GE To Sample 500GB DVD-Size Discs Soon

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

GE To Sample 500GB DVD-Size Discs Soon

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 21, 2011 @08:42AM from the yes-please-I'll-take-a-dozen dept.

siliconbits writes "GE Global Research announced earlier today that it has managed to cram up to 500GB worth of data on a standard DVD-size disc, an increase in storage density of roughly 100x. What's more, the tech arm of conglomerate General Electric Company says that the storage solution will record data at the same speed as Blu-ray discs while increasing storage capacity by 25 times. The Blu-ray Disk Association says that the commonly available 12x speed Blu-ray writers have a maximum writing speed of up to 400Mbps (or 50MBps) which means that in theory, it would take just over three hours to fill that new holographic hard disk. GE has confirmed that its R&D and licensing team will be sampling the media to qualified partners that may be interested in licensing the technology."

132 of 179 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Just when I was hoping... by davegravy · 2011-07-21 08:47 · Score: 1

...that optical media was dead.
1. Re:Just when I was hoping... by God'sDuck · 2011-07-21 08:54 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  ...that optical media was dead.
  If it costs more per gigabyte than pocket sized hard drives, it's dead to me.
  
  --
  it does.
2. Re:Just when I was hoping... by i+kan+reed · 2011-07-21 08:55 · Score: 1
  
  It basically is. This is comparable in size to an HDD, meaning it doesn't really outpace a RAID for storage potential, and most people do over-the-net transfers for all but the biggest chunks of data. This only makes sense as a replacement for backup tapes.
3. Re:Just when I was hoping... by geekoid · 2011-07-21 08:56 · Score: 1
  
  No it's not. You rarely ship media around in on HDs, and burning things to glass has legal ramifications.
  
  --
  The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
4. Re:Just when I was hoping... by derGoldstein · 2011-07-21 09:03 · Score: 1
  
  Many people use the same reasoning, and for many cases, it's true. But what if you *just* need to backup? HD video comes to mind. How much storage space do you have (I mean physical storage)? how much more vulnerable is a complete hard drive than a CD? What's more practical for off-site backup of large amounts of data (many terabytes)? I much prefer discs to tapes, which are the only option unless you have an ungodly internet connection and can get online storage *really* cheap.
  
  --
  Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
5. Re:Just when I was hoping... by h4rr4r · 2011-07-21 09:07 · Score: 2
  
  Tape is more practical for offsite for large amount of data. LTO 5 is 1.5TB raw, and if they made them bigger we would be buying them.
  500Gb is nothing.
6. Re:Just when I was hoping... by h4rr4r · 2011-07-21 09:10 · Score: 1
  
  This is way too small for backup tapes. LTO 5 is 1.5TB raw. If they made them bigger people would buy them.
7. Re:Just when I was hoping... by EraserMouseMan · 2011-07-21 09:11 · Score: 1
  
  What if a company put out a hard drive that happened to have optical platters instead of magnetic ones? What would the pro's/con's be to that product?
8. Re:Just when I was hoping... by Riceballsan · 2011-07-21 09:15 · Score: 1
  
  withering scratching etc... Back when we thought CD's were invincible buggers that as long as you didn't scratch them they would last 100 years sure, then 5 years later we realized, oh wow ok these things can fall apart after 5 years. Hard drive vulnerability, sure to an extent, at least they are more vulnerable to shaking etc, though it appears they are also more recoverable after destruction. platters break etc... you can generally get that fixed, now the cost may be very high to repair it if something goes wrong, but it is at least possible. A worn out CD may become impossible to recover at much less damage.
9. Re:Just when I was hoping... by Stormwatch · 2011-07-21 09:16 · Score: 1
  
  If they figure out a way to make an optical disc that is as fast, reliable, and infinitely rewritable as a hard disc...
  
  --
  Circumcision is child abuse.
10. Re:Just when I was hoping... by Synerg1y · 2011-07-21 09:18 · Score: 1
  
  Your average user won't go buying a tape drive, I wouldn't mind burning one of these at home once a year or so, though improbably I can still suffer data loss from 2+ disk failure. I can maybe sit on or lose my 500gb dvd?
  That brings up another topic though and thats the shelf life a dvd, it may not suffice for all back ups :)
11. Re:Just when I was hoping... by derGoldstein · 2011-07-21 09:19 · Score: 1
  
  I don't have first-hand information about this, but I know a guy who's job it is to help companies setup redundant backup systems. He keeps saying that there are so many formats, so much hardware nuance, and so many proprietary methods of getting data on and off the tapes, that he only goes for them in the most extreme cases. Many times he's called in to retrieve data that was backed up 5 years ago, and already it's a challenge to find the right hardware/software combination to do so.
  
  But, like I said, this is second-hand information.
  
  --
  Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
12. Re:Just when I was hoping... by TheRaven64 · 2011-07-21 09:33 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  It's also insanely expensive. I can pick up a BluRay writer for about a hundred quid, and blank disks are about £1-2 for WORM disks and £3-5 for rewriteable ones. I couldn't find any LTO-5 drives, but I found an LTO-4 one... for over £2000. I did find LTO-5 tapes, but they cost about £85 each. So, LTO-5 works out about half the cost of BD-RE if you just factor in the cost of the media, but you need to back up a lot before it becomes cheaper overall. Cost of backing up 20TB with BD-RE is about £900. Cost for LTO: about £2500.
  Sure, if you're backing up a few TB every day, LTO is good value, but for home users it definitely isn't. BD-RE is big enough for incremental backups, and a lot cheaper - not to mention the fact that BD-RE disks have been dropping in price for a long time. You need to back up about 50TB before LTO's cost per GB is similar to BD-RE, and that's a lot more than a lot of small businesses produce.
  
  --
  I am TheRaven on Soylent News
13. Re:Just when I was hoping... by h4rr4r · 2011-07-21 09:44 · Score: 1
  
  It would to slow to use. Check out the burn times on even blu rays.
14. Re:Just when I was hoping... by h4rr4r · 2011-07-21 09:46 · Score: 1
  
  So use tar. Simple solution for a simple problem.
  There are proprietary ways to do it, don't use them.
15. Re:Just when I was hoping... by d4fseeker · 2011-07-21 09:54 · Score: 1
  
  For home users USB hard drives are much less expensive at roughly 50$ per TB while you are at roughly 100$ per TB for BD.
  Not to mention the need for additional hardware (BD burner) and having to swap the disk 39 times per TB.
  
  Additionally, hard drives have a longer life expectancy and can be (more or less) easily recovered by forensic labs if need be.
16. Re:Just when I was hoping... by godel_56 · 2011-07-21 09:58 · Score: 1
  
  Tape is more practical for offsite for large amount of data. LTO 5 is 1.5TB raw, and if they made them bigger we would be buying them.
  Apparently HP make a 3 TB tape, but at a higher cost per byte.
17. Re:Just when I was hoping... by NicknamesAreStupid · 2011-07-21 10:01 · Score: 1
  
  Just don't drop it
18. Re:Just when I was hoping... by CrackedButter · 2011-07-21 10:14 · Score: 1
  
  These just won't be Mac compatible that's all.
  
