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

Posted by samzenpus on from the that's-a-long-movie dept.

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.'"

6 of 182 comments (clear)

  1. Good! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I was wondering where my pron collection would fit...

  2. Optical density, schmoptical schmensity! by OliWarner · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. at an OPTIMISITC writing speed of 1GB/sec by etash · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    1. Re:at an OPTIMISITC writing speed of 1GB/sec by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  4. Wonderful by Chrisq · · Score: 5, Funny

    Now our politicians and bankers can leave even more customer information on a train.

  5. Great news for ASICS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.