1TB Blu-Ray Compatible Optical Disc Announced

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."

Typo

[kernowyon]

uses a rhodamine-type dye in a 200+-later recording medium

Presumably the correct phrase is laser recording medium?

Re:Typo

[simcop2387]

nope, its most likely layer not laser.

Re:Typo

[Jason1729]

I would have guessed 200 Layer recording medium.

Re:Video uses

[Gat0r30y]

more archival friendly

Well...

Call/Recall also intends to use the technology for the enterprise market for the archiving of corporate information.

It would appear that is one of the applications they are aiming at. Since this is WORM I would suspect it would be handy for archival, but not much else - you can only write this stuff once.

Re:Video uses

[maxume]

People think they are a 'hard' copy and 'safe' whereas they are 'another' copy and 'unreliable'.

Re:Why would a Burned DVD stop working?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope.

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.

Re:1TB disc!

[Ken_g6]

How many libraries of congress could you hold on that?

It looks like 1 LoC = 70TB [loc.gov]. So that's about .014 LoC/disc.

I guess we've finally found something that takes more than one disc!

Re:Typo

[bkr1_2k]

Power consumption would be my first guess. Second would be the fact that you won't get much better playback of any video from multiple reads so it's only good for reading data and then only if you have enough buffer space and fast enough bus to actually do something productive with that data.

Re:Typo

[milsoRgen]

It was done long ago during the twilight of CD only drive...

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.

Re:Video uses

[dgatwood]

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.

Re:Buy where?

[pomakis]

http://www.supermediastore.com/ [supermediastore.com] sells them. I use Taiyo Yuden DVD-Rs for all of my important backups and archives.

Re:Video uses

[dgatwood]

Even people that have experienced hard disk failure or floppy disk failure think that burned discs simply will not fail. I'm surprised you haven't encountered such attitudes.

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). With a hard drive, you snap one head off and you're so totally screwed it isn't even funny.

Last night, I cloned off my dying MythTV box after a Seagate 500 GB SATA drive turned into a chainsaw (I could hear the grinding sound as I walked in the door of my house four rooms away). About a year old, incredibly well cooled (barely luke warm), never transported. Thankfully, I had a 500 GB Seagate PATA drive lying around because it wouldn't work in my Series 1 TiVo (a buggy ATA implementation caused it to fail to start loading the kernel about 90% of the time), so I'm back up and running. Even still, my level of trust in Seagate drives just took a rather massive nose dive. There are now precisely zero hard drive vendors on my preferred list.

I've even seen tape drives (okay, camcorders) where a fleck of something on the heads ripped oxide off the tape. Magnetic media is horribly fragile---far more so than optical.

I'd take optical media over any other media. At least there is no physical contact between the read/write mechanism and the recording surface (nor any possibility of accidental contact as is frequently the case in catastrophic hard drive deaths). In the worst case, if you scratch the thing, you can probably fix it by polishing the surface. Worst case is you have to add resin to replace the missing material, then polish it until it is smooth.

Sure, you have the problem of data retention due to dye fading and/or oxidization of the foil layer with optical media, but with modern magnetic media, you have several fundamental design flaws that can be just as bad: the medium being essentially inseparable from the drive mechanism (which is orders of magnitude more likely to fail than the medium), sharp objects (heads) in close proximity to the recording surface, the susceptibility to magnetic fields, the medium being inseparable from the drive electronics (again, orders of magnitude more likely to fail), the fragility risk of glass substrates, the extra cost associated with having to repurchase all of the electronics and mechanism along with the media, etc. That's not even considering the question of superparamagnetism and the need for increasingly complex checksums to prevent random bit flipping on the magnetic media....

IMHO, there are three basic requirements for a good backup medium:

1. It should be reliable for a reasonable period of time.
2. It should be cheap enough that you can afford to have at least three relatively recent, viable backups at all times. In the case of non-reusable media, this means you should be able to back up two or three times before the reliability of the earliest backup comes into question. In the case of reusable media, this means that you should be able to have at least three sets of media between which you alternate; failure detection takes care of itself for reusable media.
3. Individual discs/tapes/* should be large enough that an average computer can be backed up at least once without changing media so that users can do backups while they are at work or asleep.

#3 is currently the killer for all currently-available optical backup media. In fact, all but the most expensive tape drives also fail #3. And of course, if you are buying the really expensive tape drives, the price of the tapes causes them to fail #2.

Don't worry, though. There's little danger of this new technology changing the status quo significantly. By the time this media becomes av

Re:Video uses

[thetoadwarrior]

I back things up on DVDs but I also try to keep as much stuff on Rsync.net. That is the best form of backup as my backup will be backed up and I can access it from anywhere.