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."

Re:Speed?

[H0p313ss]

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?

Re:Speed?

[jellomizer]

Lets think of it this way. Being able to burn a CD 7 seconds. Or a double Layered DVD under 2 minutes. Thats pritty fast. As of 2008 Most people do not need a 1TB Drives. Unless it is a backup drive. Waiting 3 hours to burn a terrabyes to Backup your Backup drive doesn't seem to crazy. It often takes longer then then to write to the drive anyways espectially if it is an exernal USB 2 drive, which are normally slow, (but cheap and hold a lot of data)

Let's stop focusing on mechanical items PLEASE!!

[gsgriffin]

We keep having excitement about great advancements in mechanical storage. WHY?!?!?! If developers could stop leading us in the wrong direction because it excites some by huge numbers, perhaps we could focus more on faster static memory and get a 1TB on a chip...that won't were out...that won't die when scratched...that can have high transfer speeds... Anyone else out there tired of looking at last decades technology getting bigger and faster and want to head down smaller, cheaper, faster, stronger, less mechnical...

More organic dyes...

[CompMD]

...so more of the same crap? I have tapes the size of my face that still work flawlessly, and actually get used every once in a while for retrieval of archived data. All my server backups are on tape, and all of my cluster backups are on tape. After three years of constantly writing and swapping tapes, I haven't had a single DDS4 tape go bad on me. The number of CD and DVD coasters on the other hand...

Re:Let's stop focusing on mechanical items PLEASE!

[quanticle]

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.

Re:Video uses

[bkr1_2k]

Yes, pressed media is more reliable than burned media, but we're talking about back-ups here, not music sales.

That still doesn't explain what perils these would pose rather than some other option.

Re:Typo

[ShieldW0lf]

So, how long before I can buy the Library of Alexandria in a Chinese market stall for 10c?

Re:Don't scratch Grandma, kids!

[vegiVamp]

Your first assumption is already wrong: there is no link whatsoever between the value of the medium and the value of the information it contains.

How many VISA card numbers could you fit on a single floppy? A rough calculation says about 30.000, if you include CCV and 30 places for the name. I'd say that's worth slightly more than the medium.

Additionally, the worth of information does't only depend on it's actual content, but also on who gets it in their hands. If I were to give said floppy to my grandmother, it'd be nothing more than an ornamental piece of plastic. Find yourself a phisher, and he'll readily pay rude amounts for it.

No, the value of information is not going down, although I will admit that, due to our storing larger and more complex sets of data, the value of a given amount of bytes of information has gone down.