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Plexiglass-like DVD to Hold 1TB of Data
jcatcw writes "Lucas Mearian at ComputerWorld has a story about a company that plans to demonstrate a new DVD-format at the January CES conference. The .6mm thick disc stores 500GB of data by writing 5GB of data on each of 100 layers within a polymer material similar to Plexiglass. The Israel-based company, Mempile Inc., said its TeraDisc DVDs will offer 1TB of storage for consumers in the next few years, but it's also targeting corporate data archive needs with the new technology that write bits at the molecular level on the florescent-colored polymer. The company plans to sell its first product, a 700GB disc for $30."
so much porn...
and I'm spent.
...and I just bought myself a Blu-ray :(
Bloody typical.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
until they have a cheap (burner AND media) version for the desktop.
Gone!
They actually said how much it would cost. We can all die of shock now.
That being said, how much does the reader/writer cost?
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
No format war. Please!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Unfortunately their second product, the disc burning drive, won't be available for several years.
><));>
They're not planning to hit 1TB until 2011. With all the companies in the storage race, I don't see this horizon representing any special accomplishment. It's a neat way of doing things, but so are some of the other contenders in the race.
What I wonder about is the archival quality of their material. How long before it oxidizes or otherwise brittles itself into uselessness? I remember when everyone was saying that CDs would last forever, unlike cassette tapes, and then we found out that CDs were not eternal. Their plastic might take forever to biodegrade, but their data integrity would degrade within 10-15 years. So, even if this turns out to be the winner in the race to a Terabyte disc, how long will it maintain data integrity for archival purposes?
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
I can then fit my entire pr0n collection on just 4 discs!
500 gigs is a good idea....until the MPAA gets their greedy mits on it and DRM it into a paperweight.
FTFA:
"Mempile's DVD drives will initially retail for between $3,000 and $4,000, and a 700GB platter -- the first model expected out around 2011 -- will sell for $30"
I can see straight through this! Total vaporware!
(Can you tell that I'd prefer 'Some Mega High Quality MP4-or-something Files on a DVD/HDDVD/BluRay' rather than this 'You can fit so many minutes of movie on a disc! Yes, it's true!' baloney?)
The problem the company has is not technical. They could have the technical and mass production issues worked out and yet not a single disk will be made.
It didn't come from the companies mentioned in the wikipedia article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD so they cannot possibly get OEM/IT/Entertainment industry adoption. Furthermore, "Not invented here" is the typical media conglomerate response to all of these innovations.
There's no real-world scenario where this thing sees the light of day. Something like it and most likely quite inferior and more expensive from the DVD cartel? Sure.
Got Trader Joe's? friendwich.com RSS feeds work now!
but what about the HVD?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Knowing the israelis, the next format war will be slightly more animated.
At least the palestinians might breathe easy for a bit
1. make a press release 2. get slashvertised 3. wait few years to actually develop the technology at affordable prices 4. profit??
Yet another format to have to buy all our stuff in, again.
I guess thats one way to keep the MPAA in business, every 10 years or so have to repurchase our movie collection.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Why is this a cheap, plexiglass-like DVD and not a plexiglass-like CD?
Hopefully this will be the blank media that The Dethemberween Thnikkaman puts in my slippers this year.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Its not a format war, its a new format. But it *will* be a format war if any of the large firms thinks there is any money in it.
Remember "DataPlay"? A small format optical disk (with an elaborate and complicated DRM system btw) in the early 2000s - they had a new and innovative format. They even got the record companies on their side until the big players (in this case Philips) looked at them, saw they had a business model and crushed them to develop small-form factor optical (SFFO). Of course, SFFO vanished as soon as cheap flash memory was available (low power, no moving part) but the point remains. A single isolated firm will be destroyed by a large multinational as soon as they prove they have a business case. And I bet my metaphorical hat that any array of patents will not affect that outcome in any way.
More information on Dataplay/SFFO available on net, here one's link:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2930-tiny-optical-disc-could-store-five-movies.html
Besides, I've seen a number of multi terrabyte, multi layered optical systems paraded over the last few years - I label this vapor ware until I see it on the shelves. And even then I would not trust my data to it until its been proven in the corporate world.
