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Hitachi Maxell Develops Wafer-Thin Storage Disc

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the not-good-for-breezy-server-closets dept.

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."

4 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. You're wrong by solevita · · Score: 1, Informative

    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.

  2. this sounds vaguely familliar... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli_Box

  3. Re:1/10 of a millimetre is.. by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 3, Informative

    NOT a micrometre it is 100 micrometres! See here for details.

    Oh god, give my a dictionnnaryes :-)

    On that we definitely agree.

  4. For archival storage by hamjudo · · Score: 2, Informative
    This is just the first generation of the technology, and like most first generation products, it is only good for a fairly narrow niche. This is an alternative to tape cartridges. The initial cartridge is the size of two jewel cases and holds 470Gbytes. This can be compared to other tape cartridge technologies based on the usual things, access speed, write speed, read speed, cost and reliability. Don't expect the first generation to make economic sense.

    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.