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Hitachi Maxell Develops Wafer-Thin Storage Disc
narramissic writes "Hitachi Maxell Ltd. has developed an optical disc that is less than 1/10 of a millimeter thick. Working prototypes on display at this week's Ceatec Japan 2006 exhibition are based on DVD technology and are capable of holding 4.7 GB each. Making discs so thin doesn't come without its problems, however. To make the discs rigid enough for the laser to remain in focus on the disc's surface, the company has fitted inside each drive a 0.6 millimeter-thick piece of glass through which there are holes. Air is drawn through the holes when the disc spins causing the flexible disc to be drawn against the rigid piece of glass to make it flat."
Or would breaking these things be a real issue.
Immediately jumped to mind.
Hitachi: Eet Ees Waf-fer theen.
PC: I can't eat another Byte, I'm gonna puke..
Followed by a sony-battery-meltdown.
meh
100 pk. spindles of discs that take up as much room as 2 jewel cases, think of all the new places that your lost cd/dvd's can go at this size
09:F9:11:02 - 9D:74:E3:5B - D8:41:56:C5 - 63:56:88:C0
...Is what percentage of a Library of Congress can be fit onto one of these and how many human hairs thick is it?
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
So it uses air to keep the disc rigid... Does it suck or blow?
I am scientifically inaccurate.
I wonder how they taste.
Big deal. The main bulk of CDs and DVDs are for structural integrity. So, they reduced the amount of plastic use to keep the disc from falling apart. That's a little like (using the traditionally bad car analogy) making a hummer out of paper... bragging that it only weighs 200lbs... Then having to warn people that the car will collapse if you lean on it.
And in terms of data transmission, how many of these can we cram into a station wagon?
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Now I have a use for all those 5.25" floppy diskette sleeves.
Where were you when the voynix came?
The article states that the disks come in packs of ten, sealed within cartidges. These carts go into the drives, which removes individual disks for use. You, nor I, never have to get out fat fingers anywhere near the delicate little disks.
Now that that's cleared up, I still can't think of much of a use for these things.
:slices through a tin can:
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
the company has fitted inside each drive a 0.6 millimeter-thick piece of glass
A typical double-sided DVD consists of two 0.6mm polycarbonate layers sandwitched back-to-back.
So basically, this just trades a cheap external more-or-less disposeable disc with an attached and well-protected media layer, for an expensive internal (to the drive) point of failure, with a separate, very fragile media layer.
Woo woo, where oh where can I trade my entire DVD collection in for some of these magic beans?
The price of a DVD or CD doesn't come from the cost of a few grams of polycarbonate, it comes from the cost to license the content. This seems like a useless device - unless they have the goal of increasing the frequency with which people need to replace movies they already bought, due to physical failure.
The official storage medium of Mr. Creosote.
a micrometre ! :-)
Oh god, give my a dictionnnaryes
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
Somehow this technology seems academically interesting, but practically kind of lame. Who cares how thin the media is? It's so thin that it must be carried inside something else that's obviously got to be much larger than the media. This could be cool if they could layer numerous levels of these inside a standard thickness disc, but aside from that it seems fragile and dubious.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli_Box
To all the morons that say the disk is too thin to be durable, RTFA! The idea is to stack several in a cartridge that will hold terabytes of information. The discs inside the cartridge will only be handled by the drive mechanism.
GOSH, IDIOTS!
I don't really see where this is going. The public basically abandoned cartridge-based removable storage a few years ago; it reached its height with the Iomega Zip and was all downhill from there. (Actually this technology reminds me a little of the Zip; a thin, fragile, high-density storage media inside of a rigid case.) They would have to offer a lot more than just thinness to get the public to go back there.
Removable disks went out with a whimper, not with a bang, and the last few generations of them were pretty sorry. (Anyone remember the Castlewood Orb? Or any of the other HD-based removables? I do; the cost per MB was atrocious.)
Why would anyone want to move back to the days of proprietary cartridges and drives, when we've come so far from there? I'd much prefer improvements to the existing CD/DVD formats which preserve at least the physical format (allowing for easy backwards compatibility), if not the near-universal standardization.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
... floppy DVDs.
So, if this technology can shave off 1 mm of the disc's thickness, it means you can use 9 mm jewel cases instead of the regular 10 mm versions. Thus solving the storage problem once and for all! Of course, you'll probably need an extra strong case to protect this extra fragile disc.
