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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."

3 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Am I wrong? by nine-times · · Score: 4, Interesting
    According to the article:
    It's targeted at commercial storage applications. 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. A 19-inch rack mount model will be able to hold three times that amount of data.

    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?

  2. Great! by TeknoHog · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  3. Re:Am I wrong? by daeg · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.