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Data Storage Upgrades Hardware

1TB Blu-Ray Compatible Optical Disc Announced 256

Posted by timothy 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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1TB Blu-Ray Compatible Optical Disc Announced More

1TB Blu-Ray Compatible Optical Disc Announced

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  • Typo (Score:2, Informative)

    by kernowyon ( 1257174 )

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

    Presumably the correct phrase is laser recording medium?

  • Video uses (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Mordok-DestroyerOfWo ( 1000167 ) on Wednesday May 28, 2008 @01:16PM (#23572847)
    It's hard to imagine a single movie on a 1 TB disc. At first glance it looks like it will make backing up a cinch. But most of my burned CDs and DVDs start flaking after just a couple of years, unless they can make these ultra high capacity formats more archival friendly it's just going to be wasted space.

    • Re:Video uses (Score:5, Funny)

      by andrewd18 ( 989408 ) on Wednesday May 28, 2008 @01:18PM (#23572875)

      It's hard to imagine a single movie on a 1 TB disc.
      Metal Gear Solid 5 will require three of these.

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by dreamchaser ( 49529 )
        That's nothing. Duke Nukem Forever will take 10 of these disks, all loaded in drives at the same time in order to just play the game.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Gat0r30y ( 957941 )

      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.
      • 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.

        All my CD-Rs and DVD-Rs are WORM as well. What's the problem? When would I ever want to re-write a disc when they're so cheap I can just throw them away and burn new ones?

        As long as the blank media is cheap, I have no interest in rewriteability.
        • Same here. I haven't bothered with RW media in ages. Usually by the time I want to erase it it's got enough scratches that I don't trust it (maybe if caddy's made a comeback I'd use RW media more . . .). With DVD discs running $0.25 or so (and an RW disc running many times that cost), I just don't care enough to worry about reusing it.

          • Re:Video uses (Score:5, Interesting)

            by Vancorps ( 746090 ) on Wednesday May 28, 2008 @03:31PM (#23574891)

            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.

    • Re:Video uses (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Martin Blank ( 154261 ) on Wednesday May 28, 2008 @01:55PM (#23573499) Homepage Journal
      DVDs are beginning to come up short in backups, but Taiyo-Yuden makes high-quality recordable DVD media that should last you at least a couple of decades if kept in reasonable environments (mostly what you would find in a common home). It's a little more expensive, but it's worth it for backups.

      • Taiyo-Yuden makes high-quality recordable DVD media that should last you at least a couple of decades if kept in reasonable environments
        I looked at a locally owned computer store, and I didn't see any Taiyo Yuden or Mitsui media. Where do you recommend buying quality CD-R and DVD-R media?
    • No, even if these failed after a few years, they'd still be really useful: instead of having to re-burn your entire DVD collection every year or two, you'd only have to re-burn a few of these 1TB discs. Even if you have a ton of data, it probably wouldn't take many of these to back up everything you have, and making copies at 100MB/sec should be pretty fast. Making a copy of everything once every year or two is much easier if your whole library consists of 5 discs instead of 500.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Idbar ( 1034346 )
      I would say, next thing to do, is to break that 1T into 5 x 200G (Which is still plenty of room) and make a RAID 6 type of algorithm to overcome to scratches, and improve the longevity of the disks and resistance to abuse.
      • I've about 1 GB of personal work I absolutely have to have reliable backups of. So I've burned to several CDs and DVDs (different manufacturers) and I've created a RAR file and PAR archive with 100% recovery record. Its CPU intensive (esp on my P4 rig, Core2 might not be as bad) and takes a few hours to do it all). I stored some of the backups in a fire-proof safe. I sleep better at night!

        I'd love to see these discs come to market. But, the media has to be affordable. $10 to $30 a disc would be great. At th

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Idbar ( 1034346 )
          Yes, that's my point. They keep trying to put more and more information in a single disc without any sign of improving reliability. This way, the only thing they are increasing is the amount of data you lose when the disc goes bad. As you are not supposed to trust the media (even more when you are in charge of the backups), they should give some sense on increased reliability to the people so they can safely move to a new technology.