You're doing it wrong.
Believers will spend eternity in Heaven. But nonbelievers will spend an eternity in a lake of fire. Choose carefully.
I choose you, Pikachu!
"They say rock 'n' roll is the devil's music. Well, let's say that it is; I've got news for you. Let's say that rock'n'roll is the devil's music and we know it for a fact to be the absolutely, unequivocally true. At least he fucking jams! Ha ha ha ha! Okay? Did you hear that correctly? If it's a choice between eternal hell and good tunes and eternal heaven and new kids on the fuckin' block ... I'm gonna be surfing on the lake of fire, rocking out, high five at Satan every time I pass the motherfucking shore." -Bill Hicks
Living With a Nerd
I'd really prefer something as small as the flash memory you see in most phones or cameras. It'd be awesome to be able to plug them in to my video playing device, and instead of having to search through 50,000 DVD cases, I can simply select the video I want to play.
does this seem like making a vhs that can hold 40 hours of video? Cd/DVDs are on the beginning slope of the trash shute, SSD and other technologies are the things up and coming. But on the other hand dvd, Hddvd and bluray are here to, so who knows, but if it were me Id be working on an organic memory cube that measures the size of my fingernail and that I can download the contents of my brain onto... I for one welcome our brain downloading overlords?
"It's ok, I'm completely secure as long as my iron is off"
When I saw this on Maxconsole about 12 hours ago, I though to myself - I hope slashdot don't report on that stuff, those guys have a bit more sense, the more technical types know vaopourware when we see it.
but no........
Most of us enthusiasts and techs on this site have been reading about 'magical future disc formats'!!! since about when the CD came out for PC's well over 10 years ago, it's all bloody rubbish until their is one on shelves, period.
I don't care if they never have video hit the device, I want it just for data storage and transfer.
Though honestly Blu-Ray might be close to it by the time it comes out with data discs that have more layers... I'm still thinking a Blu-Ray burner (when they get a little cheaper) is the best bet for large data storage over the next few years.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The company wants investors. In my opinion, the investors page is written in a curious way, giving the impression that some of the companies listed may not actually be investors, but associated as suppliers, or not associated at all.
Slashdot has a long history of running articles about risky or even fraudulent companies that want investments, in my opinion. I think Slashdot editors should be required to run conflict-of-interest disclaimers, to give legal assurance they were not paid to run an article.
The easiest way to make money is to steal it from investors who don't really have the capacity to understand technology. That's what happened in the year 2000 market crash. That "crash" was largely theft, and pre-planned theft, in my opinion. Others share my opinion: Blood on the Street: The Sensational Inside Story of How Wall Street Analysts Duped a Generation of Investors, an excellent book.
Here is an questionable statement from the article referenced by Slashdot:
"Unlike HD DVDs, which use blue lasers to record and read data off a reflective surface on top of a polymer substrate, Mempile's TeraDisc drives use more powerful red-laser technology to write and read."
Since red light is of a longer wavelength, it has a lower resolution. The power is not relevant. All systems use the power that is necessary to make them work.
Here is another quote that seems ignorant and crazy, or deliberately dishonest, to me:
"Over the next 10 years, both studio and consumer HD products will multiply by 10 times the current resolution."
That statement tries to invent a situation in which the "new technology" would actually be needed for other than making backups. However, even the present NTSC resolution is enough for most TV watching. It seems doubtful that displays with more resolution than HD DVD will become common.
Also, HD displays are far more expensive. Would people actually want to pay more again, for resolution that is so great they cannot see it unless they are very close to the display? I think not.
Hmmm, what color is that exactly?
Here are the stakes -- the most staggering ones conceivable: On one hand, eternal happiness. On the other, infinite damnation. The question: "God is, or He is not. But to which side shall we incline?"
That's Pascal's dilemma.
Haven't we been hearing stories about how some company or another is coming out with a n layered disc that'll hold so much more than anything that's currently available for oh, 8-9 years now? I remember the original ones were when burnable DVDs were barely out and there was a company promising a 25gig disc in the next year or so using a many layered fluorescent disc. I expect that Duke Nukem Forever will be the first title released on this type of disc and I'll play it on the PC in my flying car.
