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."

Comments

Am I wrong?

[rekab]

Or would breaking these things be a real issue.

Re:Am I wrong?

[NayDizz]

Just what I thought. Aren't optical discs fragile enough? Instead of making discs with higher and higher capacity or thinner profile, why doesn't anyone make a DVD that isn't rendered useless when my niece gets a scratch on it?

Oh yeah, this way I just have to go buy another.

Just moves the disc itself inside the drive

[pla]

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.

Re:Just moves the disc itself inside the drive

[solevita]

I think you're being a little unfair; we should be able to see a half decent idea within this product:

The disks are protected within cartridges as packs of ten until they go into the drive and gain the magic piece of glass. All optical media needs this bulk to protect it; the new system simply reuses the bulk so that 1 drive and 500 disks has 1 protective layer, rather than 500. This is a good idea: The same end result is achieved, but the media is thinner, allowing more to fit in the same place and 470 gigs to be served in the space usually occupied by a single CD within its' case.

The only real question is why? Surely flash drives would be a more practical recipient of R&D money.

Lame?

[tuxlove]

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.

Welcome back, 1997. We've missed you.

[Kadin2048]

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.

Outer Space

[mr_stinky_britches]

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..