  --
  Jonathanjk.com
19. Re:Just when I was hoping... by kinabrew · 2011-07-21 10:21 · Score: 1
  
  If anything, this is more evidence of the imminent death of optical media(at least as we know them).
  When everyone had CD drives it was generally easy to use a disc from one location in another.
  Then some people got DVD discs, and for a while there were a lot of people who didn't have a DVD drive. If you brought a DVD from one place to another there was no guarantee you'd be able to use it.
  Then we got to a point when most people had DVD drives, and it was generally easy to take a DVD from one place to another again.
  Then there were multiple popular DVD formats(DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD-R DL, DVD+R, DVD+RW, DVD+R DL), and it wasn't necessarily easy to take your data from your house to your friend's house.
  Then there were HD-DVD and Blu-Ray.
  Now there will be holographic discs.
  A few years from now there will be another incompatible format that promises to hold exponentially more.
  And it could happen again and again and again.
  Incompatible formats, lack of portability, lack of rewritability, fragility, and overall inconvenience in terms of storage are what are putting an end to optical media.
20. Re:Just when I was hoping... by Grishnakh · 2011-07-21 10:31 · Score: 1
  
  That's weird, I was hoping the opposite, that someone would finally come out with a cheap, disposable media, like CD-R and DVD-R, that could replace actual hard drives as a backup or mass storage media. This new technology looks like it might fit the bill.
  The question is how cheap the media will be. For instance, we already have BD-R with 25GB/disc, but they're quite expensive, and if you're trying to back up a 1TB hard drive, it's cheaper to just go buy a second 1TB hard drive and use that for your backups. Plus, they're a PITA because you'll need to shuffle 40 BD-R discs to backup that one drive.
  This tech looks like a giant improvement. While it's still a little on the small size if you ask me, you'll only need two discs to backup a 1TB drive, or 4 for a 2TB drive, which is much more manageable than 40 or 80. But will they be stupid and keep the media prices high like the BD-R morons did, or will they keep the prices low so using these discs costs a fraction as much as simply buying spare hard drives?
  If they keep the prices high, look for this thing to go the way of the Floptical. If it's dirt-cheap, however, this may become popular. Using hard drives to back up hard drives is a little wasteful, DVD-R is way too small (it's been replaced by USB sticks), BD-R is too expensive, and Flash memory (USB sticks etc.) is simply too small and too expensive as a backup or serious mass storage solution. For 1-20GB, USB sticks are great, but for anything over that they're not economical.
21. Re:Just when I was hoping... by shaitand · 2011-07-21 10:32 · Score: 2
  
  "though improbably I can still suffer data loss from 2+ disk failure"
  It's no that improbable. We just had three old systems lose their data due to multiple disk failures. All raid 5's that could only lose one drive at a time.
  The problem with these systems is that all the drives tend to be bought at once to fill it up, and all the drives are rated for the same number of operational hours.
22. Re:Just when I was hoping... by Grishnakh · 2011-07-21 10:37 · Score: 1
  
  LTO5 is unaffordable for most people, and even most small businesses. Another poster here commented that LTO5 doesn't make economic sense until you're backing up 40TB or more at a time. The drives alone cost thousands of dollars.
  What this could be, IF the media price is low, is a good backup solution for home users and small businesses, instead of having to simply buy spare hard drives as backup media. Based on what BD-R drives cost, we should expect the drives to be no more than $100-200 early on, and if they make the discs really cheap, it should be a hit. But if they keep the discs expensive like the BD-R morons have, then it's going to go the way of the Floptical.
23. Re:Just when I was hoping... by h4rr4r · 2011-07-21 10:51 · Score: 1
  
  Too slow. For a home user drive to drive is a better solution.
  That poster is not counting the value of good backups to a business.
24. Re:Just when I was hoping... by sortius_nod · 2011-07-21 10:55 · Score: 1
  
  Not only that, it would over heat and it would cost a fortune. One of the reasons HDDs are cheap is that the read heads cost almost nothing to make. A laser capable of reading data is not so cheap.
  There's been many attempts to make enclosed optical media, none of it was very successful due to speed, price and heat concerns - lasers do run hot.
25. Re:Just when I was hoping... by grumbel · 2011-07-21 11:02 · Score: 1
  
  Incompatible formats, lack of portability, lack of rewritability, fragility, and overall inconvenience in terms of storage are what are putting an end to optical media.
  The core problem really just comes down to price. Lack of rewritability is a non-issue when discs are cheap. Fragility also not much of an issue if discs are cheap and lack of compatibility would go away if the things would be cheap enough to become standard part on any PC. But as it is right now you have BluRays that are more expensive then DVD+R and more expensive then USB HDD, while providing essentially no real advantage, so no wonder that they haven't taken off.
  The only advantage that optical media still has is granularity, you can buy a 2TB HDD for cheap, but you can't buy a 5GB HDD for cheap. HDD costs $30 minimum, which is far away from optical media which goes for like $0.40. I think there would still be some use for optical media when it's big enough and cheap enough. DVD+R really start to show their age and are just not big enough to be practical for many uses, while BluRay provides to few advantages to be worth the upgrade.
26. Re:Just when I was hoping... by Grishnakh · 2011-07-21 11:44 · Score: 1
  
  If the media is dirt cheap, the slowness might be fine. Just pop it in and leave it overnight. Having 2 or 3 spare HDs for backups is a little steep for a home user on a budget, but if this stuff is super cheap, then it might be fine for people on a budget who want to keep multiple backup sets.
  I'm skeptical, however; BD-R has been out for a while and it's super expensive, and it seems like the companies who make these super-capacity optical technologies never really understand that the media needs to be super cheap for it to become popular, and then they're surprised when they price discs at $10 each and their new technology goes the way of the Floptical. I've been using PCs since around 1989, and I've seen this over, and over, and over, and over, and over again. 2.88MB floppies, 21MB floptical, 100MB Zip discs, LS-120, 250MB Zip, dual-layer DVD-R, and many more I've missed are examples of attempts at removable mass storage (both write-once and rewritable) that have failed in the market, usually because the media cost was simply too high. There's only been a handful that have really succeeded in becoming de-facto standards, where you could safely assume (during some time period) that a typical modern computer would have a drive capable of reading (and maybe writing) that media: 1.44MB floppy, 650/700MB CD-R(W), 4.7GB DVD+-R(W), and that's it. Thanks to all this confusion in the marketplace, and high media costs on most of the offerings, USB is now the main "drive" (really a port) used for removable media these days. If someone wants to back up a HD, they just buy another HD (or a USB HD for a slight increase in price over a bare drive). If they want a small and portable way of transporting smaller amounts of data, they use USB thumb drives, which are quite cheap and also rewritable, and commonly have capacities now of 4 or 8GB or more now, so they're beating DVD discs.
27. Re:Just when I was hoping... by fast+turtle · 2011-07-21 13:31 · Score: 1
  An even better solution is to use a removable drive caddy and tray as I do.
  Reasons include
  
  Fast Write Speeds
  Low Cost
  Ever Increasing Capcity
  Suprisingly, a decent drive caddy/tray system with drive doesn't cost more then an External USB based drive yet it's far faster. In fact, you can find enclosures that include 10/100/1000 ethernet ports and can be placed onto the home network as a NAS.
  --
  Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
28. Re:Just when I was hoping... by d3ac0n · 2011-07-21 13:52 · Score: 1
  
  Or even better, use offsite backup. As long as you don't have Comcrap with asinine data caps you can use a service like Carbonite for about 60 bucks a YEAR and keep continuous incremental backups of pretty much anything.
  Not trying to sound like a commercial or anything, but it does make sense. Keep either an eSata, USB, or removable drive for a local backup, and keep your offsite backup software running as well.
  In case of a local server failure, you have a full backup on disk and can restore the most current files from offsite. In case of disaster, all your data is stored offsite, waiting for you to retrieve it.
  It's what I do. Why bother with expensive tapes, disks and drives if you don't have to?
  
