New Technique For Optical Storage Claims 1 Petabyte On a Single DVD

melios writes "Using a two-light-beam method a company claims to have overcome Abbe's Law to dramatically increase the storage density for optical media, to the 9 nm scale. From the article: 'The technique is also cost-effective and portable, as only conventional optical and laser elements are used, and allows for the development of optical data storage with long life and low energy consumption, which could be an ideal platform for a Big Data centre.'"

Comments

Optical density, schmoptical schmensity!

[OliWarner]

Supersnore. It's another year and another story about 1000-sublayer thick DVDs using multispectral lasers to fit ALL the DVDs on it. But how many of those make it to market? How robust is it? How much does that media cost?

I've been reading stories like this for 20 years and I still get little-girl-meets-Bieber excited when I think about being able to back up to just one disk... But it never happens. Spinning rust remains the cheapest and most convenient mass-storage device.

Re:Optical density, schmoptical schmensity!

[AbRASiON]

This man needs +6, seriously.
I've been reading these stories almost once a year since I first got on the internet in 1996.

Seriously, they shouldnt' even be linked to at this point.

at an OPTIMISITC writing speed of 1GB/sec

[etash]

it will take about 1million seconds to fill it or about 11.5 days

Re:at an OPTIMISITC writing speed of 1GB/sec

[TheRaven64]

If I had an optical disk that had that kind of write speed and sufficiently cheap media, I'd use it with a log-structured filesystem. The real data would be on some other media, and the optical disk would record every transaction. When the disk filled up, I'd pop a new one in, have it write a complete snapshot (about 40 minutes for a 2TB NAS, and I could probably buffer any changes in that period to disk / flash) and then go back to log mode. Each disk would then be a backup that would be able to restore my filesystem to any point in the period. Actually, given my average disk writes, one of these disks would store everything I write to disk for about 200 years, so it would probably want more regular snapshots or the restore time of playing back the entire journal would be too long. Effectively, the append-only storage system becomes your authoritative data store and the hard disks and flash just become caches for better random access.

The problem, of course, is the 'sufficiently cheap media' part. When CDs were introduced, I had a 40MB hard drive and the 650MB hard disk was enough for every conceivable backup. When CD-Rs were cheap, I had a 5GB hard drive and a CD was just about big enough for my home directory, if I trimmed it a bit. When DVDs were introduced, I had a 20GB hard drive and a 4.5GB layer was just about enough for my home directory. When DVD-Rs were cheap, I had an 80GB hard drive in my laptop, and 4.5GB was nowhere near enough. Now, the 25GB on an affordable BD-R is under 10% of my laptop's flash and laughable compared to the 4TB in my NAS.

If they can get it to market when personal storage is still in the tens of TBs range, then it's interesting.

Great news for ASICS

[Anonymous Coward]

This is great news for ASICS. Maskless direct write is the holy grail for this. Most of the cost of IC making now lies in the mask set and cost 10's of millions of dollars for a top line chip. There are ways to 'double up' mask steps into one reticule to save money on medium volume ICs and small volume has to be done on MultiProjectWafers.
Direct write is slow but with a multiple beam setup that can be speeded up. I'm thinking what Mapper Technology is trying to do with e-beam.

Optical media sucks...

[RedBear]

I've just about had it with all optical media in general. I've had numerous CDs and DVDs over the years that just stopped being readable without even having any visible damage. Both self-written and factory discs. I'm only halfway through re-watching a retail set of Stargate SG-1 DVDs I purchased at Costco for $179.99 just 3-4 years ago, and I've already encountered a handful of discs with serious defects. Learned my lesson not to buy physical media anymore. Once I finish torrenting a good pirated version of the series I'll probably never try to watch the DVDs again. The box is nice though.

Bottom line is even if one of these amazingly high density optical media schemes finally pans out, the media will need to be composed of pure diamond or something else incredibly durable, and have a filesystem with incredible levels of error correction and redundancy or it will be pointless to put even a terabyte of data on such a disc, much less a petabyte. And that's not even bringing up read/write speeds and other issues that have already made this type of media useless for many purposes.

Don't get excited until it ships

[sirwired]

Those clowns at InPhase ("Holographic Discs") were like the Duke Nukem Forever of storage; well over a decade, and no shipping product.

For now, I put this in the same pile as the Windows Database File System and Laptop Fuel Cells.

Re:Good!

[RicktheBrick]

Put a male and a female rat in a cage and they will have sex until the male grows tired of the female. Take the female out and replace her with another female and the male will find new energy to have sex. It is the same with porn. There is no need to save it since after viewing them a couple of times one will grow tired of them and they will not have the same effect as the first time. This is why there will always be a market for new porn with a new fresh legal young girl. Its in our dna and their is nothing one can do about it.