Slayer

1000 GB

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ubertuber

If you don't like clicking, here is the text. In short, sounds cool but isn't happening in your living room anytime soon. Besides, who wants 470 hours of video on one disk? I'd rather have a few hours of super-duper high quality a/v on a disk. Of course, this will mean we'll all have to buy a bunch more speakers and amplifiers...

A new technology capable of storing the equivalent of 100 DVDs on a single DVD-size disc has been unveiled by researchers from London's Imperial College.

The storage medium, called Multiplexed Optical Data Storage or MODS, was revealed at the Asia-Pacific Data Storage Conference 2004 in Taiwan on Monday by lecturer Peter Torok.


The development team said MODS can potentially store up to one terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) of data on one standard-size disc--enough for 472 hours of film, or every episode of the Simpsons. It would also have applications in enterprise data back-up and distribution.

MODS will be laser-based like DVDs, CDs and the new Blu-ray system but uses much more subtle variations in the way light reflects from the discs. Where existing schemes have patterns of pits that reflect the laser as a series of ones and zeros, MODS can encode and detect more than 300 variations per pit. After error correction and encoding, this leads to 10 times the data density of Blu-ray Disc, currently the record holder for consumer optical storage.

Blu-ray discs--currently available only in Japan, with European products expected in 2005--can store up to 25GB per layer and can have two layers. MODS will have 250GB in each of up to four layers.

"We came up with the idea for this disk some years ago," Torok, a reasearcher at Imperial College London, said in a statement, "but did not have the means to prove whether it worked."

Proving that required the development of a precise method for calculating the properties of reflected light, Torok said. "We are using a mixture of numerical and analytical techniques that allow us to treat the scattering of light from the disk surface rigorously rather than just having to approximate it."

Products are not expected for five to 10 years, depending on developmental funding, but the researchers are looking at using the technology in discs physically much smaller than current DVDs.

"Multiplexing and high density ODS comes in handy when manufacturers talk about miniaturisation of the disks," Torok said. "In 2002, Philips announced the development of a 3-centimeter diameter optical disk to store up to 1GB of data. The future for the mobile device market is likely to require small diameter disks storing much information. This is where a MODS disk could really fill a niche."

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crazycousinjim

Sexy. However, I would hate to scratch a disk with 1000GB of data on it.

oblar

Offtopic rant following:

Am i the only one here annoyed that companies are now using the sizes incorrectly? As in 20 Gigs* (Really we are cheating you, because it isn't 20 * 1024 Megs, but just 20 * 1000 Megs).

Now this is only 1 * 1000 Gigs for their Terabyte.... Sorry, I just miss the old days when they told you it was X Gigs, they meant it and didn't need a * saying that they are cheating you.

ubertuber

Not to mention, if they are for home entertainment, how will they sell the damn things? DVD's are already about $20 a pop. So now you buy a disc that has 100 movies on it and it'll cost me $2000? Sounds hard to market until you can figure out how to price the thing...

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tropple

They've been doing that for more than ten years.

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cartmen34

This is true. We're looking at years before this sort of thing hits the consumer market.

Just keep in mind that...in 15-20 years, this stuff will be old hat and we'll be looking at getting them as cheaply as you can a CD-R now.
Remember that as little as 10 years ago CD burning on a personal PC was almost unheard of, and now DVD burners are standard on most mid-range PC's.
Also back in mid-90's a PC with 1GB of RAM cost upwards of $10,000 and had to be custom built by manufacuters. Now anybody can build a PC with 3+GB of RAM for a couple of Gs.

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ubertuber

It isn't the media that is expensive - its the content! I remember reading that in a commercially produced CD, the least expensive material is the disc, at 3 cents. The liner notes came in at 30-75 cents depending on the type of material and amount of pictures. So with these huge discs, I'm sure that the media itself will be a manageable cost. I only wonder what the hell they are going to put on it that will use that space and that I will still be willing to pay for.

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CHollman82

First of all, there is more to data storage than selling movies and music to consumers. This technology will be invaluable to corporations where current data storage is literally limited to the size of the building they have to store it in. I've been inside the RG&E building in Rochester NY and have seen the way they store data. They have a huge air tight room full floor to cieling of tape disks that a robotic arm in the center of the room can grab and insert into tape drives to be accessed by their computer system. Their data storage capacity falls just short of 60 terabytes. With this technology they can replace that entire system with a handfull of tiny plastic discs. Also, have you ever tried to backup dual 250gb hard drives to DVD's. I can tell you it is a huge pain in the a$$, and just think how big hard drives will be in those days. (To store the 1.5 terabyte Unreal Tournament 2012... lol)

catback

And I was just got a dvd player, damn technology always changing...j/k, it'll be a while before that thing hits the market and even longer before it reached the everyday consumer, visualize dvd when it first came out. It'll be the same scenario. I do wonder what year the rewriteable 1TB disc will be available for the price of dvd-/+rw discs and burners are now.

Homey_V

I DO! I DO!

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kutulu

I could fit so much porn on that.

cartmen34

Bwahhhhhh!!!

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"The problem with quick and dirty, as some people have said, is that the dirty remains long after the quick has been forgotten" - Steve McConnell

NavySEAL

I would use that as my main HDD!

klo

Yeah, so would I NavySEAL! It's 10x bigger than my hard drive... so much movies, anime and stuff you can put on!