GE Developing 1TB Hologram Disc Readable By a Modified Blu-ray Drive

Globally Mobile writes "The Register has this article concerning GE's announcement that it has been developing a 1 terabyte DVD-size disk that can be read by a modified Blu-ray player. Peter Lorraine, GE's lab manager, talking at an Emerging Tech conference last week, said that license announcements could be expected soon. He also mentioned the notion of disks having the capacity of 100 Blu-ray disks, implying a 2.5TB or even 5TB capacity, gained by increasing the number of layers used for recording. The discs will be used for high-end commercial niches initially and then migrate to consumer markets in 2012-2015. Also here is a video of the technology explained. Wish we could see this sooner! Reminds me of the technology that Bowie's character came up with in The Man Who Fell to Earth."

Comments

Well

[sopssa]

Great, I haven't still even got a normal bluray player. Nor did I get HD-DVD. Seems like I might just skip it and wait for the modified player that supports this.

Re:Well

[jdgeorge]

Great, I haven't still even got a normal bluray player. Nor did I get HD-DVD. Seems like I might just skip it and wait for the modified player that supports this.

Yeah, I got a PS3, too. Who wants a "normal" Blu-ray player?

"Informative".... Nice.

Re:Well

[oldspewey]

I find I'm "skipping a generation" in many technologies: Operating systems, storage standards, gaming consoles, etc.

Re:Well

[Korin43]

But how else will you transfer large files?? Clearly optical disks are the best way!

Re:Well

[ColdWetDog]

I find I'm "skipping a generation" in many technologies: Operating systems, storage standards, gaming consoles, etc.

Parents cut off your allowance again?

Re:Well

[Translation Error]

There's always something better around the corner.

Re:Well

[iamhassi]

"I find I'm "skipping a generation" in many technologies:"

trust me, you're not missing anything. Seems nothing has changed, they just take the same old stuff and slap a new coat of paint on it. Guess Hollywood isn't the only ones who have run out of new ideas.

Re:Well

[Mr. Freeman]

If you put a thousand of these in the back of a VW bug and drove it from California to New York....

Re:Well

[Darkness404]

I see little reason to "upgrade" during this generation too. For one, everything is very expensive for small gains, in order to really "enjoy" Blu-Ray you have to buy an -expensive- player, for me I'd have to buy an expensive HD TV, and the disks themselves are expensive. Yeah, if you are buying a new TV and everything it makes little sense not to upgrade, but if you are like just about everyone else who has everything working why pay $$$ and upgrade? Sure, HD has a better picture quality, but not $1000+ worth of it, plus, I can rent DVD movies for $1 a night, I can't rent Blu-Ray that cheaply. I didn't get any current gen game consoles save for the Wii until recently because at the start they all sucked and the Wii was the only one that started with a decent price. The 360 was too unreliable in the first few motherboard revisions (RRoD) and the PS3 until about a month or two ago was -far- too expensive. Vista was inferior to XP and cost extra so I didn't upgrade my XP box to Vista. And to be perfectly honest, I don't need a lot of data backed up, my music is redundantly backed up on various MP3 players over the years and audio CDs, I don't have a huge picture collection so most pictures are still on my 4 gig SD card, and anything else needed to be backed up fits nicely on a standard DVD. I don't need to spend $2 on Blu-Ray disks and more for a drive when I only need a few gigs of things backed up.

Re:Well

[WED Fan]

I find I'm "skipping a generation" in many technologies: Operating systems

So you went from ME to Vista? Sap!

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

Blu-ray blanks are what, $25 a disk still?

So, a thousand of the "special modified" disks answers your question:

You'd be ... bankrupt.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

... what would my bandwidth be and kb/gallon be?

Re:Well

[clone53421]

I'm guessing more like XP to 7.

Re:Well

[sukotto]

Much of the tech I actually care about has reached the "good enough" stage >> why bother upgrading? (This is especially true for gaming platforms)

IMHO, DRM technology has become crimminally intrusive >> I don't want to support those bastards

I have a family and a mortgage >> I have more important ways to spend my money

Much of what I want to do and see is available online >> why buy even more physical stuff?

Re:Well

[commodore64_love]

Upgrading to the Bluray version of Star Trek eliminated the annoying artifacts present on the DVD version. That's an improvement that's visible even on a standard definition set.

Also there's nothing to skip in the case of Bluray. 1920x1080 progressive is the highest standard available, and will be for several decades (NTSC lasted almost 70 years and ATSC will probably last several decades too).

I agree about the gaming consoles. I'm still having fun with my PS1/PS2 and N64/Gamecube library. Why upgrade?

Re:Well

[bishiraver]

Netflix membership + blueray: $6.00/mo for one disc out at a time. Average turnaround time: 3 days. That works out to .60 cents per night per blueray rental.

Little bit cheaper than $1 a night dvds ;)

Re:Well

[Darkness404]

Depends on how many movies you watch though. Myself I only watch a movie at most once a week on Friday night if I don't have something more productive to do. So its still an extra $1 per Blu-Ray disk if we assume that I watch 3 movies or so in a month. For someone who constantly watches movies, Netflix would be a better deal though.

Re:Well

[icebraining]

Whoosh!

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

If you put a thousand of these in the back of a VW bug and drove it from California to New York....

Being a rear-engine car, that might not be the best idea...

Re:Well

[alexo]

If you put a thousand of these in the back of a VW bug and drove it from California to New York...

Being a rear-engine car, that might not be the best idea...

I assume that meant the back seat.
Otherwise, the phrase "put the kids in the back" takes on a whole new meaning.

Re:Well

[M8e]

There is actually room for baggage behind the rear seats. You can also tilt the backrest of those forward to get more space, and an almost flat surface all the way from the back window too the back of the front seats.

Re:Well

[Dogtanian]

Blu-ray blanks are what, $25 a disk still?

Try around US $3 (ex. tax) upwards. Admittedly, that's for single-layer 25GB write-once BD-R, and the very cheapest, generic original obscure brand ones at that. Nowhere near as cheap per GB as DVD-R, but still nowhere near $25.

Re:Well

[ceoyoyo]

Not going to do it then. New storage technology needs to be CHEAPER than current technology to be worthwhile except in niche markets.

What would I do with blank BD disks? Back up my hard drive? At that price I can just back up onto another hard drive.

That, and the insane price for movies, is why BD hasn't caught on like DVD did.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it a TDI Beetle?

Re:Well

[oldspewey]

I remember when my life included time for things like multiple movies per week, regular weekend getaways, evening drinking excursions downtown, and reading entire books in less than a week.

Those days are long gone. I have movies bought months ago that I still haven't watched. Our satellite TV company recently phoned and tried to talk me into a $10/mo movie channel package. I asked them what's the point? We'll be lucky if that works out to $5 per movie.

Re:Well

[deathcow]

> That, and the insane price for movies, is why BD hasn't caught on like DVD did.

Blu-ray is catching on to the tune of 200% - 400% growth for 2009. There are plenty of $9 and $12 blu-ray movies.

> What would I do with blank BD disks?

Store 94,000 quarter megabyte jpeg images organized by fetish and hair color.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, I haven't still even got a normal bluray player. Nor did I get HD-DVD. Seems like I might just skip it and wait for the modified player that supports this.

No kidding. I dont even have a TV bigger than 15 inch. Ive been waiting for the LCD TVs to come down now there at the right price. But now were looking at LED backlit TVs. Should I wait ? Ummm if I keep waiting Ill be a hundred or dead before I buy anything.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not skipping a generation—Vista and 7 are the same generation, just siblings.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

I however, have multiple terrabytes of DVD's in stacks and piles. I do a lot of high res photography and like to back up my original RAW images en masse.
I also haven't switched to blu-ray due to price and I'm not so sure about the longevity, etc. HDD's are getting cheaper but still overkill for me just for a hard backup.

I'd really like one of these things IF they skip ROM's and go directly to R/W's. I just have a hard time seeing much of anything needing that much space... software not likely, movies... maybe. A Freaking collection of movies.. but you could put the entire Extended LOTR series in 1080p HD easily on one of these things with plenty of room to spare. Or all the top 100 hits from every year since they started doing top 100 hits.

If any of the engineers are reading this please think of this suggestion... could you please, please PLEASE figure out a way to put the discs in SOME kind of protective case this time? I realize that casing a DVD never caught on because it was more likely to end up scratching the surface, but if I've got over a TB of data on a single disk even the smallest speck is gonna cause read errors and corruption.

Re:Well

[Nethead]

That's where my mom would but the basset hound for trips, perfect size and shape. Then we would fill the rest of the bug with cub scouts. We'd get about seven in there with the dog, nine without the dog. Oh, and my mom driving.

Note, this was back in the mid 60s when we didn't care about things like seat belts.

Re:Well

[atheistmonk]

Wait for the new one to come out and the 10TiB disc+player will be approaching on the horizon...

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.

There is nothing wrong with having a different opinion you know. You can still upmoderate something you disagree with because what's written adds to the discussion. It shows integrity on your part by doing that.

Re:Well

[SlashWombat]

If you expect Bluray to last 70 years, you are dreaming. CD technology is now on its last legs, and that is roughly only 30 years. DVD will die as soon as Bluray is cheap enough for the average punter. Expect blue-rays successor will last as long as blue-ray has! Technology is still on the exponential curve, therefore the "upgrades" will only come faster than ever before.

