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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."
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.
So it seems that these aren't meant to be something that you'd carry around loose the way you do with CDs/DVDs. They'd be encased in cartridges, and those cartridges would be in some sort of device. So I think the question would be, how would this technology compare with hard drives?
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.
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I can see these being very valuable in applications where holding data is forbidden or where the must be destroyed at regular intervals or at the end of a project. Destroying hard drives (and wiping them is time consuming and prone to user error) could get expensive, but replacing a few tiny disks could be very cheap.
The company says that a system about the same size as a tower PC and will be able to hold 4.7T bytes of data.
I may be missing somehting here somewhere (I often do) but "4.7TB of data" comes to less than 7 run-of-the-mill (by now) 750GB HDDs. Which already fit into a PC tower. Even a mini-tower. And require no new technology. And have much faster immediate random-access times than a drive that has to pick a thin disk from a spindle somewhere.
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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.