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Sanyo Invents 12X High-Speed Blu-ray Laser
Lucas123 writes "Today Sanyo said it has created a new blue laser diode with the ability to transfer data up to 12 times as fast as previous technologies. The laser, which emits a 450 milliwatt beam — about double that of previous Blu-ray Disc systems — can read and write data on discs with up to four data layers, affording Blu-ray players the ability to store 100GB on a disc, or 8 hours of high-definition video."
"man thats a lot of porn!"
and on a more serious note, what would a normal PC user use this for?
archiving video (see above)?
archiving MP3, I guess not many people have >100GB of MP3s?
an easy method of archiving an entire HDD in a few disks?
when you look into it only video/HD makes such a disk make sense.
and on a *much* more serious note, stop waxing lyrical about the storage capacity and start talking about the durability, its life span, its resistance to UV, its archival qualities. I would be much more interested in a 4GB disk that actually had a change of lasting >10 years in a normal environment (for me..? room temp, light sealed bag).
It's still the cheapest way to distribute data. CDs/DVDs are produced for a few pennies - and even Blu-Ray is produced at a cost significantly lower than flash or magnetic media of the same capacity.
For backup, it probably will still make sense to use some kind of magnetic media.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Isn't that getting into dangerous territory (popping balloons, instant blindness etc)? Recently, high-power laser pointer sales have been banned on eBay and Amazon here in the UK, I'm wondering if similar restrictions might appear for drives like this.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Distribution :)
I'm not going to send my mother a hard drive if I want to send her pictures or video. Right now I use DVDs.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Kids with your fancy optical media and lasers and whatnot. I'll stick with my betamax thanks.
-=Bang Bang=-
Story states that the drives are 1 to 2 years away. Translation, they have no idea when drives might be on sale, or when 4-layer discs might be available.
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
No matter what the technical achivements, in the end you're still hooking it up to one of Sony's defective players. Pass.
Yahoo! Pipes are awesome. How awesome? http://pipes.yahoo.com/jesdynf/slashdot
because its worked sooo well for the UK government.
honestly, CD are too easy. simply google for "lost cds uk" and see what a total balls up various government agencies have made of giving all our data away freely,
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=uk+lost+cds&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=com.ubuntu:en-US:unofficial&client=firefox-a
hell teeth, it should of been easy enough to encrypt it on the CD as a minimum, or VPN it without using a disk.
yes, they are easy to use - but too easy and too insecure in idiotic hands (though that goes for just about any storage medium I suppose).
but I agree with you totally, I'll not entrust a HDD to parcel force, its bad enough buying one on the 'net anyhow and they are professionally packaged.
Yep. And in other news, those metal things inside toasters get dangerously hot.
Personally, I've given up on using half-disassembled devices.
Because 50 GB optical media costs less than a dollar to press or burn, and 50 GB of flash memory costs about $100. And hard drives cost a minimum of $30 regardless of their size. Am *I* missing something here?
The entertainment industry still uses optical because it costs them only pennies to press optical media. Relatively speaking, it would cost them a lot more to distribute hard drives and flash memories that came pre-loaded with something I could watch or listen to.
For the average consumer, it's easier to stick a CD inside your car for music, assuming your vehicle has a CD player. Most cars do not have an auxiliary port, iPod jack, or USB slot. Only cars that have been made in the last few years might actually come with these options. Keep in mind, I'm speaking as someone that lives in the U.S., I'm not sure how different the options are in other countries.
Most computers and television sets still do not have built-in flash memory card readers. So other than USB sticks, having CF, xD, MMC, or any of those other formats might be useless if your destination cannot support it.
I think the issue isn't really the media format, but the availability of something that would support such formats. I would prefer flash memory over optical, simply because of its ease of use. And perhaps my perception of time is different, but to me it has always been faster to write to flash than to optical.
Best "String" Ever!
WD My Book Essential Edition External 1TB Hard Drive - $166.99 (link), enough to store 80 hours of High-Definition video (Lord of the Rings "extended edition" should fit in one).
That's $16.70 each 100 GB - I bet that both: the player is more expensive that this external HD and each disk is more expensive that $16.70.