Re:Well

[glittalogik]

Jan and Marcia Brady are the same generation, just siblings.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a good idea - I gather you have not seen the back of a VW bug lately

Re:Well

[Fzz]

ATSC lasted so long because it was implemented directly in hardware. MPEG2 (DVD) and H.264 (BluRay) are software. New systems will play back old formats because including the software is cheap, but adding newer codecs and formats is simple.

But you don't even need to add new codecs. H.264, level 5.1 is already spec'ed for 4096×2304. Sure, Bluray doesn't use such resolutions, but small shiny discs as a video distribution format are yesterdays technology. Just as soon as flat-panel technology makes it cheap enough to have a wall-sized screen at 100dpi, your can bet that you'll be able to stream full iMax resolution movies online. Maybe not in Britain, with our pathetically slow DSL, but in Korea or Japan for sure.

Now, cheap holographic discs for backup - maybe, but I'll probably still be using rsync.

Re:Well

[AmiMoJo]

It's not that clear cut.

1080p is likely to remain the highest standard for a while, unless 3D TVs take off. On the other hand, a really nice Samsung 1080p set is about the same price as a good SD set was 10 years ago. I think most people will just get one as they replace their older TVs.

Re:Well

[BigSes]

Actually, you can rent Blu-Ray from Netflix at no additional charge on your standard monthly fee. No "upgrade" to your snail mail service necessary. I find most people that don't get into the latest trends/gadgets (which I can assure you, Blu-Ray is not a trend), and mock the idea of upgrading, simply can't afford to do so. That, or they really aren't that into entertainment of that sort. Since you still haven't purchased an HDTV, maybe you aren't a movie/TV person and it wouldn't matter to YOU. $1000 is more than worth the cost of entry for the HDTV channels on cable/satellite combined with gaming and Blu-Ray (not that you can't get a nice size, quality HDTV for way under $1000 nowadays anyhow). Vista, on the other hand, sucks. I wouldn't "upgrade" the XP box to Vista if they paid me to use it. It'd be paying to downgrade.

Re:Well

[Steven_Lunn]

That sounds like how things turned out for me! You don't have kids now do you? Things change and I'm not complaining, but wish I had appreciated the spare time I had 10 or so years ago..............

Re:Well

[commodore64_love]

TV productions are being produced in 1920x1080, so why upgrade to a new 4096x2304 standard if there's no content at that level? I'll stick with Bluray.

And as for downloading HD videos instead of buying HD Blurays, with ~100 gig caps imposed by internet providers, that's not really an option.

Re:Well

[Dogtanian]

New storage technology needs to be CHEAPER than current technology to be worthwhile except in niche markets.

Not necessarily; until recently, DVD-Rs were byte-for-byte cheaper than hard drives. No-one uses DVD-Rs as their main form of day-to-day computer storage though.

Similarly, having significantly fewer discs lying around could be considered an advantage over the older tech.

That's not to say I'm justifying Blu-Ray though; I'm in no hurry to buy it personally. The readers aren't that expensive now, but I'm not that bothered about prerecorded Blu-Ray stuff (still got tons of DVDs I've never watched) and even though £150 or so for a burner isn't horrendous, it's still expensive if (like me) you don't really have a need for it- it's stuck between cheap DVDs and usefully-large external HDDs. I'll probably buy one when they fall under £50, but... meh.

I would have thought

[MikeyinVA]

that by now, DVD-DL would come down in price. Regular DVD-Rs, I can find them for $0.30 or less each but DVD-DLs are still $1.60 each. With Blue-ray and all this advancing technology, the industry is still strangling the consumer for DVD-DLs.

Re:I would have thought

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't even ask about the price for DV-DA. .... (I blame Trey Parker for warping my brain.)

Re:I would have thought

[Anonymous Coward]

You haven't been looking hard enough. The prices are in flux, I just picked up a 25 spindle of DVD+R DL discs for about $0.70 each.

Re:I would have thought

[Anonymous Coward]

Newegg has a 50-pack for about $.66 per disk: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817501023

Re:I would have thought

[PRMan]

I just got a 5-pack for $5.

Re:I would have thought

[drinkypoo]

DVD-DL has largely been ignored due to DVD shrinkers and splitters.

Seriously though, you can get verbatim DVD-DL for $1 or less per disc if you buy spindles, just look more carefully. Note that Verbatim is almost the only brand worth buying if you expect to be able to read the discs for any length of time. Or at least it was a few months back when I did my last spate of research and disc buying. I'll buy whatever for day use; I buy Memorex for medium-term use and Verbatim for storage and long-term use. YMMV, I guess.

Re:I would have thought

[Anonymous Coward]

This year I've picked up 110 DL-DVDs for ~$.30/ea. 60 of those were 10 packs at $3.75/ea and the rest were a 50 pack for $13. There are plenty of good DL deals around if you look. And the regular DVD-Rs go for about ~$.10/ea in bulk.

Re:I would have thought

[Anonymous Coward]

I paid $6 for a 10 pack yesterday at microcenter, Not sure if they were on sale because most of the brand name ones were $1.00 a pop

Remix

[Wowsers]

How many MB will be wiped out by a pathetically small scratch on the disk? Remember the promises made of audio CD's?

Re:Remix

[SHaFT7]

1TB discs? Now OSes can be even BIGGER!

Re:Remix

[Tubal-Cain]

I realize you're joking, but Can != Should.

Re:Remix

[thisnamestoolong]

If it is being used for audio/video applications, scratches would be no more damaging on this super HD disc (10,080p!) than a regular Blu Ray or DVD. If you are using it for data storage... I have bad news for you...

Re:Remix

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty soon you'll be able to store your entire porn collection on a 1 pedobyte disc.

Re:Remix

[gnick]

"Can != Should" is pretty well agreed upon here.
"Can == Will" is an unfortunate reality in most cases...

Re:Remix

[Anonymous Coward]

Pedobyte? I don't want data that prays on children. D:

Re:Remix

[Chyeld]

So do what most people do and dedicate a portion of the disk(s) to some form of error correction data.

Re:Remix

[john83]

How many MB will be wiped out by a pathetically small scratch on the disk? Remember the promises made of audio CD's?

You're assuming that in order to fit more data on the disc, they've just shrunk CD technology. That's not the case. Holographically stored data are spatially distributed. I'm not sure exactly how they handle damage, but I think a "pathetically small scratch" would have a pathetically small effect on the replay.

Re:Remix

[0100010001010011]

So add parity. Even if you added 50% parity, that'd still be a decent amount of information on each disk, enough to back up every photo I've ever taken and some video.

Re:Remix

[maxwell demon]

Pretty soon you'll be able to store your entire porn collection on a 1 pedobyte disc.

Pedobytes of porn? Mist be kiddy porn, then.

Re:Remix

[AP31R0N]

With that much space they could have software that automagically stores some parity bits somewhere else. Or write the data twice. If you are storing 100 GB (a shit ton) you could write it on the disc about 10 times.

Or have a backup. i'd use these disks as a backup, rather than primary storage.

Re:Remix

[stms]

Why would you need to worry about disk scratches? With this kind of size you can put one in your drive and not need to remove it for years depending on your data usage.

Re:Remix

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, as ever, the computer science solutions pretty much anyone who posts here should know already are getting modded up, while the above comment based on some actual knowledge of the technology is left untouched. I don't know why I read this site any more.

Re:Remix

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu still fits on a good old CD.

Re:Remix

[Yamata no Orochi]

Pedobytes of porn? Mist be kiddy porn, then.

thatsthejoke.jpg

Re:Remix

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but imagine a 1TB Linux release... Ubuntu may be on to something here...

Re:Remix

[gEvil (beta)]

So do what most people do and dedicate a portion of the disk(s) to some form of error correction data.

You sure do have a funny definition of "most people".

Re:Remix

[mindstormpt]

And games, you can just hear the publishers: "But games nowadays need so much content that we'll have to increase prices to 120â".

Re:Remix

[Gilmoure]

1TB discs? Now porn collections can be even BIGGER!

Fixed that for ya.

Re:Remix

[elfprince13]

holographic data storage is fractal in nature, meaning if you make a hologram of a car and then snap it in half you won't end up with 2 holograms of half a car each, you'll end up with 2 holograms of a full with half the resolution as the original. Methinks this would be good for data-redundancy in other applications as well

Re:Remix

[elfprince13]

meh, sorry, that should have been a response to the GP.

Re:Remix

[Chyeld]

You can't go AC! If you left, where would we get our snarky judgemental posts containing nothing but old man flavored bitterness and epenis size comparisions?

Re:Remix

[noidentity]

How many MB will be wiped out by a pathetically small scratch on the disk? Remember the promises made of audio CD's?

I take it you're a glass-is-half-empty kind of guy. Just imagine how much information can now be stored in a scratch on the disc!

Re:Remix

[seven of five]

1TB should be enough for anybody.

Re:Remix

[b4dc0d3r]

you're still gambling on a few things. It's possible to recover from damage with parity, but in practice I've never had it work.

First, the TOC isn't duplicated AFAIK so a tiny scratch there makes the whole thing useless.

Second, parity files can be in the area that gets scratched as well - a scratch near the end of the data and beginning of parity files means you lose part of both.

