main copy and has two hard drives in it. It automatically copies the things I have in the "vault" from hard drive 1 to hard drive 2 nightly. Then it automatically copies from hard drive 1 to a hard drive on the server also nightly. Then once per month I backup the "vault" files onto a removable USB drive. Then once per year I back up everything onto data DVDs.

Royal pain in the butt, but it's unacceptable for me to lose a byte of this information.

Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sick of all the "Now I'll lose everything!" response to higher capacity storage devices.

Can they EVER win?

[greyjoy]

That's really going to hurt when you can back up all your photos, videos and data onto one disc, and then lose it! At least if you back up to cd destroying or losing one disk isn't a disaster.

Now it's TOO convenient to back up data?

Let's switch back to backing up systems with floppy disks. That way, destroying or losing one disk won't be a disaster!

This attitude is tiresome.

[bigtallmofo]

think about this regularly, and estimate that a 1.2 TB hard disk -- something the size of a paperback book in another couple years -- would be sufficient to hold most of my life [...] every paper I wrote in a 25-year career

Every time this subject comes up, I'm amazed at people's attitudes and misconceptions. You're obviously storing a bunch of text and can't imagine anyone storing anything else. That's fine for you. Ask anyone that has a Mini-DV camcorder and stores videos of their kids on the computer. 100 GB is nothing and a year's worth of video could easily be several TB.

You're not using multimedia right now. We get it. Just trust me that large file storage capacities are needed by many people today, and many more tomorrow. Probably even you.

Re:This attitude is tiresome.

[michael_cain]

Ask anyone that has a Mini-DV camcorder and stores videos of their kids on the computer. 100 GB is nothing and a year's worth of video could easily be several TB.

Seriously, I know I don't think in video terms, and I'm trying to understand this and just how common a phenomenon it is or will be (that is, is your "many" 50% of the population, or 1%?). Compressed reasonably, variable-bit-rate home video runs maybe 2.4 Mbps, and may average less (standard-def DVDs peak at 10 Mbps, and average about half that). That's 300 KBps, or just about 1 GB per hour. Then 1 TB is about 1000 hours of home video, or a little over 2.7 hours per day for a year. Put another way, it's the equivalent of about 500 standard-play VHS tapes per year. Are people shooting that much video? Are they storing it using less compression? Are they shifting to high-def and its much higher bit-rate requirements? One of the more interesting questions is, given say 3000 hours of content, how do people find things?

Re:This attitude is tiresome.

[bigtallmofo]

or just about 1 GB per hour

This likely explains the gap. I just transferred a 60 minute Mini-DV tape to my computer yesterday. The label on the tape was "Fall 2005" and encompassed about 1 month worth of filming my family. The video file it created was 15 gigs.

I am not a video codec expert but from zipping the Mini-DV files, I know they are already compressed with a lossless compression format because they don't compress anymore. I store the file in its original form (Mini-DV) because hey, someday I may need that original form and I know that I'll likely regret having selected a lossy compression algorithm (like MPEG2 or MPEG4).

Then 1 TB is about 1000 hours of home video

Reduce your estimate by a factor of 15 and 1 TB = 66 hours of home video. This is not outside the realm of possibility especially when you consider that in addition to the original files I often make DVD movies to send to relatives that might have a sound track along with video and pictures on it.

Add a 5+ megapixel still camera and moderate use and you're looking at some really serious storage needs that make 1 TB look woefully inadequate pretty quickly.

Re:Until we get the writers, this is 100% irreleva

[ashitaka]

OK, you aren't from Japan, and I would also assume you don't read Japanese. Regardless, consumer Blue-Ray recorders exist and are available for sale in Japan and thus are not vapour. here is one example. How long they take to become available in the non-Japanese market is anyone's guess but the serious freaks will order from the regular companies that ship Japanese products overseas.

If you want to get one now you can get one now.

mod parent up

[p3d0]

...and mod me down if you must.

Re:Until we get the writers, this is 100% irreleva

[DroopyStonx]

Please explain how this makes my point invalid.

I stated: Hyping the next best thing in thinking it'll be out in "just a few years" is pointless since the next best thing (blu-ray/HD-DVD) haven't even made their way into mainstream use. Does your home player play blu-ray/HD-DVD? Nope, nor do the majority of consumers.

Ok, so I was wrong in saying they aren't available *at all*. If you really wanted one, the manufacturer-recommended price runs into US $3800.

Which technically still means: not available for general consumer use unless everyone suddenly has a few grand to blow on a writer. Either way, it's not widely accepted and used at this point in time, and won't be for another few years.

You also need to be able to read these discs as well as convince the general public to adopt this format, whether it's for higher quality movies or a reasonable backup solution. The former won't happen because most players don't play the discs yet, and the latter won't happen because it doesn't make sense from a financial standpoint to adopt this technology as opposed to buying a few 350+ gig hard drives.

