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1TB Blu-Ray Compatible Optical Disc Announced
red_dragon writes "An article on The Register tells the news of an announcement of a new 1TB optical drive and disc that will be backwardly compatible with Blu-ray discs. The technology, developed by Call/Recall in partnership with Nichia, uses a rhodamine-type dye in a 200+-layer recording medium that gives off light when excited by a laser beam, along with a single fluid-filled lens to read multiple layers by varying the amount of fluid to change the focal length. The technology is designed to work with Nichia's blue-violet laser diodes, which are already used in Blu-ray drives."
It's hard to imagine a single movie on a 1 TB disc. At first glance it looks like it will make backing up a cinch. But most of my burned CDs and DVDs start flaking after just a couple of years, unless they can make these ultra high capacity formats more archival friendly it's just going to be wasted space.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
nope, its most likely layer not laser.
I'd say layer -- having several hundred lasers in a single drive is a sure sign you've jumped the shark.
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That these Blu-ray compatible discs will be primarily used by consumers to store ripped Blu-ray movies.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
How many libraries of congress could you hold on that?
== Jez ==
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100MB/sec? Assuming that the capital "B" is the intent, that means it would take close to 3 hours to write a full 1TB disk. Is that fast enough for most backup applications? I mean, obviously it would be fine for archival purposes, but it doesn't seem practical for daily backups.
Unless you're doing daily backups of Libraries of Congress, then it should function just fine. :)
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And for you, only a DVD is required to store your mental state.
All right everyone, the old Blu-Ray is obsolete! See how crappy the puny 1080p looks on your pathetic Sony widescreen? It is time for NEW-RAY.
Throw out your entire video library once again and embrace NEW-RAY.
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Que?
I'm interested in. How reliable and/or affordable will these things become, should the product achieve decent market penetration?
/. blurb and saying, "Hmm...Interesting."
Zip Drive was a high-priced novelty that achieved just enough marketshare to ruin a lot of people's day with the "click-of-death" issue.
It's taken years for CDR/DVDR media to become reliable and cheap enough for commonplace usage.
As has been previously mentioned, reliability is also a major factor to take into account. I want a backup that I can rely on should I need to retrieve information from 10 years ago (at a minimum)
I have some CDRs that I wrote to in the late 90's (around 1998) that are now becoming unreadable due to "whatever". They are not scratched, nor is the aluminum layer at the top flaking off, yet they are simply unreadable now, so I find myself duplicating CDRs that are still readable "just in case"
If reliability ratings for the media can surpass normal CDRs by a significant amount, I may be interested in this format, even if the price tag on media is steeper, once mainstream acceptance is achieved.
Right now though, It's little more than reading a
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Nope.
For a pressed DVD, a master is etched, and is then used to physically press the pits into the substrate. The depth of these pits (1/4 wavelength) causes destructive interference when the beam hits a pit, and constructive interference when it hits a land. (1/4 wavelength in + 1/4 wavelength out = 1/2 wavelength out of phase with the rest of the beam reflecting off the surrounding substrate)
This is pretty much permanent, provided your media doesn't disintegrate.
For a burned DVD, a photosensitive dye is activated by the writing laser. This activated dye simply absorbs the beam that hits a "pit", while the unactivated dye allows the beam to reflect off the substrate behind, when it hits a "land".
Over time, this dye can degrade such that the unactivated dye slowly activates (either spontaneously or in reaction to ambient light), or that the activated dye slowly deactivates for the same reason (much like a photo left in the sun).
One of the reasons that "archive quality" disks are more expensive is that they use a higher quality dye which takes longer to degrade.
The nice thing about "mechanical" storage (since when was optical storage "mechanical") is that it is cheap. The amount of storage space on a hard drive has more than outpaced Moore's Law. Optical media hasn't quite kept up with that sort of spectacular growth, but there have been significant advances there too. In my eyes, anything that promises cheaper (in terms of $/GB) storage can only be a GOOD THING.
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Power consumption would be my first guess. Second would be the fact that you won't get much better playback of any video from multiple reads so it's only good for reading data and then only if you have enough buffer space and fast enough bus to actually do something productive with that data.
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It was done long ago during the twilight of CD only drive...
See...
http://everything2.com/e2node/TrueX
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-ROM#Transfer_rates
http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Multiheaded_20CD-ROM
I believe the main issues were reliability, cost and lack of noticeable speed gains when using the CD-ROM in common tasks. Although there isn't much to be found (or said) about them anymore. It would seem the increased density of today's optical media put a damper on the need for increased spindle speeds making multiple lasers an unattractive way to boost speeds.
Also if I remember correctly they were entering a market at a time when CD-R/RW drives were becoming more cost competitive.
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So, how long before I can buy the Library of Alexandria in a Chinese market stall for 10c?
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Dear Mr, Smith,
What is the value of information?
Does the value of information (per bit) decline as we gain the ability to store more information?
If not then presumably one of these disks ought to be worth a fortune if a Floppy was worth anything. Should they have scratch proof containers?
since this is not the case, one assumes the value of information to humans is declining with time?
Does this mean what a given person knows is also declining in value, or are we discarding information from our brains that has less value. If so then why do you still remembers that Speed Racer's little brother's name.
Eventually we will be able to store the neural state of any human. At that point if someone were to invent a method of reading out this state it could be recorded onto a Disk and preserved after death. Like Cryonics this disk would then await a time in the distanct future when the neural state could be restored from the disk to clone or simulated human.
Actually, that was just the long winded way of explaining to you Mr Smith that when we were restoring you from your disk we noticed a small scratch on made by an heir you stiffed in your will. We're pretty sure the amount of information loss is small however, though were not sure what it might have been.
Sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for selecting TotalRecall. Your bill will be in the ether.
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