Third, that a reader will be able to recover anything - usually the ones I have crap out on the whole file if there's one error, instead of getting a much as it can, so your strategy has to include some recovery tools as well. Which should be burned onto every disc you use the strategy on, so that in case the software gets pulled and DMCA notices or whatnot take down copies, it's still available.

Re:Remix

[fast turtle]

If you are storing 100 GB (a shit ton)...

ROFLMAO as that doesn't even cover my MP3 collection and when you look at my porn collection, lets just say I've got to get another drive since 320GB isn't large enough for it now and it's all videos.

Re:Remix

[Chyeld]

With respect, all of those issues are indications that you've done it wrong. ^_^

I admit I did lead you astray a bit by posting the link I did. But if you research a bit from a computer behind a network I'm not on, you should find a 'disk' based client which works off the raw sectors of a disk. I.E. you 'burn' three disks and use a fourth to store parity data.

Or, if you are really hip, you don't pack the disks to the brim and you store that parity data on a separate partition of the disk. Then you make one or five copies.

Honestly if you want to preserve data in the 'digital' world and you aren't making redundant copies as backups, then you are doing it wrong anyway.

Re:Remix

[Jared555]

Till you include the packages

Re:Remix

[WuphonsReach]

First, the TOC isn't duplicated AFAIK so a tiny scratch there makes the whole thing useless.

Second, parity files can be in the area that gets scratched as well - a scratch near the end of the data and beginning of parity files means you lose part of both.

Third, that a reader will be able to recover anything - usually the ones I have crap out on the whole file if there's one error, instead of getting a much as it can, so your strategy has to include some recovery tools as well. Which should be burned onto every disc you use the strategy on, so that in case the software gets pulled and DMCA notices or whatnot take down copies, it's still available.

TOC is the big weakness on CD/DVD (there are drives out there which can read a disk with a damaged TOC, but I don't know which ones). The only defense against that is duplicate disks, or spread parity across multiple disks so that you can restore an entire missing disk in the set.

There are two solutions for the "can't read the damaged file".

1) Use a recovery tool that is able to copy damaged files. Or include enough parity to replace entire files (not an option for cases where you are protecting a few, very large files, on a disk).

2) Assuming that you're using QuickPAR, rip the disk to an ISO file(ISO Buster, dd-rescue, etc). Copy the ISO file and rename that copy with a .PAR2 extension. Double-click the .PAR2 file, then drag-n-drop the ISO file onto the QuickPAR window. QuickPAR will manage to find all useable data and restore the individual files. (Sadly, QuickPAR doesn't support directories, so you'll want to always store things in a single directory.)

(Long time user of PAR2 on every disk that I've burned, including video DVDs.)

Re:Remix

[kimvette]

And yet, even then Windows by itself will have a larger footprint than an entire FULL install of your average Linux distro.

Re:Remix

[Hurricane78]

If only par2(cmdline) wasn't designed like I piece of shit.

I won't take that thing seriously, until it at least allows the usage in a transparent fuse layer with cross-interleaved Reed-Solomon codes.

The only thing it is good for, is to annoy people who download torrents, by adding error correction, when BitTorrent specifically includes it.
At least it does not force people to split 1.4GB video files into a thousand 50MB RARs, so that you have to have an extracted version to watch it and put in in your archive, and a splitted/compressed version to continue to share it. (I stop sharing crap like that right after extraction. I don't want to be responsible for annoying others too.)

Re:Remix

[john83]

This is correct, though you lose resolution, so there's a trade-off between how much data you can store and your resistance to damage of the grating. Also, I'm not sure exactly how they're writing these things - surely each grating won't be over the whole disc? That would mean reading very large pages each time you want to read something, which would lead to a bottleneck - you grab a huge chunk of data, but you have to pick out the bit that you really wanted to read.

Re:Remix

[Chyeld]

If you are getting torrents that include the par files or ones which are broken up into multiple rar files, it's probably because you are perusing stuff being released via Usenet first and the seeder is attempting to make it easier to seed by setting the torrent up so you can drop what you got from Usenet directly into the folder.

PS. Bittorrent doesn't include erorr correction, it includes error checking. Which, when you are downloading the files, is all that is necessary but is worth crap all if you already have the file and it's corrupted and there are no seeds to redownload from.

Re:Remix

[elfprince13]

I haven't spent enough time studying the details of current holographic disc technology to know how it's handled. I'm just pointing out that holographic medium have more inbuilt potential for data redundancy than the surface data-only pitted optical discs we've been using for so long. Also, it's not exactly new technology. InPhase Technologies + their Tapestry project have been around for at least half a decade. http://www.inphase-technologies.com/

Re:Remix

[john83]

Yeah, I was at their talk in Optics + Photonics 2008. They seem to be mostly focussed on competing with hard drives rather than discs.

Re:Remix

[elfprince13]

I *think they're stll trying to do removable storage, but they're targeting the enterprise data backup market (i.e., competing with tape drives)

Off-site backup?

[moogoogaipan]

I might be able to use it for off-site backup. As long as it can hold data for 3 years, I am good. Hopefully it doesn't cost 5K per disc.

Re:Off-site backup?

[localman57]

Aw, crap. Now it's just a matter of time before someone asks the "How do I archive data forever" question. Again.

Re:Off-site backup?

[Gilmoure]

8' thick slab of granite, with letters laser cut through. This is then sealed in the middle of 30' of non-reactive UV resistant clear polymer. This cube is then set on top of a mountain on the south pole of the moon, aligned so that the sun only strikes it once every 240 earth days, shining through and then having flaming letters 300' high show up on the shadowed wall of crater Faustinni.

Re:Off-site backup?

[ceoyoyo]

Probably won't survive the red giant phase of the sun. Better put it farther away.

Re:Off-site backup?

[Anonymous Coward]

we apologize for the inconvenience

Re:Off-site backup?

[Anonymous Coward]

nuke it!
no information is lost in the universe so by definition everything is stored forever(or atleast as long as the universe will exist) i call it multisite backup(multisite backup is a patent pending technology)
note: remember to have a escape clause for when they want to do a restore (;

Tb or TB or TiB?

[wiredlogic]

The title is confusing. Are these Tb or TB?

Re:Tb or TB or TiB?

[Mekabyte]

1 tuberculosis

Re:Tb or TB or TiB?

[Anonymous Coward]

TitBytes, as in how many tit pictures you can fit in the disc.

Re:Tb or TB or TiB?

[gnick]

TriBbles. It's an unfortunate organic consumable necessary for disc production, but they're fairly easy to replicate.

Re:Tb or TB or TiB?

[Polarina]

The article answers that question.
"The Register has this article concerning GE announcement that it has been developing a 1 terabyte DVD-size disk that can be read by a modified Blu-ray player."

Re:Tb or TB or TiB?

[AP31R0N]

Storage is always in bytes. Bits would be transmission rate (because it correlates to frequency). tFA was consistent in using TB.

Good job at pretending to be confused by a typo, though.

(if you really were confused and not being pedantic, fork over your geek'n chit so we can tear off a corner)

Re:Tb or TB or TiB?

[Rip Dick]

One of the great enemies of the Klingon Empire. Ah... to think of the victory songs after a successful tribble hunt.

Re:Tb or TB or TiB?

[camperdave]

Storage is measured in bytes, communication channels in bits. The difference between 1TB and 1TiB is only about 9%. I'm guessing most people could recover that by clearing out temporary files and duplicates.

Re:Tb or TB or TiB?

[six025]

The title is confusing. Are these Tb or TB?

Definitely a Terror-bit. Imagine the "evil bit", used by terrorists ;-)

Re:Tb or TB or TiB?

[TeknoHog]

Storage is always in bytes. Bits would be transmission rate (because it correlates to frequency)

In information theory, storage is also considered a (noisy) communication channel. You still have the same problem of representing bits in terms of something analog, with a suitable coding to minimize errors.

Re:Tb or TB or TiB?

[agbinfo]

More like 9.95%
But that's OK, you were only off by about 9%

Re:Tb or TB or TiB?

[JesseMcDonald]

Storage is often given in bits. For example, the size of every one of the NAND Flash ICs listed in Micron's online part catalog is given in gigabits.

The GP could have checked the article before commenting, but it is perfectly reasonable to wonder whether the submitter intended "1Tb" to be one terabit (exactly 125 * 10^9 bytes), as written, or one terabyte (about 1.0737 * 10^9 bytes, or exactly 2^30 bytes).

Re:Tb or TB or TiB?

[an unsound mind]

1 terabyte tit pictures?

What sort of resolution are you using? More importantly, where do you get your monitors?

Re:Tb or TB or TiB?

[Kuroji]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure I haven't generated ninety gigabytes of temporary files and duplicates in my entire LIFETIME.

Re:Tb or TB or TiB?

[camperdave]

9.05052982% according to Google.

Re:Tb or TB or TiB?

[KC7JHO]

So THAT is why I was given a round geek card! Never fit the holder quite the way I thought it should...

Re:Tb or TB or TiB?

[agbinfo]

It's a question of semantics. If you say that you are going from 10^12 to 2^40 then you gain 9.95% whereas if you go from 2^40 to 10^12, you lose 9.05%. here or simply

I guess it depends on your POV so I'll admit I was wrong. Still 1 TiB-1 TB is 92.6 GiB (99GB).