The only reason one cannot easily use an external HDs to store and play video content is because the mainstream Movie Industry won't sell their movies in a non-DRM-encumbered format (say, XVid in an AVI wrapper) - after all, how would they force people to buy the same movies again and again with each new format if they went with an open data format ...
That said, get a "Digital Media Player" with XVid/DivX support and HD capability and attach one of these external HDs. Then Rip and re-encode your movies (or don't re-encode - there's enough space for high-bitrate files in there) or get the HD version of the movie/tv-series from the Internet in a non-DRM-encumbered format (funny how the pirates provide a better product) and voila - days worth of movies and TV series at the touch of a button (with no pay-per-view charges).
PS: Yes, I am sour that the dream of having your personal movie library accessible from you remote without moving anything but a finger is being hindered by the big studios ...
I think that even though the actual drives born of this technology are still a couple of years away, it is a big step. You may argue that the drives will be crippled by being tied to Sony, or that nobody will be using optical media that large, but I say with the current trend these discs will be very welcome. Everything will shift to HD and now you can easily fit multiple HD movies on a single disc. This also allows for the easy and even redundant back-up of a hard drive. If it will only take 10 mins to fill 100GB of the disc, then you could easily create 2 copies of your 500GB external in a couple of hours. That way when it dies with a stupid 1 yr warranty(never buying WD again) you have it all saved.
Offhand, the read speed for 1x in bluray is 36Mbit/s. So we get 432Mbit/s.
For comparison, 1x DVD is 10Mbit/s.
While YOU might not want hours of video of my daughter doing nothing in particular, I can assure you that my mother does :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
It can move a lot of data but is it shark-mountable?
Well I don't know, how old is she?
I have a gut feeling everyone's talking at cross purposes.
At this point, distributing the same 50Gb of content to 100,000 people is probably most cheaply done with Blu-ray as long as those 100,000 people are also going to get many, many, many 50Gb-of-content packages in the same format from numerous other sources. So, as a movie distribution technology, optical media kind of works.
This works because it's cost effective for those 100,000 people to spend $200ish on a Blu-ray disk reader, and it's cost effective to get a duplicator to press 100,000 Blu-ray discs at approximately $2.50 per disc.
However, when you start reducing the numbers on either side, the price differentials start to radically change. It's cheaper for me to put the content on a cheap USB hard drive, even at $100 a pop, if I'm just distributing to a few tens of people, who aren't planning on obtaining Blu-ray readers. And it's even cheaper for me to burn the same content to DVD-R, given a dual layer DVD-R costs around $2, whereas a dual-layer BD-E costs around $15-20 - they're getting close per gigabyte, but the cost of obtaining Blu-ray burners, and the receiver of the data obtaining Blu-ray readers obviously changes the cost effectiveness of the whole thing.
Ok, so that's the current situation. Now let's look at the situation in three years.
Flash memory is coming down in price. Less than a year ago, I bought an 8Gb SD card for around $80. Four months later, I bought a 16Gb SD card for $80. A quick Amazon search shows that while 32Gb cards seem to still be relatively expensive, 16Gb is easily available for around $32. The cost of adding an SD card reader to a computer is around $1. No, I'm serious. They're actually giving away the readers with many cards now. So we're looking at flash memory gigabytes-per-dollar ratios doubling every three to six months. 50Gb for under $20 (BD-RE price) should be... well, that's about $90 now, so that's about a year and a half away, assuming a six month (being conservative) pricing half-life. Another year and a half, and, well, we're looking at 50Gb of flash costing less than 50Gb of pressed Blu-ray media does today. Actually, we're more likely looking at 128Gb SD cards costing $10.
So the optical naysayers are probably right in the long term.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
One caveat, flash memory is not as reliable of a storage medium as some believe, particularly as densities increase, particularly as they use smaller and smaller processes. Depending on the specific technology, and the level of error correction built into it, optical (even with dust and scratches) is more robust. Flash is great for sneaker net, or the family vacation pictures, but I'm not sure it's suitable for anything you care about.