I wonder if a product like this (I'm not saying this will actually be the product, mind you) will end up being the death of Blu-Ray and/or HD-DVD? It's always seemed to me like the new HD formats aren't a compelling enough leap in technology to warrant a "standardized" format shift (and the fact that we have two competing standards), since many people already have pretty significant DVD libraries (I know I do). Maybe consumers will simply wait for the next technology to emerge, or at the very least, for one format to become a de-facto standard. I'm certainly not purchasing any HD videos at this point.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
For a 10000 dollar device.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Unfortunately, your standard 50 pack of these 700GB discs would set you back $1500...
Then again, that would hold the equivalent of roughly 50,000 cds, which would be 1,000 50-packs, which would cost around $25,000.
Without some sort of garantee of integrity every one of these formats are worth jack.
I'm sticking to USB hard drives at the moment - too many DVDs have been unreadable after just six months. Integrity is far more important to me than saving a few cents per gigabyte.
At one point I used to write each file twice on the DVD so I'd have a fighting chance of not losing data (I simply made a folder called "backup" on the DVD and put another copy in there). If there was any space left over I sometimes did three copies just to be on the safe side. The problem is that DVDs don't hold enough any more. My files are getting too big.
With a terabyte on a single disk this strategy might be useful again. It would be good if software could automate it though - striping the data for me automagically.
No sig today...
Unless they have found a way to record 100 layers at once, it will take nearly forever to record a disc with this new format. For the same reason, the proposed 3+ layer HD DVD and Blu-ray discs are also not very interesting. More than likely, these efforts are merely for marketing purposes: to show that HD DVD can match Blu-ray, and that Blu-ray has a bright future. Unfortunately, these are both specious arguments, and it is best to judge them on their initial implementations.
One of the few alternative approaches that looks very promising uses co-linear holography on an optical disc. The advantage is that it can record multiple bits in the same area (volume actually) at the same time, so it scales much better with both density and speed. It may be a ways off yet, but one thing is for certain: an optical disc can only spin so fast, and recording bits one at a time simply doesn't scale well.
Blu-ray is the best we can hope for it the near future. From a data storage perspective, it is far superior to HD DVD, and will remain so until they are both obsolete.
It can grow even more, if it goes down to the atomic level...!!
Currently, LTO4 supports 1.6TB/800GB. The plain drives go for close to 5k and the media runs at about 80-90 bucks a pop. I figure it will cost about that initially and need a high end SAS or Fiber connection. Did I mention that an LTO4 can write at close to 100-150MB/s (not counting compression). Fastest a DVD can write at is about 20-30MB/s. Thats one LOONG backup.
Hell, look on eBay for a PV132T with an LTO2. You can get that library for under $1,500 and it holds close to 4.8TB uncompressed. Even if you want the warranty for it, its still going to be cheaper than when this thing comes out. Did i mention the media is only 10 cents a gig?
It isn't a war, it's self-defense.
Ok, go ahead and mod me to hell for being a troll. Just do it already.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
And what happens if there's a scratch on the disc? That wouldn't hurt a reader's ability to read?
I'm interested in knowing how they plan to do error correction here, but maybe I'm just out of the computer biz for too long. Any suggestions?
-
With a terabyte on a single disk this strategy might be useful again. It would be good if software could automate it though - striping the data for me automagically.
This is what Parchives are designed for. You can specify an amount of redundancy (from 0% up to whatever you please, I personally do 30% on DVDs, but I use good media and haven't had many problems, plus I have disk backups as well) and it will create all the parity files necessary. Then you just go and burn it to the disc. Later if the file proves corrupted, you can use the parity files to repair or reassemble it.
It's all open source, which is good for 'future proofing,' and gives you a lot more control than just recording multiple copies of the same file (which limits you to multiples of 100% redundancy).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive
http://parchive.sourceforge.net/
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Great! So now I can destroy even more of my data with a single scratch.
Beware the power of the fingernail!