Re:Tb or TB or TiB?

[thexile]

Depending on tit sizes.

Just in time for Windows 8

[Anonymous Coward]

I was beginning to worry it'd be a multi-disk install.

The Man Who Fell to Earth

[Geoffrey.landis]

Reminds me of the technology that Bowie's character came up with in "The Man Who Fell to Earth."

A quick reminder that the movie actually came from a novel, The Man Who Fell To Earth, by Walter Tevis.

(Movie was a moderately faithful adaptation, as such things go-- unlike some SF movies, where little is taken from the book other than the name, and--in the case of Bladerunner--not even that.)

Re:The Man Who Fell to Earth

[0xdeadbeef]

where little is taken from the book other than the name

There's nothing wrong with that. It improved Starship Troopers considerably.

Re:The Man Who Fell to Earth

[thisnamestoolong]

(Movie was a moderately faithful adaptation, as such things go-- unlike some SF movies, where little is taken from the book other than the name, and--in the case of Bladerunner--not even that.)

This is something I often lament, but Blade Runner is one of the few examples where the departure from the novel was a very, very good thing. Don't get me wrong, I am a huge fan of PKD, but Ridley Scott's adaptation worked much better for the screen than a faithful adaptation would have. Dick's style, unfortunately, does not transfer well to the screen (the notable exception being Richard Linklater's fantastic adaptation of A Scanner Darkly).

Re:The Man Who Fell to Earth

[TheRaven64]

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep would have made a terrible film in a faithful adaptation but it, and The Man in the High Castle, could both work well as in miniseries format.

Re:The Man Who Fell to Earth

[DoofusOfDeath]

(Movie was a moderately faithful adaptation, as such things go-- unlike some SF movies, where little is taken from the book other than the name, and--in the case of Bladerunner--not even that.)

Yeah, it really grinds my gears the way that most movies and books differ in both content and title.

But maybe we're just purists.

Re:The Man Who Fell to Earth

[PinkyGigglebrain]

I am sorry but I have to totally disagree with you on that.

As a "B" grade "alien bug vs. Human" sci-fi action film it was OK but I think it would have been much better if they had NOT tried to follow the original book at all.

Title + completely different story == GOOD || GREAT # see BladeRunner

Title + faithful adaptation of the book == GREAT

Title + lame adaptation == SUCK_MONKEY_BALLS

The movie Starship Troopers, as an adaptation of the book by the same tittle sucked monkey balls. The book wasn't about the bug/human war, it was an examination of a society and military that just used the war as a back drop. Its interesting to note that people who read the book expecting it to be an action/adventure like the movie are always almost always dissapointed, but if they read it for its view point on society and military tactics they love it. My Father (Major, Retired), who has NO interest in sci-fi, loved the book because it was dead on in its examination of the Military structure, training and tactics. And we both agreed that when something important is handed to you on a platter it is inevitably taken for granted, like the right to vote currently is (if its so important why is it just given to you when you turn 18?, you have to pass a test to get a drivers license don't you?). And how many times have we seen on /. comments about making the parents responsible for their children? Want to know what I'm talking about? read the book.

Re:The Man Who Fell to Earth

[Globally Mobile]

Thanks for putting that out there for folks. I just have a love for Bowie in that film. Had a pretty heavy influence on me as a little kid. Specially all the technologies that he came out with to financially support his ultimate goal. In particular I remember being quite excited by the idea of holographic mini-cubes of music (almost like cubed Nico Nico Nicorri Jelly's)Now something else to add to my never ending list of must re-reads. And as far as Dicks Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep....
I can't dismiss the cinematography in Bladerunner, specially considering the time period that the movie was made, but it really can't hold a candle to the absolute mind-digger that is PKD's work. I think he might be an author who is better off read. I wish they could have included the mood-altering box that to me seemed to be a central device in that story.

Re:The Man Who Fell to Earth

[Jesus_666]

Well, the sequel certainly fits the "reflection on society" part. For about ten seconds somewhere towards the end. The rest, however, makes you realize just how good the original movie actually is.

Re:The Man Who Fell to Earth

[Fantastic Lad]

I knew a guy who went off and fought in Iraq because of Starship Troopers. He came back reporting that he'd been a fool. I was tired at the time and gave a half-assed attempt to console him by saying, "Well, you gained a great deal of experience and insight into how the real world works. You got conned." He shot back, "Yeah, they say the military builds character, but it's the wrong kind of character. --It builds unquestioning idiots and killers and those who survive come back fucked up. I'm fucked up."

As for the right to vote; I have to agree, most people shouldn't be allowed to vote. They're too stupid and too easily fooled by propaganda into supporting idiotic things. --But to give the vote to that specific subsection of people who were fooled into becoming military killers. . ? That's insane. The world would need to be at war all the time to provide the initiatory test bed necessary to make the voting system possible. (And preparation for war always means war.) --Not only that, but those voting under such a scheme would have all gone through military training. --Which everybody knows is a punishing kind of brainwashing served up by the very Government they'd be voting for. A vote from somebody who has been brainwashed is the same as a confession beaten from a torture victim. Not worth a damn. --This would negate the whole idea of freedom of thought and democracy in general.

Basically, you're talking complete idiocy.

Here's a gem for you: In a world where all money printed by governments is borrowed from a small banking cartel at interest, how is it possible for governments to pay back the principal plus interest? --Well, they borrow more money, also at interest. This is exactly how it works. Thus one small collective of banks established god-knows how long ago when personal fortunes were first amassed by men, those shadowy creeps with their own secret services and their fingers in every important pot, own everything. Kennedy was killed in a large part because he tried to take them on by trying, (horrors) to introduce an actual American dollar, printed by the actual American government and not borrowed at interest from anybody. This could have changed everything. It could have broken the chains of world slavery to the banking cartels. So for this and other similar reasons, he had to go. Today's politicians know this and they play right along because they're cowards and they know that the only way to survive is to climb to the top of the power structure. Obama and Bush are cut from the same cloth. --You and I and your father and everybody else are slaves to this economic system burdened under ever-increasing world debt. Voting is a giant and meaningless scam. This is entirely by design and the military is just a means of generating big gobs of debt very quickly while conveniently providing a means to kill and brain-wash those men and women in the population who might actually be strong enough and righteous enough to do something about it. But they won't because the perfect method for systematically processing such people has obviously been found. Just distribute copies of fucking Heinlein to all the 18 year-olds and sit back.

Heinlein was either evil or he was a damned tool presenting a one-sided argument in such a charismatic and inspiring manner that young people reading it were blinded by its alpha-male logic and its glorious trumpet call to arms and general testosterone laden horseshit. --Drunk on this crap, readers missed the flaws in the argument. Try reading slower and thinking faster next time you pick it up. You'll be amazed.

-FL

Re:The Man Who Fell to Earth

[Anonymous Coward]

My understanding is that the movie was written as, basically, a piss-take of the book because the director thought the authors view on how to run a society were abhorant. The plan was to show up how absolutely ridiculous the idea of only allowing people who joined the military to vote was. And no, I haven't read the book yet so I don't know exactly what the book suggests (although I do intend to read it). From watching the movie from the point of view of a piss-take aimed at the original author I suspect I have a good feel for what the book will be when I do get around to reading it. I'm sure it will be quite fascinating but completely twisted (in my view).

Re:The Man Who Fell to Earth

[kewlblue]

First of all, if this guy went off to fight in a war because of a single book then he was a fool and fucked up to begin with, it had nothing to do with the war or the military conditioning program.

I think you need to re-read the book, the whole idea was that if you wanted to prove that you were good enough to vote you had to put the needs of society as a whole ahead of your own personal needs. In the "Starship Trooper" universe, you could just as easily jump into a research position rather the front-line fighting. In fact, I believe you don't have to be a grunt in this universe either if you don't want to be.

Also, I know there is some fucked up shit happening in our society today and this system could not possibly work at this point. Although, I do believe it's the fact that a lot of people really don't care enough about anything other than themselves or their close family and friends that they can't\refuse to see the big picture. If you know of a better system to filter out all of this selfish greed that runs rampant in our society today I'm all ears but when I first read this book (many years ago) I thought it was one of the best ideas I've ever heard and I still think so today. It still hasn't convinced me to join the military though!

Re:GE

[Anonymous Coward]

Silly troll - Doc Brown was played by Christopher Lloyd, not David Bowie! Besides, GE has no link that I'm aware of to the DeLorean Motor Company that I'm aware of.

Maybe I'm missing something...

Someone smack the submitter/editor

[MartinSchou]

So, what is it? 1 Tb (terabit) or 1 TB (terabyte). If you are going to fuck up your abbreviations, at least be consistent about it instead of using Tb in the title and TB in the text.

Actually I think it's the editor that needs to be hit upside the head with a terrabat (no, that's not a typo, that's supposed to be a bat made out from the ground - i.e. granite), as he probably tried to "prettify" the title.

Re:Someone smack the submitter/editor

[wjsteele]

I've got an idea... and I know it sounds unreasonable for /., but how about if you read the article and watch the video. It's quite possible that the answer is contained within one or both of them.

