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

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

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: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.