  --
  Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
29. Re:Just when I was hoping... by morethanapapercert · 2011-07-21 13:59 · Score: 1
  
  Well, there is magneto-optical that was reliable and infinitely re-writeable. It was just slower to write than a comparable SCSI HDD and was more expensive than them. They weren't very popular, so development of capacity didn't keep pace with traditional hard drive platters, but it probably could have been done.
  
  --
  I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
30. Re:Just when I was hoping... by anubi · 2011-07-21 13:59 · Score: 1
  
  I am going to date myself terribly, Go ahead and laugh.
  
  To start off, I am 60 years old, so humor me.
  
  Back in the late 80's, I fell in love with a schematic capture program that ran on a PC. Yes, the original PC. I am talking 8088 here. The program is Futurenet DASH-2.
  
  The entire program, libraries, and files would fit on a 360K floppy.
  
  For me, it was a really simple way of quickly sketching up a circuit diagram I could edit until the cows came home, and not leave eraser crumbs all over. When I get to going, I really burn through erasers!
  
  Not only that, when I finally got it right, I had written little programs that would let me send the resulting netlist to SPICE and PADS-PCB would import the netlist directly.
  
  Not only that, I was able to get un-DRM'd versions of both Futurenet and PADS, so that I could run it on anything handy.
  
  Here's the funny part. Like the old V-GER of "Star Trek" fame, these two programs remain-to this very day- the core of all of my design systems! For a long time, I refused to go beyond WIN95, as the old programs, written for DOS, needed FAT32 filesystems.
  
  I now have them running in my WIN7 laptop thanks to DOSBOX.
  
  In the 25 years I have been using these, everything I have ever done fits on ONE cdrom (that's CDROM, not DVD-R mind you), with lots and lots of room left over for things like complete copies of DOS, the WIN95 OS, Borland C++, Mathcad, Spice, and all the other tools I liked.
  
  I can pull up work I did 25 years ago as easy as I pull up work I did an hour ago. Its all there on the backup CDROM. Thanks to some nifty disk searching utilities that came out a decade after I first started messing with computers, I can even FIND the files. Yes, I ended up with thousands of little 20 to 50 kilobyte files zipped into categories.
  
  But then I have never worked on "large" projects like some today. Mine have been pretty specific, like ultralow phase noise PLL, battery supervisor-charging systems (LTC-6802/NetBurner/banks of SMPS), and maximal power point controllers for solar micro-inverters. For me, the old schematic capture technology was good enough. The newer stuff, laced with DRM, proprietary file formats, and my ignorance of its use, provided sufficient barriers to dissuade me to adopt it.
  
  I felt the newer software was like newer cars. Impressive to look at, but finicky and difficult to work with, especially if I had to look to someone else to "support" me. I felt out of my league trying to mess with software that was always insisting on me agreeing to everything it demanded or it wouldn't run. That is OK for entertainment products, but I am hard-pressed to consider finicky "customer lock-in ware" for critical applications. My grandpa survived on the farm because he knew everything about how his stuff worked, I expected to do the same. Let the rich man wave his pens in the air, signing every agreement demanded of him. For me, I needed to know how to fix it myself because I did not have the money it takes to hire a rich man.
  
  From my viewpoint, the old stuff was so simple it allowed me to solve *my* problem without introducing a whole mess of other problems that needed to be addressed before I could address what I needed to do.
  
  --
  "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
31. Re:Just when I was hoping... by whiteboy86 · 2011-07-21 14:47 · Score: 1
  
  The main problem here is the mechanics, I mean the elaborate laser machinery behind the reader, crazy expensive, hard to replicate, mechanical.. Everything that is wrong with those discs from day 1.
32. Re:Just when I was hoping... by dbIII · 2011-07-21 15:15 · Score: 1
  
  Sure, if you're backing up a few TB every day, LTO is good value
  I swear by tape, use it every day, know first hand that optical media has a pile of reliability and aging issues but would never bother using tape at home or in some organisations with different requirements. Redundant copies of cheap media gets the job done if the volume is not huge and you are prepared to do a format shift every few years, or if the data doesn't need to last many years.
  The real reason I use tape is because the data in my workplace will still have a value in thirty years time (seismic data from the 1980s is still very useful today) so it has to go onto a medium that will last that long in case nobody bothers to transcribe it. The other benefits (data shipping, disaster recovery, data known to be unchanged from the date it was put on tape etc) feed off that requirement.
  It is incredibly handy to just dump 1.5TB onto one bit of media and just let it run instead of some more messy way to split it into volumes.
33. Re:Just when I was hoping... by badran · 2011-07-21 18:14 · Score: 1
  
  The problem with these systems is that all the drives tend to be bought at once to fill it up, and all the drives are rated for the same number of operational hours.
  I avoid this problem, by using drives bought at different intervals. Say I want to build a new system today. I get 3 new drives. I would use 2 of the new drives in 2 different older systems to replace the drives there, and end up with 3 unused drives that are bought at different times.
  Right now, most of the drives that we are using at 500GB, we do not really see a point a using anything larger.
34. Re:Just when I was hoping... by jimicus · 2011-07-21 20:55 · Score: 1
  
  So use tar. Simple solution for a simple problem.
  There are proprietary ways to do it, don't use them.
  Two problems there:
  - First, you haven't solved the complete problem. Specifically, you haven't dealt with the wide range of tape formats with dubious or no inter-compatability. I haven't tested interop issues between different LTO drives - there shouldn't be any but it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if there were.
  - tar(1) is a great solution to the "I need to back up one server" problem. It's a dire solution to the "I need to back up 50 servers and they're all going to the same tape robot" problem - sure you can script a lot of it away, but IME the majority of such scripts wind up being lashed together in a hurry and provide a poor solution when far better solutions already exist.
  I would suggest your best bet is probably something like Amanda or Bacula. IIRC Amanda actually uses tar to lay the data to tape; Bacula doesn't but it does use an open format and have a thriving (not to mention very helpful) community and the main author has set up a company to offer commercial support if you can't wait for the community to help.
35. Re:Just when I was hoping... by Arancaytar · 2011-07-21 21:52 · Score: 1
  
  Won't ever be. In a few decades, the dominant storage methods are more likely going to be some form of (holographic) optical memory and flash.
  (Though I don't think the disc form will survive, because the surface is too exposed. Higher density will make it even less durable. It's more likely going to be embedded in sticks or cards, which are also less fragile and more compact.)
36. Re:Just when I was hoping... by stms · 2011-07-21 22:38 · Score: 1
  
  Or you could just go the cheapest route and just get Harddrives. Sure they're a little more clunky but if your already spending thousands of dollars on storage space offsite physical storage space shouldn't be that much of an issue.
37. Re:Just when I was hoping... by TheRaven64 · 2011-07-21 23:44 · Score: 1
  
  The real reason I use tape is because the data in my workplace will still have a value in thirty years time
  
  And you think tape guarantees that? I did some work for a company a few years ago that makes a lot of money out of people like you. Turns out that those tape drives that 'everyone's using and will always be available' stop being made, and wear out...
  