Bill

Re:Someone smack the submitter/editor

[Anonymous Coward]

What's it feel like to be angry all the time? I suppose beating your wife -er wait this is Slashdot. No woman will have you.

Silly me.

Re:Someone smack the submitter/editor

[Globally Mobile]

I consider myself smacked upside the head with a tuberculosis infected bat made from terbium. Though if you enter Google with the simple search define: Tb , you get terabit, terabyte, terbium, and tuberculosis. I should have made the extra effort to triple check myself before I got wrecked. Also, WTF, my spell-check does not have terabit as a word. Time to add yet another term to the dictionary file.

Why?

[thisnamestoolong]

With the plummeting costs of magnetic storage, what is the point of this? I mean, optical storage is practical when you are talking about a few GB, but for multiple TB? I mean, how long would it take to burn one of those suckers, five, maybe six months? Why not just buy a cheap eSATA or USB external drive and stick it in a closet somewhere -- it's not much more expensive, lasts longer, and saves you a ton of productivity.

Re:Why?

[moon3]

Much bigger problem is the optical mechinery of these discs, those might be readable after 10 years, but the drives with ton of moving parts might not even last that long, at that time we would have solid state discs much more capable, anything mechanical is just a dead-end research here. More like somebody tricked GE capital investors to buy this expensive "holography" technology, I can't see anything really groundbreaking stemming from this.

Re:Why?

[localman57]

Because some people need large storage with shock (drop) resistance. Also, magnetic and flash media can't match optical for ROM (manufactured image) applications.

Re:Why?

[iYk6]

Why not just buy a cheap eSATA or USB external drive and stick it in a closet somewhere -- it's not much more expensive, lasts longer, and saves you a ton of productivity.

GE expects a 1TB disk will be $100 5 years from now. That's more than a 1TB drive costs now, by then it will be 5 times as much. So people wouldn't use these disks to save money. The only whys I can think of are that it is smaller, and maybe lasts longer. Lasting longer is tough to tell, but historically optical disks have had a longer shelf-life than magnetic media when it has adequate error correction and no DRM.

Re:Why?

[Ponga]

I see what you are saying. But at least in theory, optical media such as CD/DVD, etc *should be* much cheaper than anything like a disk drive by virtue of the material components used alone. A DVD is largely plastic, whereas a disk has electronics and finely tuned mechanics and is much more complex; the media AND the drive for that media are all-in-one whereas with DVD, you have one drive for any number of media.

Ya, I'm not sure where we are going wrong there either...

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are looking at it as a 'one off' of 'only need 2-3TB of data times 2'. What if you have a dataset of 15TB? Then say 20% of that changes every month and you want to do full back up for simplicity and speed? Then you maybe have legal requirements of keeping the data for say 5 years. With your scheme I would have to buy 3x12x5 TB worth of HD or about $27,000 worth of 2TB hard drives. That also assumes my dataset is not going to get bigger (fat chance). Never mind either having them all plugged in and using power for something that is rarely used. Plus a rack to keep them in even if they are off. What if you are required by law (many companies are, and it is good practice) to have offsite backups. How much does a CD weigh if I have to mail it vs a HD if I have to do the same thing?

They were talking 2-3 hours to burn 1TB of data. About the same amount of time with a real HD.

OR we could have a stack of 100-200 or so discs that take no AC to keep good. Even if the drive is say 5000 and 1 spindle of disks is 2000 I still come out way ahead.

You are looking at it in the wrong way of who this is designed for and who the early adopters will be. The rest of us will get it and your bitching?! Backup my whole data set onto 1 disk instead of 130 or so DVDs that I have now? Yeah I dont want that at all.

Re:Why?

[pla]

I mean, how long would it take to burn one of those suckers, five, maybe six months?

A 24x DVD writer commits 32MB/s. At that speed, it would take just over nine hours to write one terabyte.

However, keep in mind that the biggest limitation to write speed in optical media comes from the maximum rotation speed possible (discs tend to explode above 10k RPM) combined with the areal density. The former we can't get around without switching to something more durable than cheap polycarbonate sandwiches; the latter necessarily increases with capacity. So, a disc that holds more can write more without spinning faster. At 220x the areal density of a single sided single layer DVD, you would expect a write rate on the order of 7GB/s (once the technology matures and drive interfaces can actually sustain such a throughput).

So the short answer - Just as with CDs and DVDs, it'll probably take around an hour at first; after a few years, that will drop to a modest 2-5 minutes. And by then, we'll all complain about the uselessness of a mere terabyte disc when we have multi-petabyte primary storage devices to back up onto them.

Re:Why?

[jonbryce]

If you increase the storage density, there will be more bytes per track, which will increase the data transfer speed. However, there will also be more tracks on the disk, and as you can't increase the number of tracks read per minute, it will take longer to read or fill a higher capacity disk.

Godsend for backups

[Alcimedes]

I would love to be able to burn backups to non-magnetic disk, and not have to use 40 of them to back up 1TB or more of data. I would hope that one of the early niches they'll look into will be backups and storage needs.

It can still lose!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes Blu-Ray can still lose the format war!

Re:It can still lose!

[kazade84]

I think it already did... DVD is the victor.

Re:GE

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if you want to expand on the entire thought process, there were probably rules on his homeworld against giving technology to the natives that he was breaking anyway.

Error Correction

[ThrowAwaySociety]

How many MB will be wiped out by a pathetically small scratch on the disk? Remember the promises made of audio CD's?

With well-designed error correction, nothing. Enough error correcting data would be distributed all around the disc to recover from localized scratches.

Re:Error Correction

[Anonymous Coward]

EXACTLY!

This is the reason why this disc is such a big deal.
The redundancy this thing offers is a very attractive thing to me.
No more "oh the disc is scratched, my games screwed now"

Combined with the tough Blu-ray coating TDK made and the scratch problem just disappears.

Re:Error Correction

[clone53421]

Two things I feel the need to point out...

"well-designed error correction"? How likely is that?

"Enough error correcting data would be distributed all around the disc to recover from localized scratches." Yes, but this isn't random-access memory. Data is easiest to read if it's stored in a linear fashion. And if you're worried about circular scratches too, you'd have to put the error-correcting data even farther away.

Re:Error Correction

[ShakaUVM]

>>"well-designed error correction"? How likely is that?

Very likely.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed%E2%80%93Solomon_error_correction

Re:Error Correction

[KnownIssues]

That's why the new 1TB discs will have 950GB of error correction.

It would be nice if you

[Anonymous Coward]

used the subject as a short summary of your post, rather than the informationless beginning of your comment.

American consumers don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried to argue that you could fit whole seasons of some TV shows on one Blu-Ray disk, but the argument came back "if it ain't in HD, I'm not buying a Blu-Ray disk." So these new disks could hold entire runs of some series, but it probably won't be sold as such. Pity.

Re:American consumers don't get it

[relguj9]

I tried to argue that you could fit whole seasons of some TV shows on one Blu-Ray disk, but the argument came back "if it ain't in HD, I'm not buying a Blu-Ray disk." So these new disks could hold entire runs of some series, but it probably won't be sold as such. Pity.

Or I could hold an entire season in HD of a TV series on a single 1 TB magnetic hard drive (for less money).

By "2012-2015" a 1 TB HD will be like what, 20 or 30 bucks?

Re:American consumers don't get it

[relguj9]

I tried to argue that you could fit whole seasons of some TV shows on one Blu-Ray disk, but the argument came back "if it ain't in HD, I'm not buying a Blu-Ray disk." So these new disks could hold entire runs of some series, but it probably won't be sold as such. Pity.

Or I could hold an entire season in HD of a TV series on a single 1 TB magnetic hard drive (for less money). By "2012-2015" a 1 TB HD will be like what, 20 or 30 bucks?

More importantly though, by 2012-2015, we'll have what, petabyte hard drives? We'll just be downloading and/or streaming our HD videos.

Re:American consumers don't get it

[WuphonsReach]

More importantly though, by 2012-2015, we'll have what, petabyte hard drives? We'll just be downloading and/or streaming our HD videos.

Streaming/downloading - yes. With modern codecs (XVid, h264), you can easily fit 720p into 2-3Mbps, and figure 3-5Mbps for 1080p.

HD size... probably not. 2TB 3.5" drives have only just arrived in 2009 and are close to the upper end of where Perpendicular Recording density was supposed to top out at. Although they've pushed the upper-end back a few times in the past 2 years. The original estimate was 250-300 gigabits per square inch, and now the estimate is up to 1 terabit per square inch as the upper limit. Current 2TB drives are using somewhere around 300-400 gigabits per square inch designs.

So 4-6TB 3.5" disks are likely by 2012.

After that, you get into the next tech (HAMR or bit patterned media or both) which is still a few years away and might raise the limit to about 50 terabits per square inch. More likely is maybe 10-20TB 3.5" disks by 2015.

And that ignores what is happening on the flash media front in the 2.5" size. The big units right now are already close to catching up with magnetic media in the 2.5" size. You can buy 256GB SSDs in 2.5" size and magnetic 2.5" drives are just creeping past 500GB (I think there's a 1TB 2.5" drive out now). Prices are still ridiculously high ($600 for 256GB), but are dropping very fast.

Figure 512GB MLC SSDs for $500-ish in 2010, with 1TB and 2TB SSDs by 2012 or so. The equivalent densities for magnetic storage in the 2.5" size will probably only be up around 2-4TB by 2012. So there's a good chance that MLC SSDs will catch up in size, if not in price by then.

