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Prototype 150GByte Read-Only Disk Demonstrated
Generic Specialist writes "A fully working prototype of a 150GByte read-only disk has been demonstrated by C3D Inc. The clever part is their "Fluorescent Multilayer Disk" technology. Rather than having only one or two layers (as per CD-ROMs, DVD) these new disks have 10 layers, which can be read simultaneously giving data transfer rates exceeding 1 gigabyte per second. Now, if only they could produce a read-write version...
"
Once long ago I read in Scientific American about people who were working on laser-controlled read/write 3D arrays which stored data using a photochemical called rhodopsin. Anyone know if this thing was shelved or in the works or what?
The next version of Office is probably going to be about this size.
Actually, this would be a great way to avoid piracy. Make the distribution of the software about 150 Gig (Microsoft isn't too far from this already) and make it so it'll run directly off the read only media. That's the most assured form of copy protection there could be.
The mp3s you could put on that thing...
10 DVD quality films...
Every game released this year of any quality...
1 days worth Win2000 bug reports...
Scary.
Nearly at the magical terabyte. Shame it isn't R/W, but it is only a matter of time.
Sounds alot like a holographic storage device. That would tend to make it rather hard to write data to it -- in any case, you'd never be able to write it as fast as you could read it.
Did they bother to tell anyone how they plan to populate the thing with data?
I remember an article about some "magnetic lens" technology a few years ago that boasted the same insane amounts of data storage -- it was R/W tho'.
You joke but this is already being done. One of my games is distributed on CD-ROM containing allmost 700MB. It is impossible to copy (with my consumer CD-RW at least)
In a related press release, Microsoft corp announced support for the emerging C3D data format:
"Microsoft corp has been waiting for portable storage capacities to catch up with our dreams for the desktop. We have already developed a 74 GB talking paperclip that can help users with letter writing and swear in spanish.
With current storage technologies we are severely limited in what we can do. A simple 28 MB singing elephant is not much good when it only knows one song."
When asked whether Microsoft CEO Bill Gates' android brain will accept the new disc format, company officials said "We have no idea what you're talking about."
They then smiled and winked before hiding under the table and claiming they were invisible.
Hotnutz.com
Nothing holographic about it, just the ability to read from different layers. If you look at their "products" page, you'll see they claim that existing CD/DVD factories can be cheaply retooled to produce these, and that they are also developing writable versions for consumer use. They mention a digital camera with 1 GB capacity...
Hmmm... 120mm is slightly less than 3.5"
If I recall the math correctly, DVDs take up about 1 gig per hour of video(+audio), so it should be possible to store 130-140 hours of movies on a "standard" 3.5" disk.
--
. . . how long before any of us can afford it! According to the website, there are a few models (including the credit card sized storage {-:) and the drive that they "will be developing in the next 12 months". Then of course, you need some time for the market to catch on before they start shipping software on it (look how many DVD-ROMS there are out there . . . but soon, they'll increase share and the CD-ROM will go the way of the floppy (which I still use)).
Sigh. [gazing whistfully at the space where my RAID-5 array should be]
Bad things often happen to good people,
It is up to them to see that they remain good.
If MS-office has this number of bugs in a 650mb CD, I'd need a 64bit processor to count the number of bugs on a 150gb platter.
Injured software engineer wins against Mattel! Ain't that swell.
IBM did this 5 years ago with multilayer DVD. Same principle applies here.
I got them beat with my 10 tera byte hyper-holographic disc device. Contains no moving parts and has near instantaneous write time. Oh...BTW it is a write only device. See /dev/null.
NT is based on the premise that anyone who can manipulate a mouse can administer a system. Huh?!?
Who cares about 150 GB capacity; we'll have that in a few years.
But I haven't heard *any* device manufacturer talking about speeds of 1 GByte/sec from a single device in any timeframe. Why not? Well, that's about 100x faster than today's hard disks (10 MB/sec is reasonable for most 7200 RPM disks, with some 10,000 RPMs getting up to 25 MB/sec peak performance.) And way faster today's optical media: a 40x CD-ROM is around 6 MB/sec peak, implying a 200x speed jump.
Now I can see how 10 layers might get you a quick 10x jump in capacity, and you could squeeze out another 3x over today's 5 GB DVD solutions if you were careful. But I don't see how 10 layers translates into a 200x speedup.