My point still stands.

Reason to make it the same size as a DVD (or CD)

[mark-t]

One word... Packaging

cost of HD storage

[Qazimov]

How does going to RAID 5 cost ~$1k?

I run an inexpensive RAID 5 at home for my files, by inexpensive I mean not top of the line hardware.

4x 160GB ata133 drives - ~$100 each
1 cheap ass raid controller - High point - 4 channel ata133, supports raid0, 1, 5, JBOD. ~$100.
So we're up to $500 and I'm sitting at 480gb.. If I were to do it again today, I'd go with 250gb drives for about the same price - just checked Newegg and they have 250gb ata133 drives for $100.
Using those drives I'd have 1tb of space for $500.

Re:i'm sorry, a slight increase in size is a disas

[bill_mcgonigle]

A half-height 5.25" drive is 6" on the diagonal.

I know, just sayin'...

You're right...

[DaedalusLogic]

They are fundamentally different processes so in order to have backwards compatibility you would have to cram traditional optical storage methods in with the new... Nice to see someone who has done some work in interferometry comment on this one. I haven't done anything in that area that wasn't spread out over an entire optics table... I can't imagine what it would be like having to design a unit that would fit nicely into something even the size of a traditional stereo component.

You think CD's are too small? I certainly agree that it's crazy to use anything the size of a credit card or smaller for regular use. I can't even make myself use USB memory because it's impossible to sort on a bookshelf or keep track of in a briefcase...

Re:You're right...

[birge]

I was only sort of kidding about the CD comment. I mean, once you're carrying around something too big to put in your pocket, why not make it a big bigger so that you don't have to carry around two? I'm sure they had very well researched reasons, though, like the hands of small people and so on, so I'm probably completely wrong.

Re:You're right...

[DaedalusLogic]

Yeah, plus flipbooks full of Laserdiscs were just awkward to carry around...

Take it easy.

Scratch...

[Anonymous Coward]

Scratch... Ouch! 100Mb less :/

Re:Until we get the writers, this is 100% irreleva

[Widowwolf]

Ok you have reworded your first statement to get yourself out of your hole. While i agree that this is costly, and they have both readers and writers for blu-ray, the fact is still that you were wrong. ADMIT IT!Even read your first post..there was no point there..it wasnt until your 3rd comment that you even tried to bring about a point. "Hell, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD don't even have writers yet. Until they do, the storage capacity is completely irrelevant. Otherwise, how is it useful to the counsumer?"

Re:i'm sorry, a slight increase in size is a disas

[undercanopy]

Bravo. People are forgetting that '5.24" drive bay' and '3.5" drive bay' refer to the size of the floppy disks that were used in the drives that inhabited those bays, not the drives themselves.

Re:i'm sorry, a slight increase in size is a disas

[dangitman]

hy wouldn't you be able to fit a disc having a diameter of 13cm in a 5.25" enclosure ?

Not only that, the 5.25" refers to the size of an old floppy disk - not the size of the enclosure.

Slightly simplified scheme

[goombah99]

Send the 1.6 terrabye disk but encode it. senders exchange disks, and after receipt, exchange keys by e-mail. this avoids the double step of sending two disks to insure tit-for-tat.

Increase in physical size will cause problems

[Anonymous Coward]

If the new disc is too much wider than CD or DVD, then they've pretty much guaranteed that internal players won't fit inside tower cases.

If the only benefit of using a wider disc is extra storage, the added storage probably doesn't justify the hassles introduced.

What were they thinking?

There is already one useful application:

[MtViewGuy]

The storage media for digital theater projectors.

So instead of having to install a bank of hard drives just for single 120-minute movie in uncompressed digital format, you can reduce it all to a single HVD disc plus protective caddy weighing at most 5-6 ounces. This could drastically cut the cost of digital theater projection, since all you need is a small player connected by a high-data rate cable to the digital projector itself. You also have the major advantage of drastically reducing media duplication and shipping costs, too.

Re:Until we get the writers, this is 100% irreleva

[DroopyStonx]

What the hell are you talking about? Quit trolling.

Yes, when I said the writers weren't available *at all*, I was wrong, but it hardly matters since they aren't anywhere near affordable - likewise with the players still around the $1400 mark.

You just quoted my first post, and the point remains the same: the blu-ray/HD-DVDs don't have writers yet (elaborated to say: available and affordable to consumers, and widely accepted at THIS point in time), so hyping this next gen disc is pointless.

It's not rocket science.

You could take up some of your own advice with the common sense.

What about the Holostore?

[daikokatana]

I saw this article several days ago on ZDNet (sorry /.), and it sounded very similar to something I heard before. About ten years before.

Some ten years ago, while I was still at university, there was one professor who told us about a company that was researching some kind of new digital storage.

