A 140GB CD-ROM?

Pete Brubaker writes "PCExtremist.com is running a story about some clever individuals that figured out how to layer data on a CDROM to achieve storage capacities 200 times over conventional CDROM's. Thats more than 30 times the capacity of a double sided, double layer DVD. "

Comments

Re:I hate to think I'm the first...

[technos]

I already went through that with 'CD-Caddies' back in the eighties, and I don't want to go through it again, thank you. Drives that require not only media but mamby-pamby media enclosures SUCK. Media enclosures are an environmental condom for AOL lusers who can't figure out that you PUT THE CD BACK IN THE CASE AFTER USING IT. You all know the AOL mentality! They look at the 'Magic Space Age Disc' and assume 'Well, it LOOKS indestructable' and proceed to use it as a coaster, a chew toy for their mongrel child or as a mirror to pop pimples. Then, when the disc is greasy, scratched, mauled and/or in little bitty bits, they call up the company and bitch that their copy of 'Ascii Spelunker 1.0' stopped working for no good reason and that they should get another copy because 'Ima good Windas user. Ah even knows how to make it do that pretty blue 'an yella screen where it makes sure ahl my disk thingies ahr spinnin' and as such know more than the company whose disc got mangled ever could, and as the superior being DESERVE the FREE disc.

No Subject

[um... Lucas]

This story already ran on the Register yesterday. And, in case you didn't go read either of the sources, here's a link to the company and product in question.

LINK

It's the first one down - FMD ROM (Read Only Memory) Disk... Pretty cool how it's clear, huh?

Why only CDROM density?

[crow]

So why are they doing this with CDROM technology? Why not do the same thing with DVD? Instead of 650M/layer, you would have 4.3G/layer.

Of course, it isn't as simple as that, because DVD uses a tigher wavelength to squeeze the data closer together. Still, in theory, the idea is sound.

I guess it's a lot like manufacturing hard drives. You can add space by increasing the density on a platter, and you can add space by increasing the number of platters.

Uses for large ROM devices, social implications

[billstewart]

According to the story, the technology can support ~10GB WORM drives, or ~140GB ROM technology.


Cost of writeable media and drives isn't listed; 10GB conventional magnetic disks currently cost ~$100, so this may not be particularly superior for backups, but it's still in the interesting range. They say the media cost should be similar to current CD/DVD, which may be realistic for mass-produced storage. They also don't say what kind of resources you need to produce the high-density ROM versions - is it only useful for large production runs, or can it make sense for one-offs?


The US government is said to have recently ordered a 100,000 disk RAID system, capable of holding a petabyte of data, presumably for activities like archiving Usenet, the web, stock market transactions, etc. This technology means that archiving large quantities of data becomes much more convenient for regular people, and for corporations that - remember when a Terabyte of data was huge? (and before that, a GB?) What can you do if you can archive all of your company's transactions, designs, etc., and reproduce them cheaply? How do you design policies on information retention when it's cheap and hard to make sure things got thrown away?


This could be interesting for security - having large WORM drives that are fast enough to run an operating system off, with write-once capability for log files, lets you run much more secure web servers, because it's hard to trash WORMs. How does this affect operating system design? A friend of mine did some work a few years back called "Stiff Unix", trying to find out what parts of the file system space Unix needs to have writeable, and what parts can be ROM. I think this was on *BSD; it'd be interesting to see how Linux can react to this environment.