Neither PCI, SCSI, FC-AL, nor the IDE busses used for connecting disks to CPU/memory are built for 1 GByte/sec speeds, although Intel's future "System I/O" should handle it.
The transfer rate is so high, I'm strongly tempted to not believe any of it. Note that absolutely no timeframe is attached to the availability of the technology, a suspicious sign at best.
Doubtfully yours,
--LP
I'd bet that this technology gets BURIED. The SPA, the BSA, and the RIAA will no doubtedly oppose such high storage density devices. After all you could store EVERY M$ product ever made, The last 10 years Oscar Winners, The last 20 years Grammy Winners, and all of the pr0n on the net on such a device.
Remember the rumors abour carberators (sp?) that can get your car 100+ Miles to the gallon? How about the pill that you put in your gas tank that when mixed with water will overnight ferment into a mixture that can be used as fuel.
Let's not forget Tesla's wireless energy transmission technology. That was buried because JP Morgan didn't see a way to bilk the masses with it.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Yup they hold 80 minutes of music or 737MB of data and you can buy them from any well stocked computer suppliers
I dont have any but I'm pretty sure a standard CD-RW can deal with them.
johno
So basically, it's about the same size as a conventional CD/DVD.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
It's just one of those "clear CDs" that come on the top (and sometimes bottom) of spindles. What a joke. :-)
Actually, this would be really nice if/when it catches on. I can put all my pr0n on one CD-thing instead of my damn 3 towers of RAID5 that I have sitting next to my box. :-}
And does this mean that this technology will involve some sort of UV light? If it's measuring fluorescence... I can see people having "black and white" parties with the new C-3D things sitting "read-side" up all over the place and looking really cool under the blacklights.
From a motherboard manual, error beep codes: S-L-L-L-SS: Speaker Error
I've been expecting this for awhile since once you can add the 2nd wavelength optical data storage, its really a matter of time until you start superimposing more wavelengths.
Sure, its cool to see this 150GB+ data medium but just how marketable is it? I'll admit I am drooling at the prospect of putting the entire collection of Dr. Who episodes on one, two, or even 7 (one for each Doctor?) digital disks that I can just pop in at any time.
Cool, yes. But the powers that be won't see it that way. Why sell the 2 U(ber)VD collection for $30 when you can pop each episode off on tape/DVD for $24.95?
I already see it happening, being the anime fan that I am. The first thought was that I could buy a DVD or 2-DVD set that contained all the Ranma 1/2 episodes for each season. Instead, the anime DVDs I do find (there are a few exceptions: Lodoss War, Babel 2, Iria) contain no more than what is on the tape...most of the time these tapes only have 30 minutes worth of stuff anyway.
So, yeah, I was pretty appalled when I saw a DVD of Pokemon(I don't buy them..honest! Just checking how many episodes were on the DVD.) with a running time of 30 minutes! When they can hold 4 hours of stuff???
I can see this with tapes, the quality degrades when going from sp to slp so instead of stretching out a whole 6-8 hours worth of stuff, only put on 2 hours of stuff. But DVDs are digital...its such a waste.
I think I'd really freak out if I saw a media type with 10+ hour capability with a 30 minute show on it...
*shrug*
Sorry for the rant...
-Vel
(Sorry, I was a little too hasty/estimatory with the math: the speedup over 6 MB/s CD-ROMs should be 167x, not 200x. Of course, C3D is claiming rates "exceeding 1 GB/s", but I probably should have fixed my comment before posting.)
--LP
I can't see how this would be able to catch on if it were not backwards compatible. I only got into DVD because I didn't lose the ability to use CD's with it. It sounds like this tech may need several lasers to do that, even further driving up what looks to be an incredibly high cost. Writability isn't as big a deal ... for me, at least. I can't imagine I'd ever have to write that much data myself. I' have yet to even wish I could write to a DVD. This sounds like it may end up becoming a likely format for HDTV-quality movies ... a higher-end DVD. So what's this thing going to cost, anyway? About $2500?
Mmm...150 gigs, and able to read 1-gig per second?! I can imagine at-least-movie-quality video (could we hit as-good-as-being-there-resolution, or do we need terabytes for that?), incredible soundscapes, multiple languages & channels (can you imagine a movie where you could CHOOSE viewpoints attached to characters or physical locations)?
