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Titanium Oxide For High-Density Optical Storage
Stoobalou and other readers sent along word of research out of Japan, using a new crystal form of titanium oxide for high-density data storage — promising discs that store 1,000 times more data than Blu-ray does today, up to 25 TB. The material transforms from a black-colored metal state that conducts electricity into a brown semiconductor when hit by light, at room temperature. Titanium oxide's market price is about one-hundredth that of the rare element that is currently used in rewritable Blu-ray discs and DVDs. The material is cheap and safe, and is already being used in many products ranging from face powder to white paint. The researchers successfully created the material in particles measuring as small as 5 nanometers in diameter.
Maybe I'm wrong, but what does being a conductor/semiconductor have to do with an optical disk?
http://www.redorbit.com.nyud.net/news/technology/1869698/new_disc_could_hold_a_thousand_times_more_data/
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Are there any projections/estimates related to how stable this media would be when used for long-term archival storage?
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
I have been waiting for affordable removable storage in the TB size range for many years now! There's a giant p0^H^H document library waiting on my NAS to be archived ...
Imagine watching Doctor Manhattan's weener in 7680x4320 on a 80" tv... delicious Octo Full High Definition.
The full 1000x potential won't be extracted straight away, we may see this technology in the next generation x2 or x5 the density. Now that Big Content has found a reason for more capacity with 3D, and a reason to make your existing movie collection obsolete, they will be looking for the sucessor for blu-ray 3-4 years down the track (because honestly it hasn't taken over from DVDs yet).
Interestingly in CD-ROM's heyday it wasn't uncommon for a PC to have a smaller hard drive than the amount of data that would fit on a CD-ROM. About the time DVD-ROMs were out I suppose hard drives were only a little larger. Blue-rays were fraction the size of a hard drive when the format spec was finalized (2005). Now hard drives are 20-40x larger than a blu-ray disc.
Carelessly extrapolating from the trend I predict we might not see this technology in widespread use until a common consumer hard drive is past the 25TB mark.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Coming up: The Lifetime Pirate Disk! One disk containing every surviving film, TV series, book, and computer game up until it's time of release. Get yours off your friend and never have to download your piracy again.
TFA and TFS both refer to "Titanium oxide" which typically means either TiO or Ti2O3 (Ti in either II or III states). However, both TFS and TFA also assert that the "Titanium oxide" is used in sunscreen and suchlike, which implies it is Titanium dioxide, TiO2 (Ti in IV state), not Titanium oxide.
Most likely, TFA should have referred to Titanium dioxide, as this is also a semiconductor in crystalline state.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Scientists invent new storage format -> New player is created for it -> **IA puts new *UNBREAKABLE* copy protection on it -> Consumers re-buy their movie libraries -> Copy protection gets cracked -> **IA drills disk full of holes to "prevent copying" -> Disks stop working on consumer devices -> Consumers switch to pirate copies -> **IA ask scientists to come up with a new storage format....
Titanium oxide isn't used for pigments - titanium dioxide is.
One wonders how light stable this system will be compared to existing DVD coatings. My suspicions would suggest that it may be worse.
What the hell are you on about???
Titanium Oxide is the recent replacement of Aluminum Oxide, used by airplanes around 5000-feet to 10k-feet.
Wow, that sounds like it's really difficult to swap that out at that altitude. Do they have a youtube video of that, or better yet, a training video? ;-)
RVB
Buh. After reading about terrabit cube storage in 1994 http://bit.ly/cf4ufr [new scientist], I didn't upgrade my 3.5" floppies for years ... now I'm old, cynical about every article like this and my removable storage devices don't go past 32GB.
Come to Australia so we can strip search you and rob you of your internets, pr0n, rights and freedoms.
Sony announces technology expo next week for new, even better than Blu-Ray format set for release in 5 years, throwing everyone in limbo wondering if they should stick with DVDs, buy into Blu-Ray and pray for backwards compatibility, or not buy a movie for 5 years. Monster cable to demo new cable technology, provides everyone with magnifying glasses so they can experience the difference.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
The point.
Why again do we need another slow optical disc medium? The times of those are clearly over.
Until that thing comes out, USB sticks are going to be 25 TB too. And much smaller. And not prone to scratching, sunlight, bending, dust, etc. And for everything else there is HDDs/SSDs.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
According TFA: "You don't have to worry about procuring rare metals. Titanium oxide is cheap and safe, already being used in many products ranging from face powder to white paint"
Really? Several articles have linked TiO2 to cancer. Yeah, real safe.
How much are those 25TB USB sticks going to cost you, bearing in mind that 64GB sticks currently retail for the best part of a hundred quid?
At the moment, CDs and DVDs are still used heavily because they're cheaper for archiving than flash based devices are (and cheaper than BD, at least in the UK), and easier to mass produce with read-only data preinstalled (Films, Games, and Music). If this is really using TiO2, then it's going to be dominant for the same reason DVD's are still dominant today. Cost is King - most of us are just getting by, and can't afford to splash out a few hundred on a whim.
It will never work out. The special effects explosions in action movies are hell on the furniture.
Worse still were the neighbors complaints after the snow scenes in Lord of the Rings when the Fellowship tried to cross the misty mountains before turning back and heading to Moria. Seems the melt required for the next scene seeped through the floorboards and flooded their flat (and the five floors beneath them). Oh well, still damn good entertainment.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
It's a "CHEMICAL"! Wow, damn, shit, holy crap, I can't believe it. They actually used a CHEMICAL. Who would have thought.
You do know that everything in our life is made from CHEMICALS? While you're at it, maybe check out this deadly chemical.
