Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
I was wondering where my pron collection would fit...
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.
I have been looking forward to this for a long, long time... I
As screw the build up. I just wanted to say "peta-file" It's a funny word.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L397TWLwrUU
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
It's inevitable.
it will take about 1million seconds to fill it or about 11.5 days
Just saying.
Likely not a DVD at all.
Now our politicians and bankers can leave even more customer information on a train.
Sure, it's pedantic, but a DVD holds only about 9GB on a dual layer disc. It may be a disc with the same form factor, but it's not a DVD. You could just as well say "holds one Petabyte on a single CD", which also wouldn't be true.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Stupid plastic waste storage with average lifetime of a year, just do the environment a favor and die already.
better don't scratch it :-)
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.
Well if this ever comes to market it will be fun. Teenagers of the (hopefully not too distant) future will be able to swap a single disk containing a library of the entire worlds recorded music, maybe even encoded in FLAC to boot !
I can just see all the MAFIAA lawyers having fits of apoplexy now :)
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
Sony will love these if anything for just that. Just fill up the disk with "junk data" to bloat up the ISO so as be too big to pirate. Bloody brilliant!
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.
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.
How many NSA data centres can be fitted onto a single optical disk?
http://home.web.cern.ch/about/computing
[...]
Approximately 600 million times per second, particles collide within the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Each collision generates particles that often decay in complex ways into even more particles. Electronic circuits record the passage of each particle through a detector as a series of electronic signals, and send the data to the CERN Data Centre (DC) for digital reconstruction. The digitized summary is recorded as a "collision event". Physicists must sift through the 15 petabytes or so of data produced annually to determine if the collisions have thrown up any interesting physics.
[...]
Yay, an optical disk with 1000x the density of DVD! That means that when it gets scratched, you'll lose 1000x the information that you would on a DVD!
Let's all sing along now: Tape sucks, Optical sucks. Rotational drives are here to stay.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
"from the that's-a-long-movie dept." Wrong, that's a freaking lot of bonus materials!
A petabyte disk could hold 250 TB repeated four times, making it robust against scratches.
Wow, it's been YEARS since there's been any kind of usable backup media solution. 1PB seems like a good starting point, IF the speeds are reasonable (i.e. able to write 1pb in a few hours). Even most home users have at LEAST a TB these days. Datacenters?
no reason to believe that we won't have more iterations in commonly available optical storage devices.. thought I doubt we'll be using them for anything other than backups
With even home Internet providers enforcing monthly caps, how will you fit your 3D 4K movies across a home Internet connection without having to take a week off surfing after streaming a single movie? (4K, or quad HD, is the next step beyond high-definition video. The consumer version has roughly 3840x2160 pixels.)
My first DVD player was an Apex, back when it was a big deal to reflash it with region-free/no macrovision firmware (circa 2000?). At some point I ran into issues with this player when MPEG2 bitrates went over some threshold (5 Mbps?) -- the player just didn't have the horsepower to handle that data rate.
Eventually that player died and I went through a series of inexpensive Chinese players. Some failed outright after six months, but those that didn't die would often choke on some discs, freezing in the middle of playback or stuttering every 15 minutes.
I finally gave up and spent nearly $100 on a name-brand player and all those problems went away....until I got into Bluray players!
I bought two nearly identical Panasonic Blu-Ray players, hoping that a big name and higher price bought me better equipment, but these players have also been flaky, although not as bad as the Chinese DVD players, requiring full power cycling (pulling the plug) from time to time.
Usually the content (seems most common with HBO discs) freezes and won't continue, like it has a tracking error. Sometimes you can chapter skip and it will continue playing, but usually I pull the plug. Some software updates have helped, but it still happens too often. A Sony purchased in the last six months doesn't do this.
Anyway, the moral of the story is test your discs in better players. I kept home-burned CD-Rs in my car for years and was terribly abusive to them (left on the seat, jammed 3 into one slot in the visor holder, etc) without ever having problems except for the most obviously scratched discs. Other than some very early Kodak CD-Rs I burned in the late 90s optical media, whether factory or burned hasn't been an issue as much as the player hardware has.
You mean this method inccreases the amout of data that can be stored on a 12cm optical disc, right?
This method won't increase the stroage of a DVD disc.
There has been transcoding and repacking software out there for decades. Bloody(pronounce brittish, BlOOdy) not brilliant.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion. -- Spazmania (174582)
The "one beam going through a doughnut beam" technique is well known through STED microscopy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STED_microscopy
STED is a superresolution technique for imaging when using fluorophores.
This is a very nice idea using the technique in a different way for a different application.
Do you have any better hostages?
Lets examine what the raw (unformatted ) linear read speed would have to be for this drive to have the same rotational speed as a DVD drive. :)
Warnign, I am not a hardware engineer, or a physicist or anything like that. And on top of that I am sick today, and I normally don't think that clearly so if I make a mistake, please don't flame, just correct me and contribute to the conversation
One 16x DVD drive I googled for specs ( NEC DVW001335 ) listed 10350 rpm outside track so lets use that as the rotational speed of our new media.
On the outer track of a 12 cm optical disc, assuming you can only user the lower density discussed in the article ( 52nm instead of 9nm ) your raw element read speed would have to be:
( 12 centimeters *10,000,000 nanometers *PI * 10350 revolutions *60 seconds)/(52 nanometers * 8589934592 bits in a gigabyte)= approximately 524GB/second
In reality I think this device would have to start out with DVD 1X speeds... 1089 rpms for the outside track... so only 55GB/second
317 minutes to read a raw (unformatted, un-errorcorrected ) petabyte. Pretty impressive.
Well, here's how that went last time:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InPhase_Technologies
Yeah, it sunk because the CEO was the biggest asshole on the planet but keep in mind that it was also because they launched the product before it was technically ready for market. So if this dual laser tech comes out in the next 3 years, it'll probably be a similar disaster.
I want one of these drives!
Are you trying to limit understanding? Feel free to use terms that are actually used. You know, terms like 'diffraction limit'?
Just think of the root kits they could encode on that!
http://www.mdisc.com/what-is-mdisc/
How long till the next Microsoft Office document format requires this much space to save your 500 word resume?
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
yes, yes, yes!...but when will we have this tech???
I remember hearing about this great new way of condensing 1 terabyte of info on a single piece of white paper, based on this new technology someone built....
and we have never seen it hit the light of day to help us with our storage problems..... why would this be any different...
actually only tell us once it hits the stores and we can buy it!
... hundreds of years.... so long as you don't let sun light hit it.
Getting the warez scene to stop using MPEG-4 ASP video would be like getting the legit publishers to stop using MPEG-2. There's too much of an installed base of hardware that supports decoding the format: DVD players for MPEG-2 and DVD+DivX players for ASP. The legit publishers needed a major format transition, namely from DVD to Blu-ray, to create demand for hardware that decodes AVC.