Actually, with the ability to select viewpoints, it might make viewing movies at home even more pleasurable than going to the theater - and you'd have a justification for watching the same movie over and over, from different viewpoints! (I can't even imagine what kind of headaches this would cause for the movie production logistics though.)
How much storage would you need for a full visual & aural virtual reality though?
My Starcraft CD has a 600+ meg install.exe that is mostly BS. I think they interspersed real data with junk to use up the rest of the CD.
Why? Well I remember a lot of Warcraft CD images floating around my college and when Starcraft first came out (1.5 years...) CD-Rs were not as common.
If you look at the article they have at the bottom something about 30-40 mm disks that hold 10 or so gigs. Think of the possibilities of that. Software wouldn't be shipped on those big bulky CDs or DVDs, instead they'd go out on these little ~1.5 inch disks.
After you take the disk out of the drive and put it down, you'd better remember where you put it.
But these things can fit into your pocket which is one of the big things that came with the 3.5 inch disks. If you needed to go somewhere with a disk you put it in a shirt pocket and walked away.
With the 30-40 mm disks you can carry hours and hours of music for your C3Dman and conviently change music when you're bored. Its such a pain to chain music in a discman when you're on a bus.
Also hiding these little discs would be easy, slip it into your wallet or something and access all the files you have on it anywhere. Carrying around a CD-rom is inconvient unless you have a backpack.
So 10 gigs isn't 150 gigs, but the small size is more convient, I think the smaller disks will catch on if this is pushed for convience then capacity.
Anyways just my two cents.
Software Engineer & Writer of Military Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog: petermwright.com Twitter: WrightPeterM
Quality picture would be nice..
My father is a digital audio Engineer, and he said that there have been attempts at this sort of ROM Drives before, but the firmwhere can never be written well enough to make the drive "stable". For this reason it has never gotton into prodution.
"To know what you know and know it, and to know what you don't know and know that. That is wisdom."
Their web site seems to indicate that one of the disk layers is made of glass. How much abuse can one of these take? Clearly their "credit-card sized" media are intended to be carried around in your pocket, but can such high densities withstand being flexed and sat on?
But even if they can't, just seal one of these in a box and you still have a kick-ass hard drive (when R/W becomes available).
100 mbps = 12.5 megabytes per second.
PCI (standard 32-bit, 33 MHz) = 133 megabytes per second.
100 Mbps LAN speeds are comparable to today's 7200 RPM disks. Depending on the usage scenario, one is a more relevant bottleneck than the other, depending largely on how much data and code is stored locally in one's LAN environment. A full analysis of which usage scenarios this tradeoff affects is left as an exercise for the reader...
--LP
This message was neither a troll nor flamebait. Just a commentary on how certain industries attempt to quash certain technological advances that would benefit the consumer, while removing their ability to extort more money from us.
This was unfairly marked down.
Bill Silverstein
...As no company is going to press a 10GB mini-C3D for you full of MP3s/personal files/etc.
Agreed that the 1.44 floppy is still the only pocketable standard even to this day, but look at the alternatives Zip/Jaz/LS120. It's not like the industry is trying already to up the size of readily transportable media.
So my two cents is simply, tech like this is only for mass distribution, not storage.
Dan. -- So what if it's spelt wrong, nobody's perfect
now I can watch all of the Bugs Bunny cartoons redone with him in drag. That kind of pr0n is hardcore.
Finaly somwhere to copy those DVDs to.
With the new programs/rippers released now, we can copy VOB files from the DVD minus CSS, and reburn them as is to these babies.
Check out the site and you'll see they are making the drives backwards comp.
Recently I was pointed towards that new optical mouse MICROS~1 are doing, and while glancing over the technical specs I found it needed 25 (yes TWENTYFIVE) megabytes for the software installation. Only like a couple of years ago applications with insane amounts of functionality would fit in 25 meg, and now it's the space requirements for what is essentially a mouse driver. So maybe not all of it is necessary to make the mouse function, but if that is the default install its still boggles the mind. If you had told someone 5 years ago that a mousedriver would require 25 megs they would have laughed in your face, much like now we're still laughing about your 75 gig talking paperclip...