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?

[Anonymous Coward]

They said that about condoms but it's not stopped people using them.

Re:Am I wrong?

[nine-times]

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?

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.

Re:Am I wrong?

[daeg]

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.

Re:Am I wrong?

[Iron Condor]

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.

Arbitrary Python quote

[bigattichouse]

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.

The obligatory question

[millennial]

So it uses air to keep the disc rigid... Does it suck or blow?

Re:The obligatory question

[Hal_Porter]

> How long was the procedure? You know, the one where they surgically removed your sense of humor.

I don't think it's possible to surgically remove a sense of humour. A person's sense of humour is spread of a large volume of brain matter, shared with many other vital functions. It's very unlikely that a subject would even survive such an operation. Since the American Handbook of Neurosurgery contains no approved procedures, it would be hard for the surgeon to obtain malpractice insurance. Indeed attempting a non approved procedure has been held by the courts to constiute de jure malpractice on every occasion that Health Care Providers have unwisely elected to allow the matter to reach them.

Your post is highly illogical, asking a non neurosurgeon the duration of an impossible surgical procedure. Perhaps you should read Wikipedia on the basics of a discipline, rather than attempting to learn about by asking about fundamentally flawed questions on an inappropriate forum, such as this.

Think of the bandwidth

[Kadin2048]

And in terms of data transmission, how many of these can we cram into a station wagon?

Could you do *this* with your regular CDs?

[Peter Trepan]

:slices through a tin can:

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.

Great!

[TeknoHog]

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.

Re:1/10 of a millimetre is..

[Roger W Moore]

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

Oh god, give my a dictionnnaryes :-)

On that we definitely agree.

Are these big enough to hold The Meaning Of Life?

[Phat_Tony]

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.

What's the difference?

[Gription]

"So it uses air to keep the disc rigid... Does it suck or blow?"

It's interchangeable. New technology generally sucks and blows...

Looks like...

[Farrside]

I'll have to buy the White Album again.

Bond did it!

[Ice Wewe]

Hitachi Maxell Ltd. has developed an optical disc that is less than 1/10 of a millimeter thick.

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...

Novel, but useless

[stuartkahler]

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.

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..

For archival storage

[hamjudo]

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.