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A Terabyte of Data on a Regular DVD?
Roland Piquepaille writes "This is the promise of the 3-D Optical Data Storage system developed at the University of Central Florida (UCF). This technology allows to record and store at least 1,000 GB of data on multiple layers of a single disc. The system uses lasers to compact large amounts of information onto a DVD and the process involves shooting two different wavelengths of light onto the recording surface. By using several layers, this technique will increase the storage capacity of a standard DVD to more than a terabyte. Read more for additional references and a diagram showing how this two-photon 3D optical system reads data."
But how is this different than current dual layer DVDs? Does it just take advantage of shorter wavelengths or what?
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
Glad I didn't buy blue-ray or HD-DVD, I knew they were both scams!
Don't forget to factor in the expense of more hard disk needed to rip and burn 'em.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
Soon someone will announce that by using blue laser they get blu-Terabit-DVD and another will announce blu+terabit-DVD and one more blu-terabit+DVD and finally a blu+terabit+DVD. By the this time users would have been fed up and gone on a nice fishing trip in the Owen's river in California.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Can't help wondering how durable the resulting storage solution will prove to be. Maybe it's just me, but I'm always wary of solutions that use things for purposes they weren't designed for.
something big enough to hold my pr0n collection!
You sound like "640 KB is more than enough", "There is demand in the world for upto six computers". If you build it, they will use it.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I might actually be able to back my data up at home to something other than more striped HDs!!
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
That doesn't sound like a regular DVD to me.
By the definition of a DVD (yes, just like the various "color" Book standards that defined CDs, there are standards that define DVDs), this new technology will not result in a standard DVD by any means.
More proper terminology might be "in a standard form factor 12cm optical disc".
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Both articles repeat the phrase "uses lasers to compact large amounts of information onto a DVD" and then state that several layers would then be utilized. First of all, what the hell does using lasers to compact information mean? As far as I can tell, the articles explain how they are able to cause a state change in recording media with two wavelengths of light, and read it using a single wavelength, and that this media layer is particularly thin, allowing for multiple layers to be stacked up on the disc.
In my opinion, if you're going to the trouble of utilizing a multiple beam system in your drive, holographic storage makes a lot more sense, as both beams are the same wavelength (meaning only a single laser and a beam splitter are needed), your read times are going to be tremendously faster, due to the data all being stored in the same layer, obviating the need to refocus or switch beams, and finally, due to the nature of holography (in that small sections of a hologram contain the information needed to reconstruct the entire hologram), a disc with holographic storage should be much more resistant to read errors resulting from scratches, whereas with one of these, a scratch could render data on several layers unreadable.
I have enough trouble with my regular DVDs getting hosed. I imagine this would only make the process of data retreival even more delicate. Can the data be stored more robustly if some storage capacity is given up?
Oo! Oo! Could this be done with software, even if the manufacturer decides to go with one nonrobust terabyte?
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
FMD-ROMs were the wave of the future, what? 6 years ago? Promising to hold up to 140GB?e r_Disc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorescent_Multilay
None of this kind of vaporware will ever see the light of day unless Sony or Microsoft wants it to.
-tyfighter
In best Dr. Evil voice: "One million dollars!" *muhahahahaha*
FRA: STFU GTFO
If this is using essentially the same technology as DVD i think the read/write speeds would be awfully slow to handle 1 TB of data. If the bits are squeezed into a smaller surface area (instead of just layerd on top of eachother) if should read faster but if the space the bits take up is the same I think it would have simial I/O performance. After all, you can only spin a disc so fast (10-15K RPM).
Unless they find a way to read/write to multiple layers simultaneously and very efficiently, I think it would be really slow. At round normal DVD I/O speeds, burning one of those suckers would take like 60 hours!
Universities like to announce stuff like they are a big breakthroughs when in reality they have little to no impact. Get's their names in paper...
