Hitachi Maxell Develops Wafer-Thin Storage Disc 83
narramissic writes "Hitachi Maxell Ltd. has developed an optical disc that is less than 1/10 of a millimeter thick. Working prototypes on display at this week's Ceatec Japan 2006 exhibition are based on DVD technology and are capable of holding 4.7 GB each. Making discs so thin doesn't come without its problems, however. To make the discs rigid enough for the laser to remain in focus on the disc's surface, the company has fitted inside each drive a 0.6 millimeter-thick piece of glass through which there are holes. Air is drawn through the holes when the disc spins causing the flexible disc to be drawn against the rigid piece of glass to make it flat."
Am I wrong? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Am I wrong? (Score:5, Funny)
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Yes it was tough keeping a straight face while typing that.
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You're wrong (Score:1, Informative)
Now that that's cleared up, I still can't think of much of a use for these things.
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Then again, by the time this comes to market, we'll probably have something much better than it is anyway. Of the upcoming storage tech, this does look the least impressive.
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Re:Am I wrong? (Score:5, Interesting)
So it seems that these aren't meant to be something that you'd carry around loose the way you do with CDs/DVDs. They'd be encased in cartridges, and those cartridges would be in some sort of device. So I think the question would be, how would this technology compare with hard drives?
Re:Am I wrong? (Score:4, Interesting)
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The company says that a system about the same size as a tower PC and will be able to hold 4.7T bytes of data.
I may be missing somehting here somewhere (I often do) but "4.7TB of data" comes to less than 7 run-of-the-mill (by now) 750GB HDDs. Which already fit into a PC tower. Even a mini-tower. And require no new technology. And have much faster immediate random-access times than a drive that has to pick a thin disk from a spindle somewhere.
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But it's only...wafer-thin.
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That's why I said that the question should probably be about how this tech compares to hard drives. It may be slower, and I didn't catch any indication as to whether it's available as RW or just R. So it might be that this technology is aimed at archival purposes, i.e. the same people who would buy DVD-R jukeboxes for archival backups.
I don't know, though.
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Oh yeah, this way I just have to go buy another.
Arbitrary Python quote (Score:5, Funny)
Hitachi: Eet Ees Waf-fer theen.
PC: I can't eat another Byte, I'm gonna puke..
Followed by a sony-battery-meltdown.
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Better.
Better?
Better get a bucket. I'm gonna puke.
Same thing I always think of when I hear "wafer thin."
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Now in Stores.. (Score:1)
what I want to know... (Score:2, Funny)
Think of the bandwidth (Score:3, Funny)
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We use "Libraries of Congress per Volkswagon Beetle" as the new SI unit since around 1980
TDz.
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Also, is it good for archiving (Score:2)
The obligatory question (Score:3, Funny)
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What's the difference? (Score:2, Funny)
It's interchangeable. New technology generally sucks and blows...
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Air is drawn through the holes when the disc spins causing the flexible disc to be drawn against the rigid piece of glass to make it flat."
The air is sucked through the holes, pulling the disc against the piece of glass.
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I don't think it's possible to surgically remove a sense of humour. A person's sense of humour is spread of a large volume of brain matter, shared with many other vital functions. It's very unlikely that a subject would even survive such an operation. Since the American Handbook of Neurosurgery contains no approved procedures, it would be hard for the surgeon to obtain malpractice insurance. Indeed attempti
Big deal. (Score:2, Interesting)
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Welcome back, 1997. We've missed you. (Score:4, Insightful)
Removable disks went out with a whimper, not with a bang, and the last few generations of them were pretty sorry. (Anyone remember the Castlewood Orb? Or any of the other HD-based removables? I do; the cost per MB was atrocious.)
Why would anyone want to move back to the days of proprietary cartridges and drives, when we've come so far from there? I'd much prefer improvements to the existing CD/DVD formats which preserve at least the physical format (allowing for easy backwards compatibility), if not the near-universal standardization.
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We certainly wouldn't, but businesses that need to back up a whole mess of data are still often stuck in the proprietary cartridge and drive space. A cartridge-style solution that has higher density would likely be marketed to them.
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Only because CD caddies were an expensive mess. That soured everyone on the idea, despite the problems of bare discs.
Caddies can't make underlying tech any better. Why do you blame it for all these formats' shortcommings?
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Recycling problem solved. (Score:1)
Could you do *this* with your regular CDs? (Score:3, Funny)
Just moves the disc itself inside the drive (Score:5, Insightful)
A typical double-sided DVD consists of two 0.6mm polycarbonate layers sandwitched back-to-back.