It would be some sort of glass cube (10cm), and it would be able to hold 250GB of data, which was enormous at that time. It would be called the 'Holostore'.

A few years later, I heard the same story, with a different name. But still no disk, block, device, or whatever.

This has repeated itself about 4 times, and this article now on ZDNet and /. is the 5th occurence. The only thing I'm trying to say here is: I'll believe it when I can see it.

Call me a bit suspicious, but I have a strange feeling that this is the 'Holostore' of this year... Personally, I hope it's not, and I really, really hope they create and market it this time!

Re:i'm sorry, a slight increase in size is a disas

[cliffmeece]

the enclosure is 14.6 cm wide.

Re:i'm sorry, a slight increase in size is a disas

[RedWizzard]

That leaves you only .34 cm cushion, or .17 cm cushion per side.

A 5.25" enclosure fits a drive for reading 5.25" floppy disks. The enclosure is close to 6" wide. These new discs are only 5.1" wide. Why couldn't a drive be made that fits 5.25" enclosures?

Re:i'm sorry, a slight increase in size is a disas

[StikyPad]

And yet neither you nor your sibling posters noting that important piece of information are being modded up. I guess some people just want to believe the sky is falling no matter what.

Holographic Storage Data eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally I can put the Emergency Medical Holographic program on DVD!

Man, I was reading about this last decade!

[Fantastic Lad]

I was reading about working models and all the technology being in place for full production of these holographic recording devices. In 1998!

This is moronic. This is annoying. I am beside myself with frustration. (Well, not really. --I don't actually care.)

The fundamental truth of the matter is that the technology which is readily possible, and the technology which is actually made available to the public, are decades apart. After all. . , why nip the spirit of profit in the bud when you can produce and sell entire production runs of stone-age computer tech one incrementally advanced stage after another? Heck, this keeps the economy 'healthy' during peace times, ensures jobs and an appetite for more and more junk technology. "Planned Obsolescence" is reality.

When everybody gets all excited about the big "new" thing, I groan. We're being led on and sold crap because there are miles and miles of money to be made between now and when the really good stuff is released, which of course, only happens when it doesn't matter anymore.

So who cares? Just let me have enough technology to do what I need to do. Those needs were well met about five years ago, so honestly, I don't really care about any new so-called 'advances'.

And the band plays on. . .

-FL

Re:Man, I was reading about this last decade!

[Anonymous Coward]

I was reading about working models and all the technology being in place for full production of these holographic recording devices. In 1998!

Were you reading about this?
http://www.dntb.ro/users/frdbuc/hyper-cdrom/hyper. htm

It's 10 TeraBytes on a disk 1 cm thick.
First presented in 1999.
Prototype available.

It might not go farther than a prototype too soon. It's because it's done independently by an university professor that doesn't appear to have the financial means or business prowess to make a commercial product out of it.

Spin rate? Rotational latency?

[Namarrgon]

High transfer rates are all very well, but I read somewhere (vague link not included) a bloke saw one of these last NAB, and said that they span really slowly.

I can't find anywhere what the spin rate is - but if it's slow, that's going to kill your average data access times. Forget HDD replacement. It'll be good for long-term storage or bulk data transfer, nothing more.

This sounds remarkably like...

[Kuukai]

...a miraculous new optical technology that was announced five years ago. I know it works on different principles, but this is at best a x2 improvement on it, and the story of the FMD-ROM just shows how easily great technology can turn to vaporware if it's not picked up by the big companies and consortia, or it rears its head too far ahead of its time. Hopefully this will do better, but you can see why I'm not dancing in the streets.

Worthless without standards

[mnmn]

All this is worthless without a single standard like the original CD is. The fragmentation of the DVD standard caused a lot of pain, and future DVD technologies seem like they'll continue the trend. So we'll end up buying a recorder that records those 6 different standards but not the standard that my video player can play. Add DRM to it all and its dirtier still.

But then, the companies in question cannot sell their special recorders, players and media if the market is flooded with generic recorders and players from China. Since the consumers will be the winner in that case, companies have it in their interest to divide and conquer, and we cannot expect as simple a technology as is portrayed in articles like these.

Why the shudder for tapes?

[HappyMeal]

Tape media is dirt cheap and lasts about as long as hard drives. They are, after all, both essentially hermetically sealed boxes of magnetic media.

Difference is, the tape drives are expensive because that's where the guts and expensive logic is.

With HDs, it's self-contained with each drive.

I've got 200 GB LTO-2 tapes -- native capacity; hardware compression pushes that to 400 GB. We get around 450 GB in actual use due to our particular backup data mixture. That's at 70 MB/sec for writes -- so what if it isn't random access? That's still pretty darn fast.

IBM's got 400/800 GB tapes (latest gen 3590's) with the 800 GB/1.6 TB tapes out soon, I think.