          Although, what I said is an application, doing it in hardware would prob

  • Ironic (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anita Coney ( 648748 ) on Wednesday May 28, 2008 @01:20PM (#23572925) Homepage
    That these Blu-ray compatible discs will be primarily used by consumers to store ripped Blu-ray movies.

    • That these Blu-ray compatible discs will be primarily used by consumers to store ripped Blu-ray movies.

      You could say that about any media, CDs, DVDs, even floppy disks (for holding ripped games), but I don't see the average consumer wanting/needing that much storage, in fact my current low-end computer only has a 20 gig HD and after installing tons of programs and Xubuntu I still have 15 gigs free (now granted, my image, movie and music collection is small on that) but still, I just don't see the need of the average person to need 1 TB of BR data even to store ripped movies as it would be easier to buy

  • 1TB disc! (Score:5, Funny)

    by jez9999 ( 618189 ) on Wednesday May 28, 2008 @01:20PM (#23572927) Homepage Journal
    How many libraries of congress could you hold on that?

  • nice but... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by pilgrim23 ( 716938 )
    A whole TB and there is STILL not a thing to watch! Seriously. I am more interested in an affordable Blue Ray WRITER for backup. I am sure the typical coach potato will love this but a burner is all that will get the DVDR out of my machine.

  • Speed? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Oxy the moron ( 770724 ) on Wednesday May 28, 2008 @01:23PM (#23572979)

    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. :)

    • 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.

      • And what advantage would this offer over a hard drive? Cost? I seriously doubt a writer and the disk could be procured for less than the cost of 1TB HDD (around a couple hundred right now, and undoubtedly significantly less by the time this comes out). Personally I don't see the draw for these types of optical storage, other than the mobility of a disk vs. a HDD (which is negligible) What would the advantage to this be? (not trolling, if anyone has any ideas please reply)

        • And what advantage would this offer over a hard drive? Cost? I seriously doubt a writer and the disk could be procured for less than the cost of 1TB HDD...

          Media cost, diversity and archival. A hard drive gives you only a single backup, and is unlikely to get stored off-site. (Relatively) cheap media allows for many backups over time, and allows you to easily store them permanently off-site. You can also archive off old crap that you don't want sitting on your active media.

          • While media cost would make sense, I doubt archival would be a good use.

            All of us should know how fragile and short the lifespan is for DVDs (due to their data density). I imagine this would only be worse...
        • I should've also mentioned that a voltage spike (e.g., lightning) can fry your entire computer, including the backup drive, should it be attached at the time. Poof! Everything's gone.
          • So is everything when a voltage spike hits your computer while you're burning your TB-BR. No medium will protect you from a voltage spike that occurs during backup.

            In case you assume that a hard drive always is built into the PC: The 90s are over and so is that moniker. FireWire S800 is already four times faster than this disc and not very expensive. And even though I haven't yet seen an eSATA compatible PC in the wild, there are external enclosures that support it. There really is no reason why a backup
            • But if you got hit with a voltage spike while burning the TB-BR disk the burner may have been fried. However, any other disk you burned should still be working just fine after you replace the drive.

              As for FireWire S8000 being four times faster. Please show me the hard drive that can sustain 400MB writes. It also does really matter that the backup drive is an external. If it's connected it likely has its own power adapter that it's connected to. Lightening can easily kill more than just the computer whe

            • So is everything when a voltage spike hits your computer while you're burning your TB-BR. No medium will protect you from a voltage spike that occurs during backup.

              During backup, that's true. But if you walk away from your computer after starting the backup at night (as is typical), it will still be okay if the strike happens after backup completion. The hard drive gets fried all night long. I would also say that it's more typical for people to leave their backup drive attached to their computers, rathe

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by NMerriam ( 15122 )

              So is everything when a voltage spike hits your computer while you're burning your TB-BR. No medium will protect you from a voltage spike that occurs during backup.

              True, but the discs you burned yesterday and the day before will still be intact, because they're sitting in a closet. The only way that hard drives wind up being cheaper than optical media is if you keep using the same hard drive, in which case something like a surge wipes out your backup at the same time it destroys your primary data. The 1TB

              • I tend to disconnect external drives when I'm not using them. No point in keeping them powered all the time - even in standby mode their energy consumption is nonzero.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Speed? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by H0p313ss ( 811249 ) on Wednesday May 28, 2008 @01:45PM (#23573343)

      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?