Re:American consumers don't get it

[fnj]

The 1TB 2.5" drive that exists is not even a real 2.5" drive; not in any real sense. It is thicker than the 9.5mm de facto standard and WON'T FIT ANYWHERE that a normal 2.5" drive will fit. Talk about dropping the ball.

What about a burner

[forceofyoda]

Ok, so I can read a 1TB disc using a modified Blu-Ray player. I'm sure it would cost a lot more to be able to burn a 1TB disc, right?

will be

[nimbius]

Worthless if RAID overhead keeps increasing...although i wonder if holo-storage raid overhead is more or less than conventional?

to be correct here

[poetmatt]

This is actually Bluray 1.0. There were experiments being done involving multi layer discs way before bluray. Sony is the one who dictated the 50GB size for the discs for consumers (25GB for data). Bluray discs themselves can hit considerably higher.

Meanwhile, who knows what kind of DRM will be put on this crap as it's supported by all your favorite media dinosaurs.

Can someone find the old slashdot article about petabyte holographic storage? I don't remember how far back it was, but talking about hundreds + layer holographic storage basically.

Re:to be correct here

[iamhassi]

"Can someone find the old slashdot article about petabyte holographic storage? I don't remember how far back it was, but talking about hundreds + layer holographic storage basically."

Every year there's another "hundreds of layers of storage" article, and we're still sitting here with dual layer DVDs. By the time we see terabyte discs we'll probably all have petabyte hard drives. I remember them talking about blu ray in the 90s, with the prototype arriving in 2000. Back when we had 6gb drives the idea of 50gb discs was amazing, but they dragged their feet so bad creating a standard that by the time it reached market we all moved on to terabyte hard drives. Blu ray burners are still too damn expensive, costing five times ($160 vs $30) more than a DVD burner costs. And once you have one then what? Pay $3 to $7 for each BD-R disc? No thanks, even at $3 for 25gb that's $120 per terabyte, 50% more than a 1 terabyte hard drive.

So forgive me if I don't get all excited every time they announce a new high capacity disc format because they haven't fixed the one they have out now.

Re:to be correct here

[NotBornYesterday]

Can we please get a +1, Insightful over here? I gave all my points away yesterday.

Re:to be correct here

[dgatwood]

I posted a similar comment about a year ago. Optical media should be a great backup medium, but because they take so long to ramp up production and push the cost of the media down, it is useless before anyone can afford it. Blu-ray media at 50 GB per disc is already useless and it still isn't even close to price parity with hard drives. To fully back up a 500 GB hard drive (the industry average size now) takes 10 discs to back up once. At 30 minutes per disc, this is five hours of continuous burning, during which time you have to have someone swapping out discs every half hour. For a terabyte HD, you're more than an entire work day. You should be doing a full backup at least every month and incremental backups weekly. Do the math, and you're spending the better part of a week every month just doing backups. The average hard drive needs to be able to be backed up on a single disc or you've already failed. Blu-ray has already failed.

As a result, recordable optical media is basically worthless except for people burning content to give to other people, which is a tiny fraction of its potential user base. If they would ramp production way up and flood the market with cheap media immediately even before the recorders are available in quantities, people would flock to them in droves. It's counterintuitive, but the only way any optical format will ever be particularly useful to the general consumer is if the industry decides to make it a loss leader for about a year. By the end of that year, you'll have so much adoption that it won't be losing money anymore, and it will be in the hands of consumers early enough to be broadly useful.

Re:to be correct here

[commodore64_love]

Yeah but selling optical discs with Terminator 5 on them is cheaper than selling hard drives with Terminator 5 on them.

Re:to be correct here

[relguj9]

"Can someone find the old slashdot article about petabyte holographic storage? I don't remember how far back it was, but talking about hundreds + layer holographic storage basically." Every year there's another "hundreds of layers of storage" article, and we're still sitting here with dual layer DVDs. By the time we see terabyte discs we'll probably all have petabyte hard drives. I remember them talking about blu ray in the 90s, with the prototype arriving in 2000. Back when we had 6gb drives the idea of 50gb discs was amazing, but they dragged their feet so bad creating a standard that by the time it reached market we all moved on to terabyte hard drives. Blu ray burners are still too damn expensive, costing five times ($160 vs $30) more than a DVD burner costs. And once you have one then what? Pay $3 to $7 for each BD-R disc? No thanks, even at $3 for 25gb that's $120 per terabyte, 50% more than a 1 terabyte hard drive. So forgive me if I don't get all excited every time they announce a new high capacity disc format because they haven't fixed the one they have out now.

Makes you stop and think when the cost of a disk + disk drive is lower than just a disc... At what point do they just scrap the whole optical media idea altogether and just package removable magnetic hard drive disk's.

Re:to be correct here

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm too tired to go through this....you must be too young, or too forgetful to remember prices of media and drives... Floppies vs CDs, CDs vs DVDs, DVDs vs BD, I've missed a couple... DVD Burners used to be over $200 dollars...you do the rest of the research. All tech starts out expensive. If we all had the short-sighted view that you do, we would not have CDs or DVDs, or BDs, etc..., because they are, originally, too expensive compared to the previous generation. Floppies Rule!

Re:to be correct here

[poetmatt]

maybe you don't understand?

in the concept of the phrase, hard drive = optical drive (in a casing).

There's no reason you should be unable to have terminator 1-5 on a single disc other than bad calls by the industry for discs.

Re:to be correct here

[poetmatt]

thank you. This is exactly what I was looking for. The discs are always behind on the tech, and I'm guessing maybe it's on purpose...maybe the companies want to phase it out for software licensing since then you can't "own" an irrevocable copy at this point? I know it seems somewhat tinfoil hat-ish but still.

Bluray also didn't take off because we had the HDDVD Bluray format war and the completely shit storage in the beginning. 50 GB 3 years ago is still a small amount. 50 GB today is an even smaller one. I can get flash drives with more space today.

Re:to be correct here

[Anonymous Coward]

Floppies vs Zip Disks you insensitive clod!

Re:to be correct here

[Anonymous Coward]

The average hard drive needs to be able to be backed up on a single disc or you've already failed.

When was this ever the case?

Floppies, CD's and DVD's have always been smaller than my HD at the time.

Re:to be correct here

[blahplusplus]

"As a result, recordable optical media is basically worthless except for people burning content to give to other people"

Who backs up their ENTIRE hard drive on DVD or blue ray with hard disks so cheap? You use discs to archive excess stuff you want off your hard disks. The great thing about DVD's and blu-ray discs is that they are not mechanical and not subject to mechanical faliure like hard disks are which is still a significant risk. Just recently I had a hard drive die on me permanently for no reason wouldn't even detect at bootup. Thankfully it was one of the drive's in my RAID array and not my main drive, even though I don't always keep backups of important files on flash or DVD and they take far far less space then a single disc, anything that is replacable or redownloadable (most stuff) is easy to replace.

You put stuff you want to archive on DVD/Blu ray that you want to REMOVE from your hard drive. I have downloaded way more stuff then I could possibly fit on many terabyte hard disks. Trailers for games, movies, anime, youtube videos, etc. I'd be buying hard drives every couple months with the amount of stuff I download.

I also keep raw images of DVD's and blu-ray discs those eat up a lot of hard drive space and the only way to get rid of them is to... you guessed it - burn them!

If your critical information is that important you back up what you cannot replace on many media including hard disks.

I always burn multiple copies of things that I can't afford to lose as well as put important irreplacable files on removable flash media.

Blu-ray is not useless, I use Blu ray and DVD-R's to do a lot of archiving and while hard disks have come down in price they still are not competitive with blank DVD's you can get 100 4.7GB discs for under $20, most 50GB hard drives go for $50+ shipping, even more if it's an external hard disk, even more if it has 5 year warranty. Search Newegg.com for seagate 500gb to see what I mean. You can get 1200+ GB of writable DVD media for the cost of one 500GB hard drive.

"If they would ramp production way up and flood the market with cheap media immediately even before the recorders are available in quantities, people would flock to them in droves. It's counterintuitive, but the only way any optical format will ever be particularly useful to the general consumer is if the industry decides to make it a loss leader for about a year. By the end of that year, you'll have so much adoption that it won't be losing money anymore, "

This I can agree with, but lets not forget the investors of blu ray and DVD couldn't know before hand just how far hard drive would come. Who imagined that you would be able to buy a 2 terabytes for $200 when you were gettting between 4-20 GB in the late 90's.

Re:to be correct here

[h4rm0ny]

I'm of the opinion that if we hadn't had the competition of HD-DVD then Blu-Ray would have been even more expensive and it would have taken off even less.

Re:to be correct here

[Anonymous Coward]

You must have been a late adopter of CD-ROM technology then. When I first got a CD-ROM my hard drive was just 80MB and that was pretty large for back then.

Re:to be correct here

[bertoelcon]

The great thing about DVD's and blu-ray discs is that they are not mechanical and not subject to mechanical faliure like hard disks are which is still a significant risk.

They are optical and scratches will cause loss of data. Of course if you store them and don't use them then you are safer from scratches.