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. -Confucius
Indeed. I remember back when my favorite game came on two 5.25" floppies. After a while, it was twelve 3.5" floppies. My current favorite game comes on two DVDs.
If the capacity is there, somebody will fill it. That somebody will likely make games.
So to do this at all your going to need 100 or more read heads and data channels to get the modulation rate down, or there would have to be orders of magnitude more tracks. Or possibly there's some way you could encode the bits in different overlapping frames such that the data rate of any one frame was lower. For example by using different reconstruction laser spatial patterns for different frames could use physics to select which frame was being selected.
Otherwise this is drinking from a fire hose even for the shortest reads, and the equipment needed would be prohibitively expensive.
The same problem happens when writing: how do you buffer a gigabyte of data to deliver it that fast. It ain't gonna be in the main RAM.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
HVD is supposed to be out as early as next year and have 3.9 terrabytes of storage.
I remember when the first computers with DVD-ROM's started showing up, the computers generally had about 200-400MB hard drives. So a single 600MB CD disk held more than everything on your entire hard drive.
Now a standard computer might come with a 160 or 250GB hard drive, and where are disks? Only at about 8 GB for DL DVD's. Instead of fitting one or two hard drives of info on a single disc, now you fit 20 or more discs onto a single hard drive.
Yeah, I know Blue Ray and HD-DVD will be in computers soon, but they don't come close to reversing the trend. Soon we'll have 25-50 GB/disc, and by that time probably at least 500GB-1TB standard hard drives. And then it'll be a long time with frequent hard drive upgrades and no bigger discs again. Blue Ray and HDDVD may be bigger, but at the rate they're getting bigger, discs are still falling farther and farther behind.
I hope there will be some revolutionary increase like holographic storage discs, but I'm not holding my breath, because I remember reading articles about how we'd have terabyte holographic storage devices in a few years going back as far as NASA in 1993 and 4D around 1997. Holographic storage seems to be one of those technologies like fusion that are always a few years off.
At least holographic storage is always five years away, while fusion is always 20 years away. At least that sounds more promising.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
The summary says "By using several layers, this technique will increase the storage capacity of a standard DVD to more than a terabyte.", yet UFC's website offers the following description:
"Depending on the color (wavelength) of the light, information is written onto a disk. The information is highly compacted, so the disk isn't much thicker. It's like a typical DVD."
A disk that "isn't much thicker" than a standard DVD isn't a standard DVD.
Some bring out the best in others, some the worst. Some bring out far more.
I would just about kill for this sort of data density at the moment. I run a 4.5TB SAN at my office, and we're doing everything we can to free up space. A large part of the problem is that we have some very large datasets which are not needed regularly, but they are needed occasionally. Our current answer is tapes (we're getting a tape library which uses LTO-3 tapes soon) which work quite well, but they do degrade with time and don't handle being dropped well. Also, at $50 a tape, they can get expensive, and they are slow. Lastly, if you ever switch backup software you might have to deal with converting tapes to a new format.
We have actually used stacks of DVDs to backup some of the less used data, but at 8.5GB per dual layer DVD backing up a 100GB folder takes a lot of them, and is slow. Bring on the 1TB discs, I'll put them to use, and probably start complaining about how small they are soon.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
Maybe it's the quality of media that you buy.
look up your media here to see how it rates.
http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/dvdmedia.htm
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
This is the same idea as two-photon microscopy, a relatively common technique in biological sciences. Basically, the advantage is that it gives you very good resolution in the z dimension (not just x and y). This allows you to image deep into biological tissue, or apparently, into multiple layers of an optical disc. It's not exactly a new idea, and the technology is mature. The question is whether or not it can be made affordable--a low-end titanium-sapphire laser costs around $130,000, and they have to be physically large enough to accommodate several meters (IIRC) of optical path length. The development of laser diodes with high enough intensity to do two-photon excitation will probably be the limiting factor in bringing this to market, not the dye chemistry.