Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

9 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. Am I wrong? by rekab · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Or would breaking these things be a real issue.

    1. Re:Am I wrong? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    2. 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?

    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.

  2. Arbitrary Python quote by bigattichouse · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    --
    meh
  3. Just moves the disc itself inside the drive by pla · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Welcome back, 1997. We've missed you. by Kadin2048 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    --
    "Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
  5. 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.
  6. 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.