Lake of fire. I would rather suffer eternally than worship an egotistical god who values faith over rational truth.
The dilemma is founded entirely upon a baseless idea. I can give you another baseless idea--you cannot get into heaven unless you constructed an idol out of a hollowed-out cucumber and pray to it daily, otherwise you shall spend eternity in the great Food Processor at the center of the earth.
Ridiculous as it sounds, this "dilemma" is identical to Pascal's. There exists no evidence (save your "faith" that the dudes who wrote the Bible were telling the literal truth, and that you're interpreting that truth correctly) for Heaven or Hell or God or the rules for getting into heaven and hell. There also exists no evidence for my cucumber-based religion, save for your faith that *I'm* telling you the truth. I am, at least, known. You could track me down and give me a polygraph or something. The authors of the Bible are (for all intents and purposes) anonymous.
Looks like those formats might become obsolete before they have even become mainstream. I am suddenly glad that I don't have a player for them yet.
Also, it is very nice to have a new data format developed by the tech industry, rather than the movie industry. Archival quality is going to be a more important aspect than copy protection.
This article reminds me of the company called Constellation 3D. They were using / creating what sounds like very similar technology years ago. Here are a few links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_3D
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorescent_Multilayer_Disc
I thought they held patents for this stuff, but I think they went bankrupt and their patents were bought by a company called "D Data Inc.": http://www.ddatainc.com/
Weird. They sound extremely similar to me.
I choose you, Pikachu!
Mister Anonymous Coward, this is the most insightful, informative, and funny response that I can recall reading on Slashdot. I salute you. Unfortunately, I have no mod points, so it ends there.
This reminds me so much of the Fluorescent Multilayer Disc (FMD) that was announced in 2000, which turned out to be a scam.
There was an Israeli company several years ago called Constellation 3D (originally TeraStor) promising the same things based on the same fluorescent multilayer buzzwords. They failed, and there were a couple of scandals including one about a rigged demo. None of the names I see on the Mempile website ring a bell, but I still don't think I'll hold my breath waiting for this crew to deliver the goods.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
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Mod parent down -1 Internet Asshole.
That's Pascal's dilemma.
Even worse, it's not just Pascal's dilemma with regards to God, it's Pascal's dilemma with regards to God, Allah, Yahweh, and many more.
It's not merely to either sacrifice the amulet at the altar or be hacked up by one of the four horsemen, but you have to pick the right altar!
(At this stage the odds seem pretty slim already, and maybe the god, if he exists, like frank unbelievers more than intentional heretics believing in some other god. The wager is getting harder by the minute.)
White, of course. What else?
There is only one s in Plexiglas®. It's a trademark of the Rohm and Haas company. I am rather startled that everyone seems to think it's "plexiglass". Guess there are fewer plastics geeks out there than I thought.
I have just one word to say to you, Ben...
Blooming molecules of polymer... how poetic!
"The company wants investors"
I went to your link, and all I saw was a list of existing investors. I didn't see anything to suggest that they are currently looking for investors.
Smells a lot like paranoia to me. Have you been burned in the past?
...because if you don't, then you probably should be applying for a position. With the guerilla marketing department.
But they weren't all investors, apparently, some are just suppliers. Did the suppliers invest?
What bothers me is the lack of solid honesty about what is happening. Those who steal try to make their companies look as believable as possible.
The apparent lack of honesty in the article also bothers me, as I said.
They are both based on a technology called 3D optical data storage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_optical_data_storage, which has been around since 1989 (and has also been examined by several other companies and academic research groups).
With on-demand streaming sites like Gexo, why would you even begin to archive something which loses its luster after only a few uses?
There was a company called Constellation 3D which was developing a product called a fluorescent multilayer disc several years ago. Sounds exactly like what is being described in the article. Basically there were pits with fluorescent dye that could be read with a laser. Seems that there was some sort of scandal related to a "demonstration" they did at COMDEX 2000 in which the demonstration actually played from a hard drive and not from the disc. They went out of business and their website disappeared and I hadn't heard about them for a long time. Now this article pops up seemingly touting the same technology.