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Penny-Sized CDs

Posted by Nik on from the I-shall-call-him-mini-CD dept.

|deity| pointed us at Discover Magazine, which is running an article about nanoimprint lithography. Cutting to the chase, this gives you 400 gigabytes per square inch, or 180 gigabytes on a CD the size of a penny. The advantage of this manufacturing process over others, such as the optical memory featured recently, is that the moulds can be reused, allowing easy mass production.

15 of 68 comments (clear)

  1. Columbia House by cje · · Score: 4

    Does this mean that I'll be able to buy eleven penny-sized CDs for only a penny?

    Hmmm ..

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  2. Reliability? by Zan+Thrax · · Score: 2

    Sounds to be a potentially impressive technology. I have to wonder how reliable the players will be. It sounds as though it will have to be magnitudes more precise than a CD player as far as positioning, and seems that it will be easier to jar and possibly damage. How does the scale of this compare to CD and hard disk technology as far as the head movement/distance from media/etc?

    One other thing comes to mind: this is yet another of a series of "better than CD" storage devices I've read about, and I suspect it will not show up in my home any quicker than the Ruby/crystal storage devices that I remember there being so much excitment about a couple years ago. What's the ratio of exciting new storage device ideas to new storage devices?

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  3. Data storage density is going up and up... by Sfuerst · · Score: 2

    I wonder how many DVD's you would fit on these micro-mini-ultra-compact discs? The days of having every episode of every TV program ever made on a piece of silicon are close...

    That is if they agree to some format with "copy protection"...


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    1. Re:Data storage density is going up and up... by copito · · Score: 2

      The potential is there, but I wouldn't expect to be buying MGM's film library on disk anytime soon. While the media costs will be much less, the intellectual property is still there and they'll still want to charge you for it. This is the same reason you don't see many albums released that are longer than 70 minutes even though the marginal cost of distributing an extra CD is almost negligible. You may soon have access to all the world's movies, but you are either going to have to pay per view (a la Divx) or pay per view for video on demand through a high speed network connection. No other pricing scheme makes much practical sense.
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  4. Apparently an old story by copito · · Score: 3

    The byline for the story said "Posted 7/27/98" so this is apparently fairly old news. It was the subject of a Slashdot article in July http://slashdot.org/articles/99/07/30/1612205.shtm l. At any rate the commercial realization of this work will be some time off since it requires dramatic retooling and the development of a viable atomic force microscope on a chip. The article says 5-10 years, which I interpret as technospeak for not in the forseeable future.

    What is more interesting to me is not how well this process will enable the encoding of a ROM since static data has limited applications which will be increasingly displaced by wide band network connections, but whether the atomic force microscope on a chip being developed by IBM will enable the manipulation of a miniature hard disk or particularily dense large hard disk.
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  5. Re:Sounds neat, but.... by Sfuerst · · Score: 2

    "But what about dust and scratches from which we all suffer with the current CDs? "

    CD's currently have error protection such that if 600 bits in a row are miss-read the corrected stream is still correct. (If I recall correctly.) This is why radial scratches on a CD do not harm the data. (They tell you to clean them by rubbing from the hub outwards with a soft cloth.) However, scratches going the other way destroy data.

    By using higher order codes you can make the biggest corrected miss-read sequences longer. However, this drops the effective storage density. You could still have an external disc based on this technology - but most of the data on the disc will have to be there to remove the errors produced by dust on the surface...

    Floppy discs originally had the same problem - but when they are put into self-cleaning jackets it went away.

    These new discs will probably have to be protected inside some form of cartridge if they will be removable.

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    "Would you like a cold drink with that Sir? Yes, yes, for the sake, of the future, of all mankind, I will have, a sm
  6. Think hard drive, not CD by copito · · Score: 2

    With proper error correction codes, any amount of expected dust and scratches can be accounted for. In fact, with the CD audio standard, one should be able to make a perfect reconstruction of the data on the CD even if it has a 1 mm diameter hole in it. The fact that your player skips is more a problem of the playback hardware not taking full advantage of the redundant information than of the CD itself.

    That being said, I would imagine that these "CD's" would be hermetically sealed and sold with the reading hardware. It would be more like a read only hard drive than a CD. Dust wouldn't cause obstruction, but catastrophic abrasion in an unsealed system because the contacts are so close. A surface coating can't be used since the atomic force microscope needs almost direct contact with the surface, like a head on a hard drive, not like the laser and optics on a CD or DVD.


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    1. Re:Think hard drive, not CD by copito · · Score: 2

      Obviously the amount of error correction is inversely related to data density and latency. I think you are correct that a CD as we know it would be out of the question, for reasons of dust as well as surface flatness.
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  7. Re:Wow by copito · · Score: 2

    Make that Windows 2010. This technology is 5-10 years down the road. That's 15-30 Internet Years (tm).
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  8. Ahh! by pen · · Score: 4
    Nobody move! I dropped my backup on the floor!

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  9. bits not bytes -- assorted comments by stevelinton · · Score: 2

    The original article said 400 Gigabits/sq in, and 180 Gigabits on a penny-sized disk, not Bytes as reported in the /. article. Still pretty remarkable, especially for what could eventually be a cheap mass-production technology.

    Note, however, that the state of the art in hrd disks is now up to c 50 Gigabits/sq in (what a nasty unit that is) so the advance is not that huge.

    I have heard of rewritable technologies along these lines. A short burst of electrical current from the AFM tip is used to melt a but, which then cools flat. The same AFM tips are used to scratch new pits.

    An interesting side question -- what is the smallest reasonable size for a removable data medium assuming that you have plenty of capacity for your purposes: credit-card sized? large coin sized (UK 50p or £1, US quarter)? Small coin sized (US dime, UK 5p or even Netherlands dime)?

    Steve

  10. Wait a year... two... three... by jw3 · · Score: 2
    Wow! Great news. Say, in three years the technology is there. What is left will be to agree upon a standard, of course. SONY will make their own, heavily promoted device ready in a year, but no one will buy it. Two years - the first project of HDCD (High Density CD) will arrive, and it will take no more then a couple of years to totally reject it. When it finally arrives, and companies start to sell hardware, it will turn out that due to some legal infringements it can only hold 1.2 GB, and the standard is licensed, so no GPLed Linux driver can be made. The two Norwegian hackers who reverse engineered the 8-bit encryption software protecting the HD-CD will dissappear in mysterious circumstances. However, the hacked code will spread, which will cause the companies to abandon the current standard, so the whole circuss can start all over again.

    Maybe I'm in a pesimistic mood today.

    Regards,

    January

  11. Re:Wow by copito · · Score: 2

    1998 + (5 to 10) + (MS marketing version addition) = 2010 at least. Actually, I suspect that OS version numbers will very soon go the way of chip version numbers. We'll have Windows Easium or Microsoft Fenestrium I, II, and III. Heck, we already have RedHat 6.1 (Cartman).
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  12. 12" Version by Ratface · · Score: 4

    ... Size of a dime eh? Why can't they make these babies the size of a 12" vinyl album and give us some REAL storage power :-)

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    A little planning goes a long way...
  13. MIB by EngrBohn · · Score: 2

    Wasn't this in Men in Black, except about the size of a quarter, with Kay remarking "This is going to replace the CD"?
    Christopher A. Bohn

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    cb
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