  --
  I am TheRaven on Soylent News
38. Re:Just when I was hoping... by TheRaven64 · 2011-07-21 23:46 · Score: 1
  
  He specifically said off-site. Optical disks have the nice advantage that they're cheap to slip in the post to a relative. Hard disks... not so much.
  
  --
  I am TheRaven on Soylent News
39. Re:Just when I was hoping... by dbIII · 2011-07-22 00:39 · Score: 1
  
  The line above the one you quoted says "prepared to do a format shift every few years".
  Better do something about that short attention span before pointing at "people like you" :) I suppose you could assume that I was only writing about non-tape media when I wrote that but it's a bit of an odd conclusion to jump to.
  I do have a pile of nine track reels in storage since the 1980s but they are theoretically a third copy made only for transport and belong to the companies that shipped them so I probably can't legally copy them without permission. In practice some originals had been thrown out so at the sort of stupid expense you are talking about they get transcribed when required, but so far less than 1% have been needed so the rest gather dust and become brittle. The companies own data from that time has been through a few generations of media, and a fair bit of the source data originally from those nine tracks is in there anyway.
40. Re:Just when I was hoping... by Hydian · 2011-07-22 01:19 · Score: 1
  
  "I suppose you could assume that I was only writing about non-tape media when I wrote that but it's a bit of an odd conclusion to jump to."
  "Redundant copies of cheap media gets the job done if the volume is not huge and you are prepared to do a format shift every few years, or if the data doesn't need to last many years."
  Seems like the right conclusion to me. You go on to talk about tape which is not cheap media, is made for high volumes, and per your needs is needed to last for many years.
41. Re:Just when I was hoping... by dbIII · 2011-07-22 01:30 · Score: 1
  
  Still the wrong conclusion, but at least you didn't combine your confusion with a mild personal attack like the poster above (do they teach that shit in school now or something?). Tape just gives you a bit longer between format shifts.
42. Re:Just when I was hoping... by h4rr4r · 2011-07-22 03:02 · Score: 1
  
  1. you buy a bunch of drives at once.
  2. As you said Amanda uses tar. You are still using tar. Bacula does indeed rock if you own a library.
43. Re:Just when I was hoping... by WuphonsReach · 2011-07-22 06:53 · Score: 1
  
  If the media cost was about 1/5 that of portable magnetic hard drives, then optical would still make sense. Then there's the issue that optical storage density has lagged horribly behind hard drive sizes.
  
  BD-R is still something like $0.25/GB. Horribly expensive compared to little 2.5" external drives which are about $0.12 to $0.14 per GB. You don't have to divide your data up into little 25GB chunks or deal with switching disks 20x to store 500GB. Most machines have USB ports, not many machines have BD drives.
  
  BD-R media would have to sell for $0.04/GB ($1/disk) in order to be competitive against current external drives. And they would need to drive prices down to $0.02/GB per disk within two years to stay competitive.
  
  I generally store things on 2.5" drives, then make (2) backup copies onto larger (and cheaper) 3.5" drives using an external USB to SATA drive "toaster" (Thermaltake BlacX).
  
  --
  Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
How stable is the media? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-07-21 08:49 · Score: 1

The big question is how long will a disk burn this way be good?
1. Re:How stable is the media? by SoupIsGoodFood_42 · 2011-07-21 13:44 · Score: 1
  
  Perhaps a bigger question: Is it a double layer disc that will suffer from cracked spindles all the time? Never had that problem with my own DVDs, but that doesn't mean I don't like renting stuff from the library.
  Another big question: Will the surface be made of some fancy nano-self-healing polymer, or will it still get scratched to s***?
Re:finally.. by derGoldstein · 2011-07-21 08:55 · Score: 2

Whenever I see a storage-related story, my mind always appends "FOR PORN!"

Looking over the first few comments to this story, I'm hardly the only one.

--
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
Incorrect claim 100x! by VirginMary · 2011-07-21 08:56 · Score: 5, Insightful

Standard blu-ray discs, which are the same size already store 50GB and there are already blu-ray solutions that are supposed to store multiple times that. So, at most 10x, certainly nowhere near 100x!

--
When 1person suffers from a delusion,it is called insanity.When many people suffer from a delusion,it is called religion
1. Re:Incorrect claim 100x! by pipatron · 2011-07-21 09:17 · Score: 2
  
  Yes, and there are numerous formats already available exactly the size of a DVD. For example a CD. Maybe they should have written 1000x instead, since it fits about 1000 times as much as a CD. Blu-ray is the most recent standard, and that's what you would expect someone to use as a reference when it comes to new storage media.
  
  --
  c++; /* this makes c bigger but returns the old value */
2. Re:Incorrect claim 100x! by TheRaven64 · 2011-07-21 09:38 · Score: 2
  
  Actually, it's about the same size as a 5.25" floppy, and stores 400,000 times as much data!
  
  --
  I am TheRaven on Soylent News
3. Re:Incorrect claim 100x! by Grishnakh · 2011-07-21 11:13 · Score: 1
  
  There's a difference. Just about everyone these days has a DVD burner. They're $20 new, and most computers come with them, even laptops.
  Blu-ray, however, even though it's been out a while, has had about as much uptake as the Iomega 250MB Zip drives. It's not really a de-facto standard, because no one has them. You can buy the burners somewhat cheaply now (though still much more than DVD burners), but they're not common. Typical computers don't come with them standard. The media are simply too expensive for anyone to bother with them.
  Comparing this new disc to DVDs makes perfect sense, because it's something you can assume that most computer users have these days. Comparing it to BD-Rs wouldn't make any sense, because so few people have them. Probably the only people who bother with them are people who want to rent and copy Blu-Ray movies.
4. Re:Incorrect claim 100x! by Tim+C · 2011-07-22 00:54 · Score: 1
  
  Ok, then let's compare it to dual-layer DVDs, which store 8.5GB per disc (or 17GB if they're double-sided, which most aren't of course). The 100x claim is still off.
  
  --
  It's official. Most of you are morons.
5. Re:Incorrect claim 100x! by Grishnakh · 2011-07-22 02:49 · Score: 1
  
  How many times have you seen a DL DVD-R? I've never seen one myself, except on store shelves. The cost for a DL DVD-R is MUCH more than 2x the cost of a regular DVD-R, so no one buys them, except people wanting to make a faithful 1-disc copy of a DVD movie. With everyone going to media players now, that's probably fading out fast.
  The 100x claim is perfectly valid, because it's comparing to the dominant optical data storage media currently in use. No one uses DL DVD-Rs, BD-Rs, BDXLs, or any such thing in significant numbers. If you could get sales figures, I'm sure you'd find that DVD-R is far and away the most popular format, though it's probably fading too now that USB thumb drives in that size have gotten so cheap.
6. Re:Incorrect claim 100x! by TangoMargarine · 2011-07-22 03:13 · Score: 1
  
  True, but do you really think that a new format will be any better? We'll have to have another huge format war, waste a bazillion industry dollars, and then end up with a new format that MIGHT get taken up by everybody like DVD. Like Blu-Ray did? Yeah. And I'm not naive enough to think that even if the conglomerorporationompany didn't include Sony that the DRM would be any better. Maybe a little better initially, but it's bound to come back. Being nice to the customers just doesn't pay when the customers don't know better.
  