So basically, this just trades a cheap external more-or-less disposeable disc with an attached and well-protected media layer, for an expensive internal (to the drive) point of failure, with a separate, very fragile media layer.
Woo woo, where oh where can I trade my entire DVD collection in for some of these magic beans?
The price of a DVD or CD doesn't come from the cost of a few grams of polycarbonate, it comes from the cost to license the content. This seems like a useless device - unless they have the goal of increasing the frequency with which people need to replace movies they already bought, due to physical failure.
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The disks are protected within cartridges as packs of ten until they go into the drive and gain the magic piece of glass. All optical media needs this bulk to protect it; the new system simply reuses the bulk so that 1 drive and 500 disks has 1 protective layer, rather than 500. This is a good idea: The same end result is achieved, but the media is thinner, allowing more to fit in the same place and 470 gi
1/10 of a millimiter is.. (Score:2)
Oh god, give my a dictionnnaryes
Re:1/10 of a millimetre is.. (Score:4, Informative)
Oh god, give my a dictionnnaryes
On that we definitely agree.
1/10 of a millimiter is... (Score:1)
Silicon wafers are about 1mm thick, wafers that you eat are even thicker. So why not describe it as "paper-thin"?
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..."fitted inside each drive a 0.6 millimeter-thick piece of glass"...
So they invented a way to put 10 gallons of shit in a 5 gallon bucket? How do you put something over half a millimeter thick *inside* something a tenth of a millimeter thick?
Walk away from Slashdot, and read a book.
Lame? (Score:2, Insightful)
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this sounds vaguely familliar... (Score:1, Informative)
Great! (Score:4, Interesting)
So, if this technology can shave off 1 mm of the disc's thickness, it means you can use 9 mm jewel cases instead of the regular 10 mm versions. Thus solving the storage problem once and for all! Of course, you'll probably need an extra strong case to protect this extra fragile disc.
In other words, most of the storage space with CDs/DVDs isn't due to the disc itself, it's due to the ginormous case that some people insist on having around. DVD movie cases are even worse. Personally, I prefer slim "CD single" cases whenever possible.
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And as we all know, most of the space taken up by a hard drive is due to the thickness of the disk platters... or is it?
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Wafer chuck (Score:1)
We use them to hold the silicon wafers still whilst going through the various fabrication and testing processes.
Are these big enough to hold The Meaning Of Life? (Score:3, Funny)
And finally, monsieur, a wafer-thin disc.
MR. CREOSOTE:
Nah.
MAITRE D:
Oh, sir, it's only a tiny, little, thin one.
MR. CREOSOTE:
No. Fuck off. I'm full.
MAITRE D:
Oh, sir. Hmm?
MR. CREOSOTE:
[groan]
MAITRE D:
It's only wafer thin.
MR. CREOSOTE:
Look. I couldn't eat another byte. I'm absolutely stuffed. Bugger off.
MAITRE D:
Oh, sir, just-- just one.
MR. CREOSOTE:
[groaning] All right. Just one.
MAITRE D:
Just the one, monsieur. Voila.
MR. CREOSOTE:
[groaning]
MAITRE D:
Bon appetit.
Looks like... (Score:2, Funny)
Bond did it! (Score:2, Funny)
In a toally unrelated story, the writers and producers of the James Bond movies, Q, and Sean Connery are sueing Hitachi for stealing their idea from the next James Bond movie...
Novel, but useless (Score:3, Interesting)
Everything old is new again (Score:1, Redundant)
The bernoulli disk [iomega.com] lives again!
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Outer Space (Score:3, Insightful)
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For archival storage (Score:3, Informative)
This is just a different way to handle the data layers of optical disks. Expect the data density per disk to catch up with other disk formats. Also expect them to figure out how to make the individual disks thinner. First generation disks are stored in sleeves in cartridges. If the handling system gets better, it won't need sleeves. So future cartridges will hold more disks, and each disk will hold more data.
Whether it becomes better than tape cartridges depends on media cost, access speed, read/write speed, drive cost, drive reliability, media reliability. DVD writers are really cheap. These devices share the same optical mechanism, so they have the potential of being fairly cheap. The media is paper thin, so the media handler might be as cheap as the paper feeder in a printer (but probably not).
For comparison, pricewatch says that LTO-3 tape cartridges, which only hold 200GB, are $60 each. So first generation cartridges would still be price competitive, even if they cost $100 each.