Re:to be correct here

[commodore64_love]

That message made zero sense. (shrug). The point I was making is that optical discs work just fine for the task they were designed for - cheap distribution of product..... that's a task the 1 terabyte HDDs are unsuited for.

As for T 1 to 5, I wouldn't want to buy a movie pack like that. It would cost $75 ($15 per movie). I'd rather just pick the movie I like for $15.

Re:to be correct here

[BigSes]

Um, why would I want to drag a laptop, or a USB/Firewire terabyte drive across the country when a BD-R is much more easy to transport? Did it dawn on you that portability might be part of the thought process?

Re:to be correct here

[bill_mcgonigle]

At 30 minutes per disc, this is five hours of continuous burning, during which time you have to have someone swapping out discs every half hour.

Wow, this sounds exactly like backing up to floppy, then QIC-80 tapes. Maybe it's a constant. We used incremental backups in both cases to avoid the problem, except on a monthly basis we did full.

I just back up to redundant site-diverse hard drives these days.

Re:to be correct here

[poetmatt]

well why the hell would you want to drag a BD-R for that? You can buy a flash drive for 15 or 20 bucks that holds more data and is a lot more portable and usable than the odd shape of a BD-R (and more durable) - since you need a BD-R reader to play a BD-R disc.

Re:to be correct here

[WinPimp2K]

And back when the Apple ][+ was the pinnacle of personal computing (there was an upstart from some outfit called IBM), 143K floppy disks sold for 50 bucks per box of ten - for the math impaired, that is 5 bucks per disk - or $35 per Megabyte, 35 grand per gigabyte or 35 million per terabyte. So, we can expect costs for both media and drives to drop quite a bit as economies of scale kick in.

At least to the point that the media is not punitively taxed to subsidize the folks who "produce" video content in much the same manner as male bovines "produce" fretilizer.

Re:to be correct here

[kewlblue]

You should check your own math before you start posting about the math impaired. 143 KB = $5 1 KB = $0.03 1 MB = $35.80 1 GB = $36663.50 1 TB = $37543420.42

Re:to be correct here

[BigSes]

If you can buy a 50+ gig flash drive for $15-20, you'd be a rich man reselling them. I'll give you the Blu-Ray reader part.

Re:to be correct here

[dgatwood]

This I can agree with, but lets not forget the investors of blu ray and DVD couldn't know before hand just how far hard drive would come. Who imagined that you would be able to buy a 2 terabytes for $200 when you were gettting between 4-20 GB in the late 90's.

Hard drive storage has seen a fairly consistent rate of growth since the mid 1990s, with areal density doubling roughly every 18 months. If they couldn't imagine that the trend would continue for another few years after it had done so for essentially a decade, they had no business being in charge of a standard, as that shows a rather remarkable lack of foresight. :-)

I can excuse it for the DVD standard; computer video was in its infancy when the DVD format came out. By the time Blu-Ray started to happen, though, it should have been obvious that this would be a problem.

That's a good point about archiving junk to DVD, though I would argue that if it isn't something you'll ever use again, that's what the trash can is for. :-)

Re:to be correct here

[poetmatt]

why would you need a 50 gig flash drive, or were we talking double sided only? BD-R are 25GB, which you can buy a 32GB on newegg for like $70 and it will play everywhere.

Basically, the technology doesn't really fit a purpose. It's just an interim waiting to be replaced. If flash drives keep getting more efficient as SSD represents, we might just not have a need for drives that require specific readers. I've heard bluray discs take a lifetime to burn and USB2 is no better (although USB3 will only be marginally better).

We're still on the verge of the solution for all of this crap and I don't see it being disc, flash or hard drive really.

Re:to be correct here

[WinPimp2K]

rounding errors. An obsessive concern for precision in unimportant matters may lead one into a very dark place involving magazine clippings thumbtacked to walls with arcane mathematical formulae writ large with Magic Markers and strings connecting the aforementioned thumbtacks. It is left as an exercise for the reader to determine the correct quantities and distributions of cigarette butts, pizza boxes, chineses take out containers as well as the precise dosage and delivery methods for caffiene and other less legal stimulants.

143K at 5 bucks figure 7 disks per megabyte hence $35 per megabyte plus the useful imprecision of assuming 1000K = 1M, 1000M = 1G etc.

No Need for DRM...

[Nemyst]

If you can't even fit the disk on your hard drive to rip it! It's all part of a devious scheme to make backup copies impossible to do *puts tinfoil hat*.

Re:No Need for DRM...

[maxwell demon]

Actually, the useful content will be not much more than on Blu Ray. The rest of the space will be used for the excessive DRM.

Re:No Need for DRM...

[HogGeek]

I suspect few geeks have less that 1Tb (or is it 1TB) of disk space...

Personally, I have over 21 Tb in 6Tb, 6Tb, 4Tb, and 5Tb increments...

Re:No Need for DRM...

[Yamata no Orochi]

How much did a 6TB hard drive set you back? I didn't even know you could buy those through normal channels.

Re:No Need for DRM...

[ceoyoyo]

Uh huh. I remember when they started releasing games on multiple CDs. Wing Commander... III? came on six discs so at $10 / blank CD you might as well just buy it. Baldur's Gate was similarly pirate proof.

And then blank CDs went down to fifty cents each.

Re:No Need for DRM...

[VoltageX]

Quad core/GPGPU means you should be able to rip the disc and encode it to a much smaller h264 in at least realtime. Problem solved!

Industry

[geekoid]

The entertainment industry could use then to create 1 disk sets.
All Disney Films on one disk, for example.

Anyone where stamp data is needed for this size.
I can see a solution where you ahve an HD attached to your computer with a special addition BUS designed to push data to these devices at a high rate. Since it's direct you remove a lot of over head,. It would be expensive, but for companies dealing in petabytes of data it would probably be worth while.

Re:Industry

[PRMan]

Chinese street vendors could use them to create 1 disk sets. All Disney Films on one disk, for example.

FTFY

Re:Industry

[SBrach]

All Disney Films on one disk, for example

And they would only charge $10,000 for it.

Re:Industry

[Jesus_666]

Disney would never do that. They'd just ship the Cinderella 5 disk with thirty hours of unskippable ads.

*Yawn*

[Urza9814]

Wasn't there a company promising this exact same technology about ten years ago? I've found articles from 2005 talking about a holographic disc from InPhase, and I seem to recall hearing about another company working on something similar even earlier than that, though I can't recall the name of it...what I do recall is hearing something along the lines of the company shutting down several years ago.

Re:*Yawn*

[QuantumRiff]

Its like Nuclear Fusion.. The technology of Tomorrow, and always will be!

Re:*Yawn*

[Urza9814]

Ah! I remembered! FMDs. There was a 50GB prototype demonstrated at COMDEX in 2000, the second and third generation discs were apparently capable of holding up to a terrabyte.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorescent_Multilayer_Disc

Re:*Yawn*

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF is InPhase? This is GE, not some start-up company announcing a product that will never see the light of day.

Re:*Yawn*

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone should start asking why InPhase has chosen not to pay their employees for 6mos??? They are dead, they missed their ship date because they are out of money.

Nelson Diaz ran the company in the ground...he trashed a good engineering team a couple of years ago when he failed to see the big picture. That guy is out to lunch, everyone around him tells him what is going on, and he chooses not to listen. He just wants his golden parachute.

Re:*Yawn*

[ShakaUVM]

>>Wasn't there a company promising this exact same technology about ten years ago?

1999?

I was working for a professor in 1994 who was all about holographic storage of data. They could actually get very, very high data densities, but the writing of the things (which was akin to developing a photograph) took too long to be practicable. They were sure that the technology would mature, though. Perhaps it has?

The textbook I read with him was published in the late 80s, IIRC.

Re:*Yawn*

[Anonymous Coward]

Constellation 3D

Re:*Yawn*

[bill_mcgonigle]

Its like Nuclear Fusion.. The technology of Tomorrow, and always will be!

Apparently GE funds its research appropriately.

Re:*Yawn*

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone should start asking why InPhase has chosen not to pay their employees for 6mos??? They are dead, they missed their ship date because they are out of money.

Nelson Diaz ran the company in the ground...he trashed a good engineering team a couple of years ago when he failed to see the big picture. That guy is out to lunch, everyone around him tells him what is going on, and he chooses not to listen. He just wants his golden parachute.

Everything that was said is very true, especially that part about Nelson Diaz. I meet him originally when he was at Storage Tek, he was a blooming idiot then and has continued his infinite stupidity at InPhase. The big joke at weekly staff meeting is that Diaz was hanging around long enough so that he could purchase "his own island" and the quit.
            His dreams are apparently not coming to fruition unless he can get the current investors to throw in more cash or find other VC's (saps) who need someplace to waste their money.

$ Better Spent Elsewhere

[Anonymous Coward]

I see portable disk based storage for the most part going the way of the dinosaur. With computers having ever increasing capacity and more devices having internal hard drives, throughput is going to become more important. Why put anything on a disk when you can download it from your home server using your cell phone anywhere in the world? That's the technology worth researching.

On a side note, this is still impressive. If they find a way to make these disks/drives faster, more reliable, and somehow overtake magnetic disks as new hard drive technology I think they would be much more valuable than they are as a new type of DVD/Blu technology. I just have a hard time seeing the laser/spinning disk method going there.