  --
  Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
7. Re:Incorrect claim 100x! by treeves · 2011-07-22 04:52 · Score: 1
  
  It's even smaller than a 5 1/4" floppy to be precise, since CD format is 120mm / 25.4 mm/in = 4.72".
  Can you imagine?: "Please insert disc 372,685 of 399,999"
  
  --
  ...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
8. Re:Incorrect claim 100x! by Hypoon · 2011-07-22 05:04 · Score: 1
  
  I disagree, I see FAR more CD-Rs floating around than DVD-Rs. I also find the CD-Rs are more readily available for "borrowing" from friends and co-workers, although I wouldn't consider that supporting evidence for their popularity. A 500 GB disk is roughly 700 times bigger than a CD.
  Regardless, using whatever stretch you want, it was poorly worded. I read it as suggesting an increase of 100x the most dense available dvd-sized disks today, 50GB Bluray.
Re:wow good thing the taxpayers bailed them out by geekoid · 2011-07-21 08:57 · Score: 1

All the people that are still employed at GE and still creating new technologies can buy cloths and food, as do the people that buy their goods from.

--
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
But... by msauve · 2011-07-21 08:57 · Score: 1, Funny

how many Library of Congresses is that?

--
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
1. Re:But... by swanzilla · 2011-07-21 09:08 · Score: 1
  
  Libraries of Congress, please. 500GB is roughly 1/40th of a LoC.
  
  --
  0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
2. Re:But... by Threni · 2011-07-21 09:15 · Score: 1
  
  500GB is certainly a lot of congress.
3. Re:But... by msauve · 2011-07-21 09:23 · Score: 1
  
  "Libraries of Congress"
  
  There's only one.
  
  --
  "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
4. Re:But... by rubycodez · 2011-07-21 09:29 · Score: 1
  
  What's the difference, sum of storage of many hypothetical Libraries each with the capacity of our Library of Congress, or summing the storage of libraries of a bunch of hypothetical Congresses, each having a Library?
5. Re:But... by msauve · 2011-07-21 09:51 · Score: 1
  
  "Library of Congress" in this context is a unit of information, not an actual library. It's the unit which is made plural, not the library and not the Congress.
  
  --
  "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
6. Re:But... by rubycodez · 2011-07-21 10:54 · Score: 1
  
  it's so fun yanking peoples' chains around here. or yanking people chains. or yanking people's chain.
7. Re:But... by rubycodez · 2011-07-21 16:30 · Score: 1
  
  I prefer punched card capacity; excluding columns 1-6 and 73-80, of course.
8. Re:But... by TangoMargarine · 2011-07-22 03:14 · Score: 1
  
  A large act of Congress? No wait, that would be measured in metric tons of (bull/)shit.
  
  --
  Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Back up my 3TB HD in 18+ hours by davidwr · 2011-07-21 08:58 · Score: 1

Wow, full daily backups, and I only have to change platters 6 times a day!
On the other hand, most of my neighbors will be able to incrementally back up their computers every day for the life of the computer and never disks. I hope they protect that backup very well.

--
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
1. Re:Back up my 3TB HD in 18+ hours by Grishnakh · 2011-07-21 11:19 · Score: 1
  
  A good backup strategy with incremental backups is to make a fresh backup every so often, and then make incremental backups at shorter intervals in between. Then you can keep 2 or 3 of the full backup sets, plus the incrementals, and have insurance in case your most recent full set fails. You should never have only one full backup set if you're doing incrementals.
  18 hours may sound ridiculous for backing up your 3TB HD, but how long would it take to make a 3TB backup onto a second 3TB HD? I don't think that'd be a terribly quick operation either.
2. Re:Back up my 3TB HD in 18+ hours by Bing+Tsher+E · 2011-07-21 12:01 · Score: 1
  
  Few people (not businesses) have a 3TB drive wirth backing up.
  Sure, you have your 'movie collection' on there, but that's just something used to justify having all that storage.
  One of the things that is really depressing about the way the Internet has been saturated with 'file sharing' is that it's largely a huge redundant clump of the same stuff, that has been converted 60 times by 600 people using 580 different codecs. And it's all the same content.
Not impressed by cpu6502 · 2011-07-21 08:59 · Score: 2

500GB divided by 50 GB == 100 times??? This must be that new math I heard about. Maybe it's time to do a refresher course at my local college.
(1) I thought Pioneer has already developed a twenty-layer bluray disc that stored 500 GB. So not that big of a deal for GE to do the same.
(2) Optical media will not be dead if ISPs keep putting 150 GB (i.e. three-to-six hd movies) limitations on their internet lines.
(3) Optical discs allow me to KEEP the movie for life. Downloads do not, thanks to DarmnRM.

--
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
1. Re:Not impressed by rolfwind · 2011-07-21 09:12 · Score: 1
  
  Yeah, that's what they did but it's stupid. When Intel comes with a new chip, they don't announce it's a leap of 100x speed!!!*
  *Compared to a 10 year old P4.
  Plus the same write speed as Blu-Ray is pretty bad. It should have scaled up. Oh well, it's something.
2. Re:Not impressed by KnownIssues · 2011-07-21 09:12 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  Since the reference is to standard DVD-sized discs, it's reasonable that the 100x is to standard DVD capacity, which is right around 5GB.
3. Re:Not impressed by basotl · 2011-07-21 09:30 · Score: 1
  
  Considering they used DVD as opposed to Blueray as the reference point.... you can see what they did there.
  
  --
  HTC EVO 4G LTE w/ CM 10.2 | NookColor w/ CM 10.2 | Samsung Epic 4G w/ CM 10.1
4. Re:Not impressed by rubycodez · 2011-07-21 09:32 · Score: 1
  
  Pure marketing genius!! Heck, let's give the shareholders some real wood and say it's an improvement of 6.25 MILLION times ! !
  
  (over the capacity of a punched card)
5. Re:Not impressed by Kjella · 2011-07-21 09:48 · Score: 1
  
  (2) Optical media will not be dead if ISPs keep putting 150 GB (i.e. three-to-six hd movies) limitations on their internet lines.
  So it'll be a US thing like the imperial system, I guess. /speaking from a 60/60 Mbps fiber connection @ $100/mo, no caps. So I am slightly ahead of the curve but almost all large, new buildings now have fiber. They'll deliver me 800/800 Mbps here if I wanted to pay $1100/month, the last mile is no longer the limit.
  
