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."

Comments

obligatory! (and more serious..)

[apodyopsis]

"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).

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[nine-times]

and on a more serious note, what would a normal PC user use this for?

It's telling that people are likely, these days, to ask how a normal PC user would use these disks to store his own data, rather than how media companies will use this to distribute their products more cheaply.

Anyway, yes, this would be handy for backups/archives. What else do people use physical media for? I have to back up 5TB of data every week, so don't tell me that these disks have gotten too big for practical application. Even at home, it'd be nice to be able to back up my entire computer onto one disk.

Go ahead and figure out how to store massive amounts of data on cheap plastic with no moving parts. I'll figure out a use for it.

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

Audio data doesn't necessarily mean MP3s. Storing your audio in a lossless format like FLAC means about 50% compression, so we're looking at ~250MB/album - 400 albums isn't especially unreasonable.

But who says the data has to be written all at once? I assume BD-R supports multi-session writing like other optical media do - ie. you can incrementally add sets of archive data to the disc so long as you don't "close" it.

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[nine-times]

Well first, even if you buy a legal version of video, that doesn't necessarily mean you get media. iTunes movies and TV shows, for example, are sold without media. If you want to back that stuff up, you'll need something additional. Second, even if you have a legal DVD or Bluray version, you might want to backup that purchased copy. Third, I wasn't specifically talking about movies or TV shows. I'm not even necessarily talking about video.

And then beyond all that, backing up to an external USB drive doesn't necessarily serve my purposes unless I'm buying new USB drives on a regular basis. I'm not just talking about maintaining a running mirror of my current hard drive contents, but maintaining a backup. By that, I mean that sometimes you want to keep copies at set increments, like having a monthly backup that you keep and don't overwrite. Not only does this protect you from a catastrophic failure of your hard drive, but also protects you from data being deleted or overwritten.

Ideally, those backups should be on some kind of WORM media (so I don't accidentally erase something while I'm restoring) that's cheap, reliable, and lightweight. Even for my personal stuff, I can burn a bunch of DVDs and mail them to someone. Since they're light and small, shipping won't be expensive. Since there are no moving parts, I don't have to worry very much about them breaking in transit, but since they're cheap it's not a big problem even if they do break.

450mw beam

[lobiusmoop]

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.

Re:450mw beam

[Maddog Batty]

When encapsulated within a system so that it is not possible for the beam to escape under normal usage then the whole system can be given a class 1 rating and a class 1 label. The laser itself is a class 3B and would have to have this rating if removed from the player. Current Blu-ray recorders are 250mW but are considered safe as they are encapsulated.

Re:450mw beam

[Spatial]

A class 3b laser, I think (less than 500mW).

It's a big risk if if you're putting your head into the player and resting your eyeball directly over the laser diode. For people who do that, all we can hope for is more powerful lasers, or perhaps blu-ray players with sharks inside to which the laser is attached.

Re:I don't get it

[profplump]

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?

Re:I don't get it

[Clandestine_Blaze]

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.

Sure..

[soulsteal]

It can move a lot of data but is it shark-mountable?

Re:Is this still releven?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I don't know, how old is she?

Re:I don't get it

[squiggleslash]

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.

Re:I don't get it

[Austerity Empowers]

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.

Re:I don't get it

[Khyber]

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.