Gonna have to buy another copy of

[wiredog]

the White Album.

Re:Gonna have to buy another copy of

[jgtg32a]

and Dragon's Lair

Re:GE

[Anonymous Coward]

Doc dealt with the Libyans.

Skip the video...waste of time.

[FiloEleven]

The gist of the video was "there is lots of data. we are working to make a holographic disc." Completely information-free!

Re:Skip the video...waste of time.

[wjsteele]

I disagree. They very clearly state the storage capacity, which was my point.

They start of by saying it can store "500 gigabytes" now... then, later on, they say that they are going to be able to store "a terabyte or more."

Bill

No moving parts, please!

[Fishbulb]

Everything I'd heard about holography and one of the most appealing and promising things about it was that it would not require, or at least minimize, moving parts. Why are they now recreating holographic media as Yet Another Spinning Disc device with parts that wear out quickly, go out of alignment, and put the media at risk of damage? A digital storage medium without moving parts could easily provide devices with unprecedented longevity.

I get the connection to make a Blu-Ray backward-compatible medium, but why lock ourselves in to a bad idea (spinning platters) for a medium that's had lackluster adoption*?

* - which I contend is almost entirely the fault of the iron grip the entertainment distribution industry has tried to impose on the digital storage industry With Great Fail.

Re:No moving parts, please!

[nsheppar]

Why are they now recreating holographic media as Yet Another Spinning Disc device with parts that wear out quickly, go out of alignment, and put the media at risk of damage?

Because reusing existing spinning disc technology means saving a little money now and not improving on the future, whereas making a whole new, probably much better technology means expending more money now in order to save money in the future.

Re:No moving parts, please!

[WuphonsReach]

Why are they now recreating holographic media as Yet Another Spinning Disc device with parts that wear out quickly, go out of alignment, and put the media at risk of damage?

Cost? Spinning the disk and moving the read/write head in a single axis is probably a lot less expensive then a 2-axis controller setup.

Too late?

[kheldan]

The discs will be used for high-end commercial niches initially and then migrate to consumer markets in 2012-2015.

Assuming the Earth doesn't end in a gigantic apocalypse and we're all still here, that is.

Ohh the Pornmanity

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally I can backup all my collection and more into few disks!

Re:Ohh the Pornmanity

[MR.Mic]

Is your collection really that small?

I agree

[Anonymous Coward]

No, wait, I think I got this backwards.

Re:GE

[Rip Dick]

I like how Doc donned a bulletproof vest after reading Marty's letter from the past. He was pretty confident that they wouldn't aim for the head/legs/groin. Also, he apparently wasn't too concerned about the rocket launcher they were toting through the roof of their mystery machine van...

Someone has to say it

[still cynical]

Looks like I'll have to buy the White Album again.

Can they be pressed?

[Guysmiley777]

Mass produced CDs and DVDs aren't "burned", they are pressed from masters so that the embedded metal foil layer has the correct pattern on it. This allows for very, very high speed production. Is it possible to do the same thing for these holographic discs? If not, this could be a nice backup media but won't replace DVD or Blu-ray.

Re:Can they be pressed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are Blu-ray discs pressed? Same problem I would think.

The RIAA most like this

[Goateee]

Soon I may put all relevant music ever made onto a single disk. Internet filters wont have much effect then.

Re:The RIAA most like this

[Voyager529]

Soon I may put all relevant music ever made onto a single disk. Internet filters wont have much effect then.

That still fits on a single CD-R.

Re:The RIAA most like this

[Goateee]

For a single person a CD-R sure could include all the songs he/she felt relevant at the moment. I was thinking more of having a disc with so much music of different types that it could be handed to pretty much anyone in the world, and most would think it would fill their music needs. At 5TB and about one million tracks, its at least aproaching this.

Re:The RIAA most like this

[Anonymous Coward]

Soon I may put all relevant music ever made onto a single disk. Internet filters wont have much effect then.

Just buy an iPod like an ordinary person.

Is this a related article?

[SnarfQuest]

Is this related to the recent article about the government uses of computers?

versus LTO

[TheSync]

I think a big challenge to these holographic schemes is that LTO keeps ramping up, and thus an archive market for non-tape solutions never opens up. LTO-4 now holds 800 GB, and when LTO-5 comes out it wil be 1.6 TB.

Re:GE

[Gilmoure]

Ruh-roh, Raggy!

Burn times

[whoisisis]

Fine, an optical disk with 1 TB storage capacity. And I think DVDs take a long time to burn.

Of course, if it's made of the same material as rewriteable DVDs there would be no need to burn an entire disc, and you could probably use it as some sort of external harddrive.

Re:GE

[RDW]

'Besides, GE has no link that I'm aware of to the DeLorean Motor Company that I'm aware of.'

Can't see it on the company chart, but I think it fits in somewhere between the Sheinhardt Wig Company ('Not Poisoning Rivers Since 1997') and AHP Chanagi Party Meats of Pyongyang, N. Korea:

http://www.nbc.com/30_Rock/images/placeholder/GE_OrgChart.jpg

http://www.nbc.com/30_Rock/exclusives/30R_GEWigChart.pdf

No, only 500$/movie

[Well-Fed Troll]

They would sell you a decryption key for each movie for only $500.
(Assumption being that by the time this is out the dollar would have been inflated about 20x).

wake me up when it ships

[JackSpratts]

i won't be setting the alarm.

just spent $68 on a 1 TB wd my book btw. they're not getting less dense - or more expensive.

- js.

Re:Can they be pressed? Small correction

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe that the plastic is actually "pressed" the reflective film is applied over the plastic so the laser can "see" the pits.

Re:GE

[pwfffff]

My childhood would thank you, if it wasn't now laying dead on the ground.

A 1-TerrorByte, HorrorGraphic optical disk?

[Anonymous Coward]

Quick, someone inform the Crypt Keeper! He'll want to use these for the horror-rez versions of his deceasing sets ...

PCRam (Phase Change RAM)

[Anonymous Coward]

Holographic storage, phase-change memory

• Phase change memory relies on a class of alloys called Chalcogenides, which can adopt crystalline or amorphous forms; the crystalline form provides low resistance to currents. Switching between the two states can be done simply by heating the alloy and carefully controlling the cooling process. Fortunately, "carefully controlled" doesn't mean "slow"â"Doller said that his company has phase change devices with 17 times the access speeds of SSDs.

PCRam is far more interesting than holographic BluRay storage. It is going to market _now_ and Samsung is set to begin mass production.

Currently the storage capacity isn't yet on par with SSD - but that should just be a matter of time as the technology matures. As it stands right now it is already faster and significantly more durable than SSD/Flash Ram.

No Doubt Lucas will re-deliver Star Wars again

[Tomsk70]

....in a 3D directors extended widescreen THX-2 version with more hours of extras than the viewer has left to live

Re:No Doubt Lucas will re-deliver Star Wars again

[Jesus_666]

This time Han won't shoot at all, he'll just point at Greedo with his walkie-talkie.

Scratched discs now ruin 1TB at once? No thanks

[RubberDogBone]

The problem with BD discs and these hologram discs and whatever comes next is that they still haven't fixed the problem that one scratch or some dust or who knows, bad water used in the manufacturing process will ruin vast amounts of data at once.

It's not like a bad CD where you'd lose 700MB or so, or a bad DVD where you lose 5 gigs or so. Now it's 50 gigs for BD and a whopping terabyte for this thing?

No matter how careful I am with my burned discs, some of them still go bad because the media itself is unstable or made to the lowest bid spec. Even name brand stuff dies.

Do they honestly expect anyone to trust terabyte media?

I won't, no freaking way. Thankfully hard drives are getting bigger and cheaper all the time. The most effective backup solution for a big drive is ... another big drive. It works.

Re:GE

[scottrocket]

At the beginning of the first BTTF, Doc had a replica of the old clock tower with a figurine hanging from one of the hands. I had always assumed that Doc had already been to the past/future, & simply feigned ignorance to Marty; therefore, he wasn't too concerned about being shot in the head/legs/groin, the "first" time around.

USB flash disks as new media of distribution

[OricAtmos48K]

a 4GB thumb drive is around $8 ... and price going half every 3 months. I will never burn a dvd again. In this tempo, the blu ray capacity will be affordable as "give away usb stick" in 2 years

jumped off the dock and made an account to ask

[infinite.intimation]

if the youtube video linked to is pushing for a slashdotting of the use of the 400 times a "metric brain" metric soon becoming proprietary? i am new at this. anyone "WANT TO SUBSCRIBe to my newsletter"???;) y'all like extraneous punctuation round here right?

Too little too late

[jridley]

The media for this will no doubt cost at least $30 each, since regular bluray blanks are currently about $12, and new media types are always expensive when they first come out.

By the time this comes out in 2012 to 2015, we'll probably have hard drive space down to something like $20/TB if not less, since it's at about $60/TB right now. I recently switched from DVD-R to 1.5TB hard drives as removable media (hard drives plugged into docking stations) when I realized that not only were hard drives cheaper per GB than DVD-R blanks, they were far more reliable too.

I wouldn't be surprised if flash memory was pretty close to competitive to this price point too, by then ($100/TB or less).

When will Star Wars & LOTR be released on it?

[motherpusbucket]

I want yet another copy of each series.