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."

Cool

[jellomizer]

Corporate Data for small buisness on one Disk. Who needs tape anymore

Hmmm

[buckymatters]

Hopefully they'll be rewritable so I can just run my computer off it. That'd be nice, one disc for each OS.

Does a protoype exist?

[NightWulf]

I'm reading the articles mentioning that they have been issued two patents, but is there anything tangible to these patents. So they have a working 850GB DVD using nanotech, or is this just another patent for tech that *could* be made in 2025.

Great!

[0kComputer]

Now I can get rid of my Zip drive.

Scratched discs?

[adisakp]

Of course, with 850GB per disc, a single scratch will wipe out a couple gigs of data.

finally... clone your entire drive

[johnpaul191]

maybe with media this large people will be more likely to back up (clone?) their entire hd? maybe not.... but it would make it a lot easier than picking the important files.

even of the slightly more responsible people i know... a few lost their entire mp3 collection when the drive died. i guess they did not have a 200 gig backup drive.

Not news

[SkinnyPapa]

Every few months, some new technology pops-up with promises of greater storage capacity (all simpsons episodes on 1 disc!!1!1one) on today's or future optical/magnetic media.
Be it some variation of Holographic storage, which has been promised over 10 years ago or something different.
This is this generation's Cold Fusion.
Besides, seeing how much trouble there is with the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD war, I doubt we'll see any other format come up in the next 7-8 years.

I'll wait 5 years..

[Adult film producer]

850 gigs ? Wow.. nice but how about reliability and longevity? (I'm sure the press release will promise the heaven and sky.) I'm reminded of this by people setting themselves up as guniea pig experiments for laser eye surgery. I'll wait another 10 years before diving into that one too. A lot of theory suggests everything will be okay but I'll let father time be the judge of that.

As cool as this is...

[Gardenhead]

It's a step in the wrong direction. The great minds behind all this new technology need to meet up AGAIN so these things can make it into the consumer's hands. I don't want 3 different optical drives in my tower. This could either start DVD doomsday or this technology could take the path of everthing else that Iomega has made; they tend to overcharge for media, which is ultimately their downfall.

Re:Cool

[cafard]

What about making as many copies as baskets you require then?

Re:Click of death ... on remote control?

[Humorously_Inept]

True enough, but they were very good about replacing the affected drives regardless of whether they were still under warranty or not. I think the quality of a company's warranty says a lot about the people running it and their intentions. Commitment to customer satisfaction is quite rare and I can only hope that Iomega still maintains that same commitment.

Re:Cool

[gunnk]

Have you ever dropped a DLT?

Someone over in our Comp Sci department did that a few years ago. It looked okay, though, so it went back on the shelf.

Next time they ran a restore from the tape it destroyed the DLT drive. Unfortunately, they thought the drive was the problem, not the tape, so they stuck the tape in a backup drive... oops.

The example you gave also has a couple of others problems:

1 - No matter what media you use you NEVER rely on one copy as the only copy of your data. If you do, it is NOT a BACKUP.

2 - A DVD out of it's case is easy to scratch up. Of course, magnetic tape has a pretty short lifespan out of its case as well -- the difference is only that the tape goes into the drive CASE AND ALL. When you put your backup tape in a case you are really putting your tape + case into a second protective case. I've actually seen drives that do the same thing for optical disks. It's not a bad idea for critical backups.

Inevitable...

[Anonymous Coward]

The inevitable thing is that whenever we have more data storage, we'll fill it with more data.

Re:Cool

[/ASCII]

Yeah, I've heard BS stories like that one before. I highly doubt the parent is a true story, and if it is, this should not reflect badly on the DVD format. It is simply a case of incompetence in putting all your eggs in one basket. The same thing could have happened to a tape, which is why important data should be stored in multiple copies at multiple places.

...similarly low price

[4/3PI*R^3]

LOL, we're talking about IOMEGA here. The company that still thinks it can charge $10-$15 dollars for a 100MB magnetic disk that only works with their proprietary drive.

I quit using my zip drive years ago. Everybody has a CD-ROM drive any more; almost nobody has a Zip drive. CD-R media costs a whopping $0.10 for 650MB of data. I can burn 100 CD-R's before I incur the same cost as one Zip disk.

IOMEGA's biggest problem is that once they set a price for their products the rest of the market be damned they will not lower their price to compete. All this patent is going to do is ensure that IOMEGA will be able to charge 50 quakazillion dollars for their DVD media when you can do the exact same thing for under $100 using current DVD technology.

Charge for Blank Media

[Punko]

Hmmm with 850 GB if data per disc, at 4 mb per song, I guesstimate that the music & video boys are gonna want some serious cash. If approximately 212,500 songs fit on a single disc, and they want a blank disc tax of $0.01 per song, or $2,125 per disc.

Kinda silly when the media will worth only pennies per disc.

Write twice, read once - can you say "redundancy"

[JCOTTON]

The cure for the "scratch syndrome" would be simple reduncancy. Write all data twice, in different sections of the disk. Yeah, so a 800GB disk now becomes a 400 GB disk. So what? Now you really have to scratch it up to make it unreadable. You still have 400 good gigabytes of space, which is a lot more than today's 4 to 8 GBs per disk. Or, all you Computer Science types can work up a good bit check algorythm that can put those scrached out bits back.

To confirm you're not a script, please type the text shown in this image: MICroSOFt SUCks.

Simply NOT true...

[korbin_dallas]

"and at similarly low costs."

Iomega NEVER sold any media at anything near similar low cost. In fact their media was always a premium cost. I think they were just mad they never got in the champagne, er ink business. :^)

Re:Does a protoype exist?

[Gadzinka]

or is this just another patent for tech that *could* be made in 2025.

No, it's a new trend: companies patent problems without a solution anticipating that some court in a couple of years will grant them license fees from someone that's going to actually put the money and effort to solve the problem.

I remember seeing in this category patents for ethical AI[1], Sony patenting virtual reality games via ultrasound stimulation of a brain. None of this thech is or will be available in foreseeable future.

So what?

Fucking parasites.

Robert

[1] "Three laws" anyone?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Space abundance

[evillorddan]

640K is more than anyone will ever need... Hmm.

Re:I call bullshit

[Kent Recal]

Whether the story is bullshit or not. IF it happened like that then the company deserved what they got and it had nothing to do with what media they used (be it dvd, tape or papyrus scrolls) but rather their backup strategy was faulty.

A single media can fail at any time so if you don't have multiple full backups available at any given time then either your data is not worth backing up or your IT team has no clue.