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