  --
  Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
6. Re:Not impressed by tepples · 2011-07-21 10:13 · Score: 1
  
  So it'll be a US thing like the imperial system, I guess.
  I get it already. The United States is lagging behind in telecommunications and can't be fixed from within. Have you any tips on qualifying for legal immigrant status in a more "civilized" country?
7. Re:Not impressed by EdIII · 2011-07-21 10:23 · Score: 1
  
  I don't own anything BlueRay for precisely the DRM that they are putting on all the devices. Not interested, Fuck Off.
  Now if this 500GB disc from GE does not contain any measures like this... and they have readers that they can install into media players, I will be very interested in doing so. That's probably anywhere from 130-150 DVD's on a single disc. Make 3 or 4 backups and keep one in a safety deposit box and you will have all your media (music, pictures, and movies) backed up pretty well.
  I would like to see a Jukebox for this. Just like the ones made for DVDs. I had one that stored up 250 DVDs in the carousel. 250x500 GB = Buttload of space.
  You are also forgetting Sneakernet. Can you imagine me giving you 5 or 6 of these in trade? Give it a few weeks and you will see an amazing exchange of data that would exceed the bandwidth limitations of every ISP in the city combined.
  P.S - Optical discs only allow you to keep the movie for life if you remove the protections. DVDs are okay because the protection is so easily removable, even on the new ones. Prohibited User Operations, and all the extra crap can be removed including trailers and the FBI warning. When a brand new disc is released where they have done some funky things that we cannot remove the protections on easily..... that's where piracy comes into play. Just download a high quality DVD-R release of the movie because the piracy groups are experts at removing protections that should not be there in the first place.
  The only difference between DRM on DVDs and BlueRay is the amount of effort it takes to break them. BlueRay is just too damn difficult, and because they are increasingly making it Internet connected devices, it will turn into the same battle between PS3 owners and Sony. No thank you. I don't need to be a participant in that war.
8. Re:Not impressed by Omestes · 2011-07-21 11:31 · Score: 1
  
  But that's not the current standard, they might as well reference 5.25" floppy discs if they are trying to inflate their breakthrough.
  For consumer optical storage, it is. Bluray might be the big thing for content producers (though I think DVDs still out sell them), most people still use DVDs for back-up, when they aren't using platters. I don't actually know anyone who bought a Bluray burner, much less anyone who uses one. The hardware is expensive, the media is expensive, it isn't wildly popular (for data or PCs), so you can't share it as well.
  There are other issues, since it doesn't work like it should thanks to restrictive and ubiquitous DRM (can I stick this burned movie into my living room players?).
  Right now its cheaper to by a 1TB external HDD than to by a Bluray burner. Actually, I don't see much reason to invest in optical media, at all. I have about 30 old HDDs strewn about the house, with various backups, media, etc... When I want to watch something on the TV, I generally stream Netflix or pull it off a networked computer. If I want to back up, I have a nice gleaming eSata part at the top of my computer, which is twice as fast and supports media many times the size of Blueray. For small jobs I probably have a terabyte of old flash drives sitting around.
  The only reason my and my girlfriend bought a Blueray player was because I didn't have the HTPC set up yet, and it supported streaming off Netflix. Its a technology that's doomed, and what little success it has is based almost exclusively on hype.
  
  --
  A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
9. Re:Not impressed by 2fuf · 2011-07-21 14:10 · Score: 1
  
  compared to a regular dvd, moron
10. Re:Not impressed by wye43 · 2011-07-21 19:42 · Score: 1
  
  Its actually 770 times more than a CD-ROM, and a whopping 347222 times more than a 1.44 floppy disc. A ...mazing :P
11. Re:Not impressed by stms · 2011-07-21 20:11 · Score: 1
  
  I normally don't care about people posting estimates in their posts that are a little off but seeing as your post is criticizing another for the same thing and then gets another estimate wrong. How do you get 3 to 6 HD movies in 150 GB? I understand a BluRay disk is 25-50 GB but they only need that much space so they can support MPEG-2 video. When you download stuff over the internet they use Codecs that are designed for the internet like H264. In this codec a good Quality 1080p movie with surround Requires at most 10 GB (really a lot less but lets assume worst case scenario). That's at least 15 Movies in 1080p.
12. Re:Not impressed by TangoMargarine · 2011-07-22 03:17 · Score: 1
  
  Maybe the standard dual-layer DVDs you get films on, but the basic burnable DVD media is still single-layer, 4.7GB.
  
  --
  Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
13. Re:Not impressed by TangoMargarine · 2011-07-23 10:58 · Score: 1
  
  Dual-layer are usually a couple bucks more, and personally I don't usually even have enough data that I want to back up to fill a single-layer anyway. Single-layer is the base standard, so while we're at it we might as well compare against Zip Drives. Although yes, I agree that it would have kind of made more sense to compare Blu-Rays.
  
  --
  Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
14. Re:Not impressed by cpu6502 · 2011-07-24 09:32 · Score: 1
  
  >>>I understand a BluRay disk is 25-50 GB but they only need that much space so they can support MPEG-2 video.
  BluRay uses MPEG 4 (also known as h.264).
  
  --
  My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
15. Re:Not impressed by stms · 2011-07-24 22:15 · Score: 2
  
  I know which is why I said "so they can support MPEG-2." As in they need that much space so they have the option to use MPEG-2 if they so choose. But yes you are correct BluRay players are also required to support h264.
Re:wow good thing the taxpayers bailed them out by levork · 2011-07-21 09:01 · Score: 3, Informative

The government bailed out General Motors, not General Electric.
Re:wow good thing the taxpayers bailed them out by LordLimecat · 2011-07-21 09:10 · Score: 2

When you say "bailed them out", to be clear, you mean that they took advantage of tax incentives, by presumably doing things we were trying to incentivize that cost GE money (like green initiatives)?
Re:Itt's about bloody time by derGoldstein · 2011-07-21 09:10 · Score: 1

It's not 2 years. It's 5, at least. I remember the numerous promises of 45Gb discs and 70Gb discs using blu-ray technology. The bottleneck is usually the burn-time per-disc (about 20 hours). By the time this is market-ready, HDDs will be 50-terabytes large, and this will be too small to be practical.

--
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
Holographic Disk by Thelasko · 2011-07-21 09:13 · Score: 1

I've been hearing about holographic disks since 2004. I'll believe it when I see it.

--
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Re:wow good thing the taxpayers bailed them out by Osgeld · 2011-07-21 09:16 · Score: 1

the problem is, stop number 2 or 3 on that chain is China and or India
GE can take their time by Edmund+Blackadder · 2011-07-21 09:16 · Score: 1

I am not buying a new disk player for 10 years at least.
Re:wow good thing the taxpayers bailed them out by jameskojiro · 2011-07-21 09:21 · Score: 1

Yeah, GE got a lot a "Government Help" in the form of green energy regulations that favor them and penalize others and sweet tax deals.
GE is the definition of "Crony Capitalism".
A lot of regulations are written by these large companies like GE and Monsanto and their lobbyists to drive the middle sized and small operators out by making them comply with ridiculous regulations that are easier to comply with if you are a large company with a herd of full time lawyers. This kills their competition and allows them to stay on top where they become bloated and filled with corruption. Just look at the Old AT&T of the 1970's and 1980's, horrible service, high prices and no competion so no incentive to improve themselves.

