Iomega Patents 850GB DVD Nano-Technology

Mike writes "US Patent & Trademark Office recently issued a patent to Iomega Corp. for its work with nano-technology and optical data storage. New technology, called Articulated Optical - DVD will allow 40-100 times more data (upto 850 Gb) to be stored on a DVD with data transfer rates 5-30 times faster than today's DVDs, and at similarly low costs. AO - DVD is a novel technique of encoding data on the surface of a DVD by using reflective nano-structures to encode data in a highly multi-level format."

Re:Did they also patent...

[Anonymous Coward]

Clicking noises [grc.com] indeed. Since they sold me a Jaz drive that ate disks, I have lost trust in them. What's the point of external storage if you don't believe you will be able to read it when you need to? I will never never buy from Iomega again [riverusers.com].

Re:Cool

[PenguinBoyDave]

Tape is Dead. Long Live Tape. CD's and DVD's are dashboard technology. They were designed to fit in your car radio (the CD's anyway). They have no protection from scratches, etc. and a fifty-cent piece of media insn't designed to hold your companies crown jewels. I once sold a backup solution to a company who decided to go with DVD's rather than tape for the cost of the media alone. Three months later someone moving the dvd platter dropped it on the way to the vault. The DVD's that hit the floor and got scratched up was data that was not replaceable. But the time they figured out what they lost it was too late. a Company that had been in business 20 years was out of business because of one mistake and cheap media. I'd feel better putting my data on redundant hard drives or tape than on a DVD.

I call bullshit

[autopr0n]

I once sold a backup solution to a company who decided to go with DVD's rather than tape for the cost of the media alone. Three months later someone moving the dvd platter dropped it on the way to the vault...a Company that had been in business 20 years was out of business because of one mistake and cheap media.

If it was on the way to the vault, why didn't they just do anther backup? Why didn't they just restore from an older backup?

Also, DVD's do have protection against scratches, the layer of accrylic covering the data layer. If that part gets scratched, it dosn't really matter, because the laser dosn't focus on that part. Scraches and imperfections 'dissapear' from the POV of the DVD player.

They also put a lot of redundant data on the disk, so that if some of the bits are lost, the disk is still readable.

Re:Cool

[Ucklak]

I call BS.
There is no way that a company can be out of business because of a bad backup. No way. Especially one in business for 20 years.

Tape can be demagnetized.
Oxides on the tape can deteriorate and seperate.
Tapes are more fragile than DVD's.

Restoring Tapes from say BackupExec or the like is a Pain In The A$$ and can take hours if done as incremental.

Restoring tapes from a different machine other than the one that mastered it is yet another hurdle especially in a windows environment.

Having a tape archive from years ago done in a version of backup software that isn't supported anymore and newer tape machines that can't read the older format is extremely counterproductive and isn't worthy of the 'archive' title.

Backups and archives should be just that. Not dependant on 'current' software versions or technology.

How do I know?
-I've had to throw away 10 year old tapes because of software and hardware incompatabilities. The 20 year old 5.25 floppies worked but the tapes didn't.
-Years of Backup Exec (5 to current) experience.
-Years of NTBACKUP experience and don't even get me started on the XP version of NTBACKUP.
-A couple of years of the CA backup software. I forget what the name is.
-A few years of lesser known backup solutions.

Tarballing on a DVD is fast, cheap, reliable, and easy to restore. I've never had an issue with that.

Re:Does a protoype exist?

[Laurance]

normally, patents require that you have atleast a working protoype

Re:Does a protoype exist?

[Anonymous Coward]

Patents require no such thing. All that is required is that you include a written description of the invention or discovery and of the manner and process of making and using it, in such full, clear, concise, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the art or science to which the invention or discovery appertains, or with which it is most nearly connected, to make and use the invention.

Re:Buffing compound

[nozzo]

A typical CD-R has a recordable layer sandwiched between a polycarbonate disk and an acrylic disk on which is the label. If you take an old CD-R and scrape the label off you will see that what you are left with is the poly disk which in context is quite thick. I use buffing compound to restore disks for clients with amazing success although I would recommend scratching and repairing an old CD first. The same method for regular music CDs which is great if you have piles of them our of their cases (like me)

you confused CD-R with DVD-R

[alizard]

The NIST publication "Care and Handling of CDs and DVDs - A Guide for Librarians and Archivists" says CD-R has the soft acrylic layer under the label, data layer, and polycarbonate layer and DVDs have a polycarbonate layer on both sides with the data layer sandwiched inbetween.

This is why CD-Rs are much more fragile than DVD-Rs.