The tape media, for that, is about $100 per tape. With 450 GB of data per $100... about 22.2 cents per GB.

I'm seeing about $280 for cheapest 400 and 500 GB drives. That's nearly 3 times the cost of the same tape cartridge, for about the same write performance or a little less.

Drop a HD, can you reasonably expect to lose your data? Seriously.

Drop a tape, can you expect to lose your data?

Which eats more power and puts out more heat? 10 tape drives + 600 tapes sitting there in library slots, or 600 hard drives spinning?

Of course, the down side with tape is that said LTO-2 drive is pretty pricey... goes for between USD $12,000-$19,000 each.

Still, this ain't your dad's old 9 track reel tape of decades ago. :-)

Still a perfectly legitimate option today.

We don't use tapes as sole backup method; we combine on-disk backups (first level backups) because it's fast, and then we *also* backup to tapes as additional insurance.

Granted, tape isn't for everybody. Fair 'nuff. But don't just shudder and dismiss it out of hand. :P

Re:Why the shudder for tapes?

[HappyMeal]

Slight clarification: the $100/tape was for LTO-2, not for the more expensive and faster 3490 tapes. :)

Re:Until we get the writers, this is 100% irreleva

[physman_wiu]

It's funny that you have to elaborate your statement after it was proven wrong.
Then going off and telling me that I didn't do any research, ha!
Who cares that YOU- or the mass public for that matter- can't afford it. That's irrelivant to the point.
My point was you were wrong.

"and the point remains the same: the blu-ray/HD-DVDs don't have writers yet (elaborated to say: available and affordable to consumers, and widely accepted at THIS point in time),"

Now that you've admited it, you would've been a better person for it. Oh yeah, until you had to open your trap again and "elaborate."


I think it's funny how people elaborate after being proven completley wrong.

Re:Until we get the writers, this is 100% irreleva

[DroopyStonx]

Trolling is booooring.

Cut your losses, move on.

AHAHAHAHAHA

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell me, have you been owned like this every day since school or was this just a comeback-special for the entire readership of slashdot to mock? 'Cos right now, there's a lot of people who just saw you brag and then get your metaphorical pants pulled down. Whatever balls you thought you had shrunk back up inside yourself, leaving nothing but a silly little prick bobbing around for our derision, and I'd guess by the way you don't even flinch at the mocking this has been a regular event for many years. You'd feel the force of our laughter blowing against your burning face if you weren't such a think-skinned moron. What a pitiful arsepiece you are.

Thanks for the link guys!!

Re:AHAHAHAHAHA

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be new here.

(Psst, it's called baiting. I understood the OP's post just fine.)

Writers are not available.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the writers are not available. Your manner of discourse is quite puerile.

Sites my list them with a high price tag, but there are very few in stock and extremely rare to come by. If you must see the evidence for yourself, try to contact the distributors and/or manufacturers in an attemp to get one. You'll find that it's pretty much impossible to get a hold of one. Even if you managed to acquire such a writer, there isn't anything you can do with it except manipulate your own video or backups.

There is also a reason the industry is not releasing content on these new formats, and that is because the standalone players also cost an arm and a leg. Production companies aren't even batting an eye at it at the moment. You have to keep in mind that consumers need to be convinced to adopt yet another format, and most people won't do it. It will be very tough for Blu-Ray (and HD) to catch on.

I can't imagine anything after it becoming available in under 10 years. I have to agree that the article presented has more attention and hype around it than is necessary, as the media in question will have to be widely accepted by general consumers to become an economically feasable product that others would likely use.

Re:Until we get the writers, this is 100% irreleva

[Anonymous Coward]

What losses, no one lost anything, except you- digninty.

Yep. That looks familiar. . .

[Fantastic Lad]

It might not go farther than a prototype too soon. It's because it's done independently by an university professor that doesn't appear to have the financial means or business prowess to make a commercial product out of it.

Cool hyperlink!

--I also like to consider. . .

If that's what an under-funded university prof can come up with in his spare time, what could a bunch of specially selected high-paid geniuses working in a top-secret corporate tech department come up with? --With billions of dollars at their disposal and direct instructions, "Invent huge storage. Oh, and you can also have access to all our previously researched top-secret stuff."

Heck, what could the military black-budget tech departments come up with, for that matter. . .

It is logical to assume that this stuff, and far, far better already exists. And the reason an under-funded university proff will NEVER be allowed to develop his creation into mainstream commercial industry is that the behind the scenes people can't abide by some upstart inventor mucking up their careful product release scheduling. Honestly. . , if you're clever enough with your inventions, you'll either be hired away into something top-secret, or you'll be hushed up.

-FL

Re:Yep. That looks familiar. . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Your conspiracy theory would be a lot more convincing if you understood the difference between a prototype and a product.