--
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Re:wow good thing the taxpayers bailed them out by EraserMouseMan · 2011-07-21 09:22 · Score: 1

GE got a $140 Billion bailout. But I don't blame you for being incorrect. Billion dollar bailouts were handed out like candy. And how effective they were (or not) is about the same as candy too.
Re:wow good thing the taxpayers bailed them out by basotl · 2011-07-21 09:26 · Score: 1

GE also received some forms of help. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2008/11/12/fdic-to-back-139-billion-in-ge-capital-debt/

--
HTC EVO 4G LTE w/ CM 10.2 | NookColor w/ CM 10.2 | Samsung Epic 4G w/ CM 10.1
Obligatory... by blueturffan · 2011-07-21 09:32 · Score: 1, Funny

I guess I'm going to have to buy the White album again
1. Re:Obligatory... by Bing+Tsher+E · 2011-07-21 12:04 · Score: 1
  
  My White album is on vinyl and from the 70's. But 'Martha My Dear' has a skip on it. It doesn't matter, though, because the CD copy of the White album from the local public library was easy to check out.
2. Re:Obligatory... by mikechant · 2011-07-21 23:02 · Score: 1
  
  But 'Martha My Dear' has a skip on it.
  Skips can often be turned into much less annoying clicks by 'scratching out' the skip with a pin. Just scratch gently along the groove and repeat until it no longer skips.
  I've done this successfully on several occasions.
Re:Itt's about bloody time by TheRaven64 · 2011-07-21 09:39 · Score: 1

Dual layer blue-ray disks are on the market now. 50GB rewriteable discs cost about £20, which is pretty expensive considering that the 25GB ones only cost about £5.

--
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Increase of 100x? by towelie-ban · 2011-07-21 09:41 · Score: 1

HVDs, with the size of a DVD and a storage capacity of 6TB, would like to speak with you.
1. Re:Increase of 100x? by Grishnakh · 2011-07-21 11:22 · Score: 1
  
  You mean slightly more. It's either 4.3GB or 4.7GB, depending on whether you prefer the old or new definition of "gigabyte".
GE Capital by perpenso · 2011-07-21 09:45 · Score: 1

When you say "bailed them out", to be clear, you mean that they took advantage of tax incentives, by presumably doing things we were trying to incentivize that cost GE money (like green initiatives)?
I can't be sure but I expect that the GP was referring to GE Capital, the financing component of GE.
LOL by AngryDeuce · 2011-07-21 09:53 · Score: 2

Can't wait to put my computer out of commission for 8 hours while I burn one of these monstrosities. I think I'll just go ahead and stick with hard drives...
1. Re:LOL by Bing+Tsher+E · 2011-07-21 12:07 · Score: 1
  
  I make a habit of sleeping for about 8 hours at a stretch...
2. Re:LOL by AngryDeuce · 2011-07-21 12:27 · Score: 1
  
  I shoot for 5, but settle for 4.
Re:wow good thing the taxpayers bailed them out by d4fseeker · 2011-07-21 09:57 · Score: 1

Or a patent troll buying their IP and we would be having more of these "sueing" news on ./
Re:wow good thing the taxpayers bailed them out by mcl630 · 2011-07-21 10:01 · Score: 1

Just to be clear: they insured GE Capital's (GE's lending subsidiary) debts to $140 billion... they didn't actually hand them $140 billion. Se the nytimes article basoti linked below.
How about a smaller disc? by willy_me · 2011-07-21 10:07 · Score: 3, Interesting

I would like to see how much they could cram into a disc with a 1" radius. The way I see it, the only way this technology will really take off is if they make it cheap and convenient. There is little need for 500GB of portable general purpose optical storage - portable HDs work fine. But I could see a use for ~20GB of cheap, portable, and disposable storage; the sort of thing you hand off to someone knowing full well you will never get it back. Around 20GB would be enough for HD video content, anything more would be wasted - better to reduce the physical size.
1. Re:How about a smaller disc? by Grishnakh · 2011-07-21 11:25 · Score: 1
  
  The way I see it, the only way this technology will really take off is if they make it cheap and convenient. There is little need for 500GB of portable general purpose optical storage - portable HDs work fine.
  Sure there is, for backing up your TB+ hard drives. It seems ridiculous that to back up a 2TB HD, I basically need to buy a second 2TB hard drive, or multiples if I want to keep multiple backups.
  Hard drives are cheap if you're just buying one, but as a backup media, they leave a lot to be desired.
  We could really use a cheap optical media with large capacity for doing low-cost backups for homes and small businesses. Perhaps $2/disc. At that price, it wouldn't cost much to do quarterly or even monthly backups, and would be much cheaper than buying hard drives for backup.
2. Re:How about a smaller disc? by Vegemeister · 2011-07-21 13:49 · Score: 1
  
  Hard drives are cheap if you're just buying one, but as a backup media, they leave a lot to be desired.
  Not really. They're cheap per GB. They can be read and written fairly quickly (~100 MB/s). The apparatus for reading back your backups is self contained - usb will be around for a long damn time. They're sealed and don't degrade much over time (unlike high density optical media). And you can back up 2 TB of data without changing media 40 times.
3. Re:How about a smaller disc? by DarkOx · 2011-07-22 00:13 · Score: 1
  
  Here here!
  I am pretty careful about keeping my original media, and retaining the tag files from my installation and such on my home machines. So I really only need to backup my home directory. Within that I am pretty organized as well. There is lots of stuff I keep because I can that I don't need and would not cry over if something happened to it. The stuff I do want to keep either because it would take lots time re-rip and prepare form the original media or because its my own content (software I wrote, my financial records, e-mail, everything I wrote for College, etc) weighs in at about 30GB tar'ed and bziped and feed through ccrypt now.
  I used to do backups to zip disks, moved on to jaz disks, did dvd+Rs for a while, currently rotate on a pair of 32gig flash drives now. I like to keep the older generation at the office; so multiple media backs would be a pain. I am about to out grow my flash drives, probably within a few months. I will have to by some 64 GB or 128 GB models to replace them. I have no real use for the 32s after that.
  Optical disks of enough capacity would eliminate this waste for a good long while have multiple uses (the drive anyway) and let me affordably keep more than two generations.
  
  --
  Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
4. Re:How about a smaller disc? by TangoMargarine · 2011-07-22 04:30 · Score: 1
  
  What can you possibly need more than 16GB of RAM for? I'm really curious if you're not running a mainframe or a server or something, what you need it to do. Having your kernel constantly recompiling while exporting 2 HD movies at the same time?
  
  --
  Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
5. Re:How about a smaller disc? by kvezach · 2011-07-22 08:59 · Score: 1
  
  Let's see. Standard DVD size has a diameter of 120mm (radius = 60 mm). You want 1 in (25.4 mm). There's a center hole that's 15 mm in the DVD standard, so let's say it's shrunk to 8 mm. Then the area of the DVD sized disc is pi * (60^2 - 15^2), and of the small disc, pi * (25.4^2 - 8^2). The DVD sized disc has about 5.8 times the area of your smaller disc, so if they can get 500 GB on the big one, 80 GB on the small? Sounds good.
Re:wow good thing the taxpayers bailed them out by glwtta · 2011-07-21 10:08 · Score: 1

Wait, you can't buy food and clothing and you're wasting your time on Slashdot instead of looking for a job?

Why the hell are you even paying for an internet connection? That's just messed up.

--
sic transit gloria mundi
Medium on which the tar streams are stored by tepples · 2011-07-21 10:09 · Score: 1

So use tar.
tar(1) just combines multiple files into one stream. How will you read this stream off the backup tape years later?
1. Re:Medium on which the tar streams are stored by idontgno · 2011-07-21 10:46 · Score: 2
  
  um... tar with the "x" option. Just like it's been done for the last 30 years.
  I'd be more worried about the "tape" part than the "tar" part, since there's no guarantee the drive that could read your tape would exist in 30 years, let alone the tape itself still being readable.
  
