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... "

Comments

Rhodopsin Arrays

[AngryMob]

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?

Hmm, very "Next Generation"ish (Star Trek)

[Cramer]

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'.

Mass storage.

[Matt2000]

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

10 Tbyte holographic disc

[mudnux]

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.

Speed is big payoff, but smells like BS

[LinuxParanoid]

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

Re:Unit conversion.

[Tau Zero]

120 mm = 4.72 inches. (1 inch = 25.4 mm)

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Deja Moo: The feeling that

Re:Marketability

[Pascal Q. Porcupine]

Ultimate Tenchi Muyo is really good about actually using the DVD format properly. It has all 13 episodes of the original series on 2 DVDs, as well as a third disc which is an interactive encyclopedia with information on all the characters, settings, and governments, with lots of video clips and the like as well. However, it's definitely the exception, not the norm... I'm quite annoyed at how, for example, Macross Plus (assuming Viz Video ever sticks to their release dates - after September 28th came and went they quietly pushed it back to October 12th, a practice they've been doing every 2 weeks for many months now) has two 1-hour episodes on each of two DVDs. At least it's not like the VHS version where it's one 1-hour episode on each of 4 $30 tapes. Yuck.

But yeah, all this storage space is more than any industry is willing to put out. I mean, with DVD audio, one could fit all of the Beatles' albums on one or two discs (depending on the bitrate), but nobody would want to sell all their albums in one package for $30, and nobody would want to pay $200 for a single disc.

At least the South Park DVDs have 2 tapes' worth of episodes and cost proportionally the same as the VHS versions. (That is, the VHS versions hold 3 episodes and are $10-12, and the DVD versions hold 6 and are $20-24. How about that.) But Pokemon pisses me off, yeah... one episode on a DVD instead of one episode on a tape, and with likely worse quality (Pokemon isn't exactly the best-quality animation, and they probably encoded it at a hideously low bitrate) they charge quite a bit more since it's all yuppie and on DVD.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

The 30-40 mm Disks are the interesting ones

[Durrik]

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.

But only if you can write them yourself...

[Dan B.]

...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.

Re:But only if you can write them yourself...

[Dan B.]

So how do you mass-prouce them?

Excellent question! I imagined each layer would have to be manufacured individually, then pressed together, but that would involve some pretty serious alignment hardware. It costs about 2-20c to press CD's (dependant on volume) so I doubt this form of media will be going the way of the 8-track for some time now.