Pioneer Promises 400GB Optical Discs

schliz writes "Pioneer has developed a 16-layer read-only optical disc which it claims can store 400GB of data. The per-layer capacity is 25GB, the same as that of a Blu-ray Disc, and the multilayer technology will also be applicable to multilayer recordable discs."

Comments

Blu Ray

[CogDissident]

Good thing we all updated early to the blu-ray player, when something is about to come along to blow it out of the water, right at about the time when DVDs are reaching the point where people need more than 2-3 DVDs for games/movies (which is the point at which CDs were phased out, and floppy disks).

Re:Blu Ray

[Comen]

Call me a snob if you like, that does not change the fact I can tell the difference very quicly on my 56" HDTV between HD content and DVD content, especialy when the HD content was recorded with a HD camera, not upconverted from film.
To me the diffence is as drastic as going from VHS to DVD.
Some people just do not care, and that is fine.
My Dad can sit in front of his 15 year old tv and the picture has a red ghosting hue to it, and drives me nuts but when I tell him he should get a HDTV, he just tells me he likes the one he has just fine, this is a guy that watches every sporting event on TV, and that content is mostly shot with HD cameras, so he would really benefit from the upgrade, but would he care? NO

Re:Blu Ray

[TheSync]

I have no clue what "artifacts" you are talking about

I can attest that Hollywood studios are very serious about making their newest Blu-rays "artifact free". We're talking MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 at 25 Mbps, which (speaking as a HDTV guy) is way overkill for most eyes. Consider that terrestrial HDTV is =19 Mbps MPEG-2 and what you see on cable or DBS is probably compressed down from that. I'm pretty happy delivering 14 Mbps H.264 HDTV to stations for high-quality prime-time network use.

In post-production houses, there is now this position called the "compressionist" who uses semi-automated systems to compress each scene 10 or 20 different ways with different parameters to ensure the best compression. There are built in PSNR measurement, MOS estimation, as well as the human eye looking over all this. And it costs a lot of money....

Re:Blu Ray

[JesseMcDonald]

It is possible to split an HDMI video signal, provided it's not tainted with HDCP. HDCP encodes the signal for a specific receiver, so even though you can split the signal only one screen can decode it. It is true that all (licensed) Blu-Ray players require HDCP on their digital outputs, but one could create an unencrypted, full-HD signal some other way. For example, by applying a cheap DVI-to-HDMI adapter to the output from a PC. The resulting signal could then be distributed to multiple HD screens. Suitable PC-compatible HD video for a simple demo shouldn't be hard to come by.

Re:Blu Ray

[sricetx]

That's the reason why I'm skipping the entire BlueRay generation. My family can live with DVD quality just fine.

The reason I'm skipping BlueRay is that I won't buy ANYTHING with DRM (unless it's easily crackable like DVD). Hollywood can take BlueRay and stuff it. I will reject any technology which limits my free use rights.

Re:Blu Ray

[Sethumme]

From the article: "The huge capacity of these discs means that the new technology will be best suited for applications such large volume data archiving, rather than consumer use."

The tech they are using to read so many layers of information is impressive. However as the article states, this format is in no way intended for consumers.

Your BluRay hardware is probably safe for another five years or so.

The non-consumer, archival focus was the same thing they were saying about the CD (or was it DVD?) when the technology hadn't been perfected yet and when 3.5" floppies were considered more than sufficient for consumer storage. Eventually, consumer media will demand larger-capacity formats then even a 100Gb Blueray can provide. Besides, anything that a library can afford to spend money on will have to be cheap enough that it could also feasibly be marketed to some portion of consumers - archiving isn't an industry that's rolling in venture capital...

More importantly, it's highly likely that a significant market share of home entertainment will be provided via downloads and HD-quality streaming media services within the next several years, which could devastate the physical data storage medium industry, including Blueray.

Anyway, I'm still holding out for consumer holographic storage devices.

Burn time?