  --
  Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
2. Re:Medium on which the tar streams are stored by Anonymous Coward · 2011-07-21 12:20 · Score: 1
  
  Use open source software like Amanda. It has been around for 20 years so it is the definition of stable. It is open source so it will be around in 5000 years and you will be able to retrieve data from your DAT tapes even if you are running FreeBSD 345.54 or the linux kernel version is 43495.34345.2322.43. Also it uses dump or tar depending on how you configure it. Both dump and tar will be with us till the end and can be found on any OS worth its salt.
  Period. End of argument.
Re:wow good thing the taxpayers bailed them out by Anonymous Coward · 2011-07-21 10:20 · Score: 1

Nah, he sounds like a typical white young male. The whole "creating new technologies" thing is a dead giveaway. 99.9% of life has nothing to do with new technologies. Exactly that, clothes, shelter, food, water, infrastructure, all these things have nothing to do with how many unlawfully obtained movies and games you can cram onto a piece of plastic. Trivial nonsense that goes out the window the day you didn't get your three meals.
Re:500GB = 100x 128GB? by LordKronos · 2011-07-21 11:02 · Score: 1

1) Wow, I didn't realize that capacity existed yet.
2) I thought it was bad when drives had 3 or 4 different speed ratings, but I guess that was nothing:
Pioneer BDR-206MBK - BDXL drive - Serial ATA - 24x (CD) / 8x (DVD) / 6x (BD) 24x (CD) / 8x (DVD±R) / 8x (DVD±R DL) / 6x (BD-R) / 6x (BD-R DL) / 4x (BD-R QL) / 4x (BD-R TL) 24x (CD) / 6x (DVD-RW) / 8x (DVD+RW) / 2x (BD-RE) / 2x (BD-RE DL) / 2x (BD-RE TL) - Internal
3.5" small disks? by ThePhilips · 2011-07-21 11:04 · Score: 1

Small write-once read-only media? Make the 3.5" small disks a fully support format - and I might get slightly interested. Because the 5.25" disks are f****ing huge by all modern standards. Even 3.5" might be too largish. UMD-like media (2.5" or smaller; with a case) if it is still above 10GB, might be interesting too.
If you are again with the same old 5.25" shit - do not even bother. Blu-ray - disks and drives - just got sufficiently cheap to be even considered. Your tech, with the current download/cloud trends, would take even longer to get any traction in the market - probably never getting there thanks to wider adoption of broadband.

--
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
1. Re:3.5" small disks? by failedlogic · 2011-07-21 11:17 · Score: 1
  
  I know the capacity is small, but I think the best format so far are the Sony Mini Discs. Too bad discontinued. The cases didn't take more space than the disc and for some of them you slid and snapped it in. No Scratching the media to worry about.
2. Re:3.5" small disks? by mmmmbeer · 2011-07-21 13:11 · Score: 1
  
  I agree. It's great that they've found ways to improve data density, but that can just as easily be used for reducing the size of the disks as for putting more data on them. Especially with today's miniaturization of everything, some sort of microdisk that could hold at least dvd-quality video would be much better. Then you could have a reader built into a laptop, tablet, or even cellphone.
Re:Itt's about bloody time by Grishnakh · 2011-07-21 11:15 · Score: 1

And 5 pounds, or even 5 dollars here in the USA (which I think is a typical-to-high price for them here), is still severely overpriced when you compare to the cost per gigabyte of a hard drive. For storing large amounts of data (such as HD backups), BD-R discs make zero sense. You're much better off just buying a second HD.
Re:500GB = 100x 128GB? by Grishnakh · 2011-07-21 11:28 · Score: 1

How many people do you know that have BDXL discs and burners? Heck, I've never even heard of such a thing, just the regular and DL BD-Rs, and even there, I've never actually seen one outside of a store. No one uses them, because the media cost is way too high.
What kind of moron would spend $$$ on 128GB BDXL discs (and a special burner) when they can just buy a 1TB HD for $50? How much would it cost to use BDXL to back up a 1TB hard drive (you'd need 8 discs)? Is it more than $50? If so, then it's a stupid and useless format.
Like MiniDisc? by bigsexyjoe · 2011-07-21 11:29 · Score: 1

They already tried that. Maybe it work better if you could put movies on a tiny disc or more music on a tiny disc.

--
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
they'll mess it up by sixsixtysix · 2011-07-21 13:05 · Score: 1

it'll be okay for comsumer data storage, but if gets in the hands of media companies, they will fuck it up for sure. just look at blu-ray. here we could could put entire an entire tv season in dvd resolution (especially stuff that can never be made HD), plus how much physical space would that save if thin-packed, but no. even more-so with sd cards, but nooo. fucking. retards.

--
...
i wish they'd insure my subsidiary debts by decora · 2011-07-21 13:33 · Score: 1

because then my interest rate would go to 0
which would be like getting free money
from the taxpayer.
if only there were some word to describe that phenomenon...
in which factual errors get rated higher than by decora · 2011-07-21 13:35 · Score: 1

actual facts.
====
GE is GE Capital, which is a gigantic fucking hedge fund.
If the taxpayers had not bailed out big finance, almost all hedge funds would have collapsed overnight.
Stick to standards by Dragon+Bait · 2011-07-21 14:26 · Score: 1

Tape is more practical for offsite for large amount of data. LTO 5 is 1.5TB raw, and if they made them bigger we would be buying them.
Apparently HP make a 3 TB tape, but at a higher cost per byte.
If the Hp tape isn't part of a standard, don't buy it. Given time, proprietary will always bite you.
Doing more with less by dbIII · 2011-07-21 14:56 · Score: 3, Informative

One thing I like about Amanda is that if you just dump part of the first file on the tape onto something with "dd" or similar it has INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO USE IT IN THE HEADER. How is that for future proofing? I've recovered files from an Amanda tape without using Amanda, just "dd", "tar" and a text viewer to read those instructions.
Just great, now I get to buy Star Wars again... by DarthVain · 2011-07-22 01:34 · Score: 1

With the state of media companies today, I dread new physical media now. Just means that they will use this as an excuse to sell you the same garbage you already bought them, and to use this as an excuse to flex their IP muscle. Can't wait for Star Wars the definitive GE super extended edition!
Anyway its all about cost, how much are these suckers going to cost, and how much is the burner. Wait and see. Might at least be a legitimate backup option for consumer PC's eventually if not expensive. Still, even with BR write time, filling 500GB is going to take forever.
Personally I would like to see some company make SSD's a lot cheaper. That would make my day.
Re:Itt's about bloody time by TheRaven64 · 2011-07-22 21:52 · Score: 1

Why split your data up into 25GB chunks when you can just load everything onto a 2.5" drive, then make a backup onto a 2nd drive.
Simple: I produce about 1GB a month of new data. If I took a lot of photographs, it would still be under 25GB. It's easy to burn a disk containing the new data for this month and pop it in the post to a relative. You've now got cheap off-site backups. Oh, and one of the main reasons for backups is to protect yourself against theft. When thieves broke into my father's house, they concentrated on high-value items. They took his laptop and external disk, but they left his DVD backups...

--
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
cool thing by hesaigo999ca · 2011-07-26 05:02 · Score: 1

I would only need a firmware upgrade to let me burner know how to implement the new tech. ...without changing the player, this could be a great money saver!!!