As long as the market driving this media is digital photography, the concern about the occasional bit being flipped isn't going to change anything. Flipping a bit on almost anything else, is catastrophic.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Not that there isn't a lot of truth to what you say but... The subject of this article, as well as key factor to deciding on Flash memory's fate, is SPEED. Cheap flash can read/write at 5-10 MB/s, whereas this new Blu-Ray laser has a stated read/write speed of 170 MB/sec. So, "cheap" Flash has a ways to go before it's competitive with optical media in strictly read/write performance, which for HD video is of utmost importance. The cost/benefit ratio changes for other purposes, but when speed is on the line it's disc or hard drive, flash just isn't there yet.
Ok, this is great, but how fast can you spin them before they explode?
Old enough to look good in a bikini.
Young enough to land-you in jail, you DOMAI! ;-)
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Let's send some messages into the future, for one!
Sending messages to the future is trivial: Put 'em in a box.
If you can break the speed of light you can send 'em to the past. THAT's more useful.
Even if it only goes a little way. For instance: We could show the congresscritters that passing the bailout bill would spread the pain from the mortgage sector and crash the REST of the economy, changing 6 months of "subprime borrowers lose their houses and go back to renting" into "Stock market tanks and we have a decade or two of 'greater depression'."
Wait a minute: We already TOLD them that and they passed it ANYHOW.
Never mind.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Ow! Economics and making sense on slashdot! Stop it!
/me takes an aspirin
Guess you've never heard of OUM memory technology. Same glass substrate that's used on re-writable optical media, but instead of using a laser to flip bits you use an electrical pulse to change the state of the glass from amorphous (bit 0) to semi-crystalline (bit 1) and voila no more worry about bit flip. It also is stronger than silicon wafers and can tolerate more heat and requires less power for changing bits. Also, due to using the crystalline structure representing 1 or a 0, it's non-volatile. Access times are faster than standard flash devices today. The read/write cycles are several orders of magnitude higher as well than current flash memory.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
So, can I buy it? Where? What does it cost?
Remember that the reason Nintendo abandoned cartridges was because a 8.5 gigabyte DVD was cheaper than the equivalent ROM.
Two things:
First, those were probably EPROM's, not flash, but don't quote me on it.
Second, supply+demand+moore's law = totally different situation today.
...I wouldn't be suprirsed if a 1GB EPROM costs more than used car....
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
Well, here's the thing. Does it still need to be "pressed"?
You go into Movieworld (or whatever they're called.) You browse the titles, wander over to the checkout with your selection, buy the movie, and walk out of the store.
The clerk then yells into the back "Customer just bought Hockey Mom President, need a refill."
Some guy at the back inserts an SD card into a writer. An hour later, he checks back, sees the card has been written, pulls Disney's packaging from a sealed envelope, inserts that into the transparent outer lining of the case and puts the SD card into the case itself, walks out, and puts it on the pile of "Hockey Mom President" boxes.
Disney loved it. They just needed to print the packaging and ship a hundred copies sealed to various movie stores together with a single SD card containing the master.
The movie store loves it. All they need to have in stock at any time is a big pile of blanks - blank cases, blank SD cards - plus the (easily storeable) packaging Disney et al sent. The day before a major release they do, of course, have to prefill a bunch of SD cards, but SD card writers are $1 each, so their computer can make 64 copies at a time without breaking a sweat. Oh, and if they don't sell 64 copies, they can always recycle the cards.
The only loser in the entire scenario is the idiot who bought an awful and highly improbable movie about a dimwitted soccer mom who managed to become a Governor before being picked as a Vice President by a doddering-old politician with stage-three cancer.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
But... but CDs are made out of a polycarbonate. The samt hing that Bullet-Proof Vests are made of! They're therefore unscratchable! (See, I remember the late 80's well)
Sapphire! We need to make CDs out of Aluminium Oxide. First we need to mass-produce the stuff in enough volume that the perceived volume goes down. And then use it on PDA, phone, ogg player screens while we're at it.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I've never heard of this tech, but the most optimistic lifespan of a CD-RW is 25 years, and in practice they usually die in less than 10 years. So if it uses the "same glass substrate that's used on re-writable optical media", then it's still not suitable for long-term storage.
The details are trivial and useless; The reasons, as always, purely human ones.