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

Anyone care to venture how long it would take to burn such disc, if it is loaded full?

I'll believe it when I see it

[jandrese]

Frankly, given the track record of optical formats, I'd be surprised if this ever makes it out of the laboratory, especially given the fact that it has so many layers. With DVD a lot of production companies basically gave up on the dual sided dual layer discs because the yield on 4 layer disks was so bad. Getting a good yield on a 25 layer disc is either an achievement worthy of talking about over the disc, or it's a bunch of lies and marketing hype.

Lifespan?

[s31523]

With so many layers, I wonder if the useful lifespan of the disk is shorter than a conventional DVD. The obvious application for these discs is backing up servers and home storage drives.

Re:No burning. Less useful than Blu-ray. Lame

[somersault]

How is that a bad thing considering SONY have released a useful disk format. You're suggesting that they'd buy a load of companies and then not bother to look into any interesting tech that those companies had been researching? Blu-ray is theoretically capable of holding just as much as these disks if SONY can work out how to do multi-layer work effectively, as Pioneer claim to have done. I'd expect SONY are either close on their heels in R&D terms, or could just license the tech.

The main difference between these 2 formats are that SONYs was out in the market over 2 years ago, and Pioneer has yet to get this tech out of the lab. 2 years ago, a 50GB optical format (dual layer blu-ray) was quite useful, and it still is today. Blu-ray also has rewritable disks in the market.

Really, I don't see what use in the extremely-mild-conspiracy type comment serves.. companies like google and MS always buy out other companies and assimilate their tech. In some cases that can be negative, but in other cases it leads to some great products.

BTW, Wikipedia points out that FMD died because one of their demonstrations was proven to be a hoax. I presume they did have some working tech though because DMD is being developed by a company who acquired Constellation 3D's patents.

rerun

[ILuvRamen]

Too bad InPhase already has had a holographic disk of that capacity for a while now plus a write speed that blows this media away.

Long term data storage

[DragonHawk]

A 500 GB HDD costs less than a single one of these discs, is reliable, rewritable a million times, lasts decades if properly stored, is already available, is faster, and requires no fancy hardware.

I'm curious as to on what you base your statement that a 500 GB HDD will last decades. Can you cite a study on the long-term storage reliability of modern hard disk designs? In my personal experience, disks which have sat unused for several years sometimes don't spin up. They're not designed for that.

I'll also point out that the equipment needed to read an ST-506 hard disk -- introduced circa 1980, thus "decades" -- would likely be somewhat hard to find and integrate into a modern operation. It might not be "fancy hardware", but the end result (high cost) is the same.

I'm not dismissing the use of hard disks for archiving in general; I just find some of your claims dubious.

One thing that seems to be true is that storage is getting cheaper and bigger all the time. Thus for some applications, it may actually be cost-effective to keep all your archives online (disks spinning), with redundancy, and simply upgrade to newer, larger drives as old ones fail. Capacity keeps growing for new data, and old data keeps getting copied to new media. That eliminates the concerns about keeping equipment around to read old media. As an added bonus, everything is online all the time.

Re:Long term data storage

[mitgib]

One thing that seems to be true is that storage is getting cheaper and bigger all the time.

How about faster? That is my desire, and hardware SAS and SATA raid arrays are just not fast enough for what I am interested in. I saw a new device recently that was mentioned here, the Fusion IO, that is 1000 times faster, but is cost prohibitive yet, and small in size still, like 320gb is as large as offered. At $30/GB it has a long way to go before it is really mainstream and I don't see that happening for quite some time since they have their production sold out for months on end. At least that was what I was told after contacting their sales department. It is supported in the CentOS 5.2 kernel though, so that was a major plus to me, and no Windows support yet either, another major plus to me.

Amazing seek times

[Joe Snipe]

Essentially wouldn't this be the same as having an 8 platter HD (aside from the slower moving read head)? This could easily outperfom a 2-4 platter Hard drive, no?