I just love it when people just use the word "chemical" to scare everyone away. So, where to start? first of all, Morgellon's Disease:
"Current scientific consensus holds that Morgellons is not a new disorder and is instead a new and misleading name for a well known condition. Most doctors,[2] including dermatologists[3] and psychiatrists,[4] regard Morgellons as a manifestation of known medical conditions, including delusional parasitosis..."
Yes, the sentence continues to say that some believe it may be a real condition, but the consensus is that it is some sort of Psychiatric condition.
Regarding Titanium Dioxide health issues - there are studies in animals that it can be carcinogenic if inhaled, and some studies argue that small particles can be absorbed by the skiin, but studies in humans have yet to show a similar effect, though it has been researched. Again, this is all from Wikipedia, this is not my area of expertise - if you have a different (credible) source, I'll be happy to hear about it. Anyhow, I don't think that if it would be part of a CD-like medium it would be toxic, in the same way that asbestos is only dangerous if it is broken and thus small particles are freed into the environment and are inhaled.
Whenever in an argument, remember this.
25 freeking terabytes? 10 of these would store my entire movie and dvd collections! Thats less then my 40,000 DVD's and 80,000 CD's. I'm amazed. How long until this hits the market?
Of all the conspiracy theories this one confuses me the most.
It displays a fundamental lack of understanding in both physics and meteorology. High altitude chemical spray is quite simply the the worst possible, if not impossible, way to disperse fluids. First off the winds aloft are different at 3K feet. At 10K-30K they are significantly stronger and can be in a different direction than on the group. Plus there the problem that the fluid would likely evaporate before reaching the ground. Another problem is that you couldn't fit enough "product" on a plane to cover any significant area.
Also the infrastructure required to perform "chemtrails" is insane. It would require the cooperation of at least the following groups of people.
Aircraft design companies
Aircraft manufacturing companies
FAA
Pilots
Airline companies
Airport ground crews
Chemical design engineers
Chemical manufacturing companies
Delivery companies
Yet somehow all these diverse groups can work together with no leaks or mistakes. I guess what amazes me most is the super human abilities attributed to the government.
Make storage discs that are *reliable* and I will be a lot more interested. Data loss due to failed optical media must be astronomical based on the lack of long term storage ability.
With the labor market, we could just hire people to come and act out the movie for us. Call it "RealLife-O-Vision".
I patented the idea, in case you're wondering.
But maybe they've got prior art
On Broadway (On Broadway)
You could get a USB or eSATA hard drive. That's sort of removable.
Something that "slides into a slot or sits on a tray" doesn't need an extra power brick. Nor does a USB flash drive. Many USB or eSATA hard drives, on the other hand...
I'm not so sure about that step...not next time around.
No sig today...
Damn, he said "CHEMTRAIL" not "CHEMICAL". Silly me. Guess I have a knee-jerk reaction to all the tin-foil hat guys.
Whenever in an argument, remember this.
Actually several lifetimes worth. One disk that can be passed from generation to generation!
Seriously, who needs 25TB with a single access channel and a single point of failure?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
25TB of storage? That is nice - but I do not see a significant need for it. Electromagnetic storage like harddrives come already at 3TB at reasonable prices. Discs scale pretty well. The problem is not the size - it is the transfer speed! jsut calculate how long it takes to fill the current sata 2TB-discs. Multiply with 12 for 25TB then multiply with x for factoring in the slower speed of optical methods.
This can only become usefull if the data rates between caches and drives increase significantly and this requires some serious tweaking of the physics. A real breakthrough would be a shift towards optical computing but this might still be science fiction for the next decades
perhaps the gp meant an esata dock. these allow you to switch out a sata drive in about 2sec, and so you dont need to worry about power, or finding an esata port on your case, keep your dock on your desk, as i do, and you can have a bunch of TB drives in a draw and simply switch them.
really helps with a lappy which has limited space on the builtin hdd which is also a slow 5400rpm, which is good for power though. when im connected to the dock i have extra esata ports and can copy at ~120meg/s from one esata dock to another, significantly faster than the built in drive or anything over usb2.
you can also get esata raid racks that will hold multiple drives, ive been wanting to try one out for a while. the combined read speed of a couple of very cheap 1TB drives should break 240meg/sec (raw, together with compression, or sparse/packed data structures things get interesting) and this could make for some very interesting processing of large data sets.
Your ideas intrigue me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter!
Please send me your name, mailing address, bank routing and account numbers, recent vaccination history, the name of the song stuck in your head (and whether it's the 1983 or 2005 remake), and current GPS coordinates so I can sign up.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Not to mention the fact that neither titanium oxide nor aluminum oxide are toxic in any way. The former is what makes toothpaste white, the latter are more commonly known as rubies, sapphires, or the abrasive in sandpaper.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Obviously the government couldn't be behind it, but What about the Boy Sprouts or the Gnomes of Zurich?
THERE IS NO CONSPIRACY: It's all done by the letter in the contract, right in front of you, like a felon.
You appear to be the only troll with the audacity and gall to call me out on this, and the others didn't say anything useful to abate my assertions. This is about the public-disclosed private contract to spray this shit around Los Angeles... Download this file and read about the arial spraying or just go to http://ladpw.org/ and see for yourself.
http://www.ladpw.org/wrd/cloudseeding/
cloud_seeding_draft_mnd_final.pdf
So when does that MODERATOR replace
What rare element? I thought that BRDs and DVDs used aluminum, just like CDs did.
Learn something new.
Just imagine how much p0rn that is,
and now imagine the world's biggest bottle of jergen's hand lotion they would have to make to accomodate that much p0rn....
now you know what BIG is.
Adding it to the water supply would have been easier, but that method is already monopolized by the flouridation conspiracy.