In other words, most of the storage space with CDs/DVDs isn't due to the disc itself, it's due to the ginormous case that some people insist on having around. DVD movie cases are even worse. Personally, I prefer slim "CD single" cases whenever possible.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Is it as thin as a wayfair theen meent?
NOT a micrometre it is 100 micrometres! See here for details.
:-)
Oh god, give my a dictionnnaryes
On that we definitely agree.
Those of us in semiconductor manufacturing will recognize this as a vaccuum chuck.
We use them to hold the silicon wafers still whilst going through the various fabrication and testing processes.
actually 100 micrometers, which is just about the thickness of bond paper, which in turn prompts one to ask the question: why WAFER-thin?
Silicon wafers are about 1mm thick, wafers that you eat are even thicker. So why not describe it as "paper-thin"?
Set your phasers on "funky"!
MAITRE D:
And finally, monsieur, a wafer-thin disc.
MR. CREOSOTE:
Nah.
MAITRE D:
Oh, sir, it's only a tiny, little, thin one.
MR. CREOSOTE:
No. Fuck off. I'm full.
MAITRE D:
Oh, sir. Hmm?
MR. CREOSOTE:
[groan]
MAITRE D:
It's only wafer thin.
MR. CREOSOTE:
Look. I couldn't eat another byte. I'm absolutely stuffed. Bugger off.
MAITRE D:
Oh, sir, just-- just one.
MR. CREOSOTE:
[groaning] All right. Just one.
MAITRE D:
Just the one, monsieur. Voila.
MR. CREOSOTE:
[groaning]
MAITRE D:
Bon appetit.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
"So it uses air to keep the disc rigid... Does it suck or blow?"
It's interchangeable. New technology generally sucks and blows...
I'll have to buy the White Album again.
Maître d': And finally, monsieur, a wafer-thin storage disc.
.
.it's only wafer thin.
.just one. . .
.voila. . .bon appétit. . .
Mr. Creosote: No.
Maître d': Oh sir! It's only a tiny little thin one.
Mr. Creosote: No. Fuck off - I'm full. .
Maître d': Oh sir. .
Mr. Creosote: Look - I couldn't eat another thing. I'm absolutely stuffed. Bugger off.
Maître d': Oh sir, just. .
Mr. Creosote: Oh all right. Just one.
Maître d': Just the one, sir. .
BOOM!
Maître d': Thank you, sir, and now the check.
In a toally unrelated story, the writers and producers of the James Bond movies, Q, and Sean Connery are sueing Hitachi for stealing their idea from the next James Bond movie...
These things sound very breakable, but how long do they last untouched, like for archival purposes. Do they deteriorate faster than CDs or DVDs?
Can I bum a sig?
The article says that the media (presumably rewritable) will be sealed in bulk in a cartridge that allows you to put 470GB in a space roughly the size of a DVD drive. Sounds potentially nice if full cartridges sell for the price of a spindle (100) of DVDs. Otherwise, anyone with a brain will just buy a 500GB hard drive. This tech would likely be ungodly slow, full of moving parts to break and prone to jamming. Considering all of the super specialized tech required to make this happen, it would probably be much more cost effective to just build a larger system that shuffles off-the-shelf DVD-rw media and can be upgraded to higher density media later. Speaking of which, isn't blueray or hddvd already pretty close to the 47GB/mm spec that the article implies.
The bernoulli disk lives again!
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
Technology which relies on the effects of wind resistance to work have no future in the space shuttles, I would imagine. This seems like a 'new' device which is actually more primitive than what we have..
Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.
This is just a different way to handle the data layers of optical disks. Expect the data density per disk to catch up with other disk formats. Also expect them to figure out how to make the individual disks thinner. First generation disks are stored in sleeves in cartridges. If the handling system gets better, it won't need sleeves. So future cartridges will hold more disks, and each disk will hold more data.
Whether it becomes better than tape cartridges depends on media cost, access speed, read/write speed, drive cost, drive reliability, media reliability. DVD writers are really cheap. These devices share the same optical mechanism, so they have the potential of being fairly cheap. The media is paper thin, so the media handler might be as cheap as the paper feeder in a printer (but probably not).
For comparison, pricewatch says that LTO-3 tape cartridges, which only hold 200GB, are $60 each. So first generation cartridges would still be price competitive, even if they cost $100 each.