    • 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.
      Well you wouldn't have 1TB of data to back up every day in 99% of cases.
      • Also, One Rsync variation uses a Delta copy method where it only
        copies over the data that has changed even at a file level.

        Ex: a 700mb movie file is slightly edited, it does not
        recopy the whole movie file, just the diff.

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsync#Variations [wikipedia.org]

        Thus can make for faster backups.

        • Ex: a 700mb movie file is slightly edited, it does not recopy the whole movie file, just the diff.
          How well does delta copying work on lossy-coded files such as many 700 MB movie files?

          • How well does delta copying work on lossy-coded files such as many 700 MB movie files?
            Well enough I'd expect. Lossy content usually has key-frames every few seconds which contain the full frame data (to allow for seeking, streamed data loss, etc.) so if you only edited one frame you'd have maybe 10 seconds of data that's actually changed.

            Of course editing lossy content is a bad idea in general anyway...
      • I'm sure that 10 years ago, no one thought you'd ever have to back up more than 4.4GB of data. Now, the 4.4GB limit of DVDs seems really small for backup purposes.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by vux984 ( 928602 )
        Well you wouldn't have 1TB of data to back up every day in 99% of cases.

        I dunno. I do daily incremental backups, but once a month, I'd like to take a complete snapshot of our servers. So for me its 1/30th the time... or around 97% of the time I don't need a full backup, but that 3% is still a killer PITA.

    • Re:Speed? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Wednesday May 28, 2008 @01:52PM (#23573455)
      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)

    • Re:Speed? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Tadrith ( 557354 ) on Wednesday May 28, 2008 @01:57PM (#23573535) Homepage
      That would be more than enough speed for backing up, especially at the right price. I have a client who has approximately 7TB of data. It isn't because of wasted space either, but because of the industry they are in. We could perform a full backup say, once a month on the weekend, and that would greatly reduce the disaster recovery time.

      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.
      • I highly suggest you look into Amazon's S3 cloud storage service. We back up hundreds of TBs of data into it for one of our clients. No media to worry about. You just need fat pipe (100Mb/s transit, or even business class FIOS).

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Tadrith ( 557354 )
          It looks like a great service, but in the few cases I have, my clients don't really have the ability to pay for that kind of pipe, and unfortunately, Verizon's FiOS still hasn't gotten to quite everywhere here in California.

          We do have a couple clients with that sort of line at several datacenters, though, and this looks like an excellent solution. I will have to look into this further, as it would certainly simply things a lot, and we wouldn't have to worry about calling the datacenter to get tapes changed.
    • Right now I would be happy just to be able to back up so much data on a conveniently sized medium that has no moving parts.
    • I don't think it's meant to be a capital B. 800mbits would be truly impressive for a transfer rate. To achieve that it would have be directly fiber attached to the SAN or over 10gig ethernet. Might it replace the tape library? Over the years I've definitely developed a trust of optical media over magnetic media. Optical media is usually obvious when it's not going to work. With tape capacity stagnant along with transfer mediums in order to get any bandwidth you have to go to high level enterprise systems an
  • And I thought I wasted my money buying a HD-DVD writer. Now I've gone and wasted my money on an ordinary Blu-Ray writer.

    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)

      by morgan_greywolf ( 835522 ) * on Wednesday May 28, 2008 @01:39PM (#23573247) Homepage Journal

      And I thought I wasted my money buying a HD-DVD writer. Now I've gone and wasted my money on an ordinary Blu-Ray writer. 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.
      I dunno about you, but I'm still waiting for the dust to settle in the floppy disk wars; hence, I'm still doing my backups on 'datasettes'. BTW--anyone know where I can get these on sale? They're getting mighty expensive these days.
  • 1. Lies
    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.)

  • Yes! (Score:5, Funny)

    by geekmansworld ( 950281 ) on Wednesday May 28, 2008 @01:33PM (#23573139) Homepage
    All right everyone, the old Blu-Ray is obsolete! See how crappy the puny 1080p looks on your pathetic Sony widescreen? It is time for NEW-RAY.

    Throw out your entire video library once again and embrace NEW-RAY.

  • It's the MEDIA (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mandark1967 ( 630856 ) on Wednesday May 28, 2008 @01:45PM (#23573353) Homepage Journal
    I'm interested in. How reliable and/or affordable will these things become, should the product achieve decent market penetration?

    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 /. blurb and saying, "Hmm...Interesting."

    • I'm interested in. How reliable and/or affordable will these things become, should the product achieve decent market penetration?

      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.

      Affordability is a big issue here.

      I'm not sure, but I think the problem with Iomega's stupid Zip drives was that they had patents on it, and used that to keep the media prices artificially very high. This is what kept Zip from ever becoming a tru

  • Great, Just Great! (Score:3, Funny)

    by FurtiveGlancer ( 1274746 ) <AdHocTechGuy@@@aol...com> on Wednesday May 28, 2008 @01:53PM (#23573483) Journal
    My users don't need MORE justification for never deleting anything!
  • I give up. Things are going to change too fast. I can't see myself buying any movies on any physical media. About the only think I see of use anymore is storage media and only if it's cheap (very important).
    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.
    • You don't have to spend $400 on a burner. As I recall, I only spent around $50-60 each for my CD-RW and then DVD+-RW burners. As long as the companies holding the patents here don't jack up the prices too much, a similar trend should follow for this technology. It'll start around around $500 for the burner, and then within a year they'll be selling for $50.

      Just like with every other new technology, the best advice is: "Don't be an early adopter". Wait a year or so for all the other schmucks to buy it at

      • You don't have to spend $400 on a burner. As I recall, I only spent around $50-60 each for my CD-RW and then DVD+-RW burners.
        I was talking about blu ray player/burner.
        ~ $50 is reasonable, anything more is not
        • Yep, the BD burners and media are still overpriced. Give it a little time, and hopefully it'll come down. If not, some patent holders (Sony) are trying to milk it too much, and we should wait for something better and cheaper.
  • 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

    • Re:Let's stop focusing on mechanical items PLEASE! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by quanticle ( 843097 ) on Wednesday May 28, 2008 @02:40PM (#23574189) Homepage

      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.

    • Um... hello? 1TB on a chip will always be far more expensive than 1TB on some kind of disc. Chips require multi-billion-dollar fabs to make; DVD-Rs and other discs can be made in cheap factories in Taiwan. You might as well suggest just using 1TB hard drives instead of this.

      1TB on a chip is fine if you want fast, reusable storage. For cheap archiving, it doesn't make any sense at all.

  • More organic dyes... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by CompMD ( 522020 ) on Wednesday May 28, 2008 @02:17PM (#23573851)
    ...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...
    • Right, and how much does one of these tapes, and the drive needed for it, cost? How much does a DVD burner and media cost?

      Let me know when these tape drives are $50 and the tapes are less than $1.
  • Having a liquid filled lens in a dry environment seems like a plan for frequent drive replacement. How long are these drives expected to last? At what humidity?

    I used to live in a place that approached 0% humidity in the winter. Static electricity was bad enough. Having to maintain optimal humidity so your backup media can be read is going to be an even bigger pain.
    • I would assume that the lens is sealed. When you use a tiny bit of water as a high-precision lens you don't really want it to come in contact with the outside world.
  • This may be great, but I'm rather certain I won't reasonably be able to afford the drive and media for my home system in the next 5 years, making it of no use, and hence no real interest to me now.

    It's like being told that the next Rolls Royce will be by far the best one ever, but I'm never going to be able to afford the Rolls.

  • You'll probably need one of these to install Windows 7 with all the eye candy.
  • "developed by Call/Recall in partnership" == Total Recall ??!!
  • where do you get the light from when the Laser just doesn't 'do it' for the medium any more?

  • The article estimates a 2010/2011 launch date. So we're at least 2 years off from an actual product. Meanwhile, I've heard many times of huge CD/DVD-style discs which would hold tremendous amounts of data. Inevitably, the company making the announcement either vanishes entirely or makes a few more announcements before postponing the release date and *then* vanishing entirely. I'd be happy to see a 1TB "DVD-R"-style disc, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
    • I was thinking the same thing, but this one may not be a flash in the pan.

      Call/Recall has been around for 20+