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1TB Blu-Ray Compatible Optical Disc Announced
Posted by
timothy
on Wed May 28, 2008 12:12 PM
from the many-bytes-many-bits dept.
from the many-bytes-many-bits dept.
red_dragon writes "An article on The Register tells the news of an announcement of a new 1TB optical drive and disc that will be backwardly compatible with Blu-ray discs. The technology, developed by Call/Recall in partnership with Nichia, uses a rhodamine-type dye in a 200+-layer recording medium that gives off light when excited by a laser beam, along with a single fluid-filled lens to read multiple layers by varying the amount of fluid to change the focal length. The technology is designed to work with Nichia's blue-violet laser diodes, which are already used in Blu-ray drives."
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Typo (Score:2, Informative)
Presumably the correct phrase is laser recording medium?
Re:Typo (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Typo (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Typo (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Typo (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Typo (Score:5, Informative)
See...
http://everything2.com/e2node/TrueX [everything2.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-ROM#Transfer_rates [wikipedia.org]
http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Multiheaded_20CD-ROM [halfbakery.com]
I believe the main issues were reliability, cost and lack of noticeable speed gains when using the CD-ROM in common tasks. Although there isn't much to be found (or said) about them anymore. It would seem the increased density of today's optical media put a damper on the need for increased spindle speeds making multiple lasers an unattractive way to boost speeds.
Also if I remember correctly they were entering a market at a time when CD-R/RW drives were becoming more cost competitive.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Video uses (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Video uses (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Video uses (Score:5, Interesting)
Blue-ray "Professional" disc is in a caddy format. Nice and bulky, I first saw it and thought "retro!"
Then I realized how crappy it is to store video on blue-ray for production purposes. It takes so long to get the video off of it that it's pointless.
My last event produced over 100 blue-ray discs at 25gig each that's not really that much video. It's taken over a week to get it onto the SAN where it is actually useful. 1TB blue-ray might be more worthwhile, we'll see when it comes out.
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Re:Video uses (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That still doesn't explain what perils these would pose rather than some other option.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
In practice, they're probably right far more often than they are wrong. While it is true that all media are inherently unreliable, magnetic media are particularly unreliable. At least if an optical disc fails, you usually only lose a small portion of the data (unless you break it in half or scratch off the silver layer on a CD-R).
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, I suspect we will soon see a lot more people (legally) downloading movies instead of buying DVDs. The average person buys something like 15 DVDs per year. If we transition to a download-based delivery system (which is almost inevitable, IMHO), then even at non-HD resolution, you're talking about the average person downloading and storing some 138 gigabytes per year. For an HD movie at 25 GB of content, you're talking about 375 GB per year. :-)
Re:Video uses (Score:5, Informative)
CD-R discs flake. DVD-R discs have the metal layer between two layers of plastic, so they can't flake (unless you mean the label paint). They can oxidize, but not flake. As a result, DVD-R should be much less susceptible to accidental damage than CD-R media.
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Ironic (Score:5, Interesting)
1TB disc! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:1TB disc! (Score:5, Informative)
I guess we've finally found something that takes more than one disc!
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nice but... (Score:2, Interesting)
Speed? (Score:5, Interesting)
100MB/sec? Assuming that the capital "B" is the intent, that means it would take close to 3 hours to write a full 1TB disk. Is that fast enough for most backup applications? I mean, obviously it would be fine for archival purposes, but it doesn't seem practical for daily backups.
Unless you're doing daily backups of Libraries of Congress, then it should function just fine. :)
Re: (Score:2)
Is that fast enough for most backup applications? I mean, obviously it would be fine for archival purposes, but it doesn't seem practical for daily backups.
For home or office use, it'd be great. Do you use your computer 24 hours a day? Three hours is fine. Pop a disk in before you go to bed (or leave the office) and let it go to town.
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It's like complaining that it takes a long time to move a house without damaging it. Well DUH!
Re:Speed? (Score:5, Insightful)
but it doesn't seem practical for daily backups.
Can you give an example of a competing technology that is practical for backing up 1TB daily? Short of having your own tape/cd burner farm?
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Re:Speed? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Speed? (Score:5, Interesting)
He currently backs up on a "per client" basis on DLT tapes, which is fine, but my own personal nightmare is that everything crashes and we have to restore from the 50+ tapes lying around. Obviously all of this data is on arrays with hot spares and such, but I would be more than happy to have some sort of "interim" solution in the event that somehow, everything blows up.
Obviously long-term archiving on it may be an issue, but I'm not looking for that so much as I'm looking to have some sort disaster recovery option. Backup systems seem to be falling far behind the amount of data that many companies generate, so much so that we have begun to turn to redundant systems instead. For 1TB, this works great - just have a single IDE drive and back up to that, with tape for long-term, but it gets pricy for larger systems, and it does not have the benefit of being able to be brought off-site. We always recommend that bring their current backup with them each night, so if the building burns down, they still have their data.
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Just great (Score:2, Funny)
Alright, I lied. I didn't buy either of those. In fact, I'm not going to buy this "rhodamine-type" enhanced backwards-compatible Blu-Ray drive, because that will soon be surpassed by a Super-deluxe backwards compatible "rhadamine-type" enhanced backwards-compatible Blu-Ray drive. To think I thought the race was over.
Re:Just great (Score:4, Funny)
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4 kinds of lies in the world (Score:2)
2. Damn lies
3. Statistics
4. Storage products
But seeing Nichia's name in there gives me hope. (Of course, Charlie Brown had hope every time Lucy held the football for him too.)
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2. Damn lies
3. Statistics
4. Storage products
5. ??????
6. PROFIT!
Yes! (Score:5, Funny)
Throw out your entire video library once again and embrace NEW-RAY.
Re:Yes! (Score:4, Funny)
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It's the MEDIA (Score:4, Interesting)
Zip Drive was a high-priced novelty that achieved just enough marketshare to ruin a lot of people's day with the "click-of-death" issue.
It's taken years for CDR/DVDR media to become reliable and cheap enough for commonplace usage.
As has been previously mentioned, reliability is also a major factor to take into account. I want a backup that I can rely on should I need to retrieve information from 10 years ago (at a minimum)
I have some CDRs that I wrote to in the late 90's (around 1998) that are now becoming unreadable due to "whatever". They are not scratched, nor is the aluminum layer at the top flaking off, yet they are simply unreadable now, so I find myself duplicating CDRs that are still readable "just in case"
If reliability ratings for the media can surpass normal CDRs by a significant amount, I may be interested in this format, even if the price tag on media is steeper, once mainstream acceptance is achieved.
Right now though, It's little more than reading a
Great, Just Great! (Score:3, Funny)
not investing in media (or players) (Score:2)
I don't even burn CDs/DVDs to give large files (all legal) to people anymore (unless it's to mail). I let them borrow one of many flash drives.
Yeah I'm not (as just a consumer) investing in $400+ players (or burners) that are going to be superseded in 6 months.
More organic dyes... (Score:3, Insightful)
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Don't scratch Grandma, kids! (Score:5, Interesting)
What is the value of information?
Does the value of information (per bit) decline as we gain the ability to store more information?
If not then presumably one of these disks ought to be worth a fortune if a Floppy was worth anything. Should they have scratch proof containers?
since this is not the case, one assumes the value of information to humans is declining with time?
Does this mean what a given person knows is also declining in value, or are we discarding information from our brains that has less value. If so then why do you still remembers that Speed Racer's little brother's name.
Eventually we will be able to store the neural state of any human. At that point if someone were to invent a method of reading out this state it could be recorded onto a Disk and preserved after death. Like Cryonics this disk would then await a time in the distanct future when the neural state could be restored from the disk to clone or simulated human.
Actually, that was just the long winded way of explaining to you Mr Smith that when we were restoring you from your disk we noticed a small scratch on made by an heir you stiffed in your will. We're pretty sure the amount of information loss is small however, though were not sure what it might have been.
Sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for selecting TotalRecall. Your bill will be in the ether.
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Re:Excited... (Score:5, Funny)
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Brilliant. I'd mod you up if I had the power.
Re:Why would a Burned DVD stop working? (Score:5, Informative)
For a pressed DVD, a master is etched, and is then used to physically press the pits into the substrate. The depth of these pits (1/4 wavelength) causes destructive interference when the beam hits a pit, and constructive interference when it hits a land. (1/4 wavelength in + 1/4 wavelength out = 1/2 wavelength out of phase with the rest of the beam reflecting off the surrounding substrate)
This is pretty much permanent, provided your media doesn't disintegrate.
For a burned DVD, a photosensitive dye is activated by the writing laser. This activated dye simply absorbs the beam that hits a "pit", while the unactivated dye allows the beam to reflect off the substrate behind, when it hits a "land".
Over time, this dye can degrade such that the unactivated dye slowly activates (either spontaneously or in reaction to ambient light), or that the activated dye slowly deactivates for the same reason (much like a photo left in the sun).
One of the reasons that "archive quality" disks are more expensive is that they use a higher quality dye which takes longer to degrade.
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Re:Let's stop focusing on mechanical items PLEASE! (Score:4, Insightful)
The nice thing about "mechanical" storage (since when was optical storage "mechanical") is that it is cheap. The amount of storage space on a hard drive has more than outpaced Moore's Law. Optical media hasn't quite kept up with that sort of spectacular growth, but there have been significant advances there too. In my eyes, anything that promises cheaper (in terms of $/GB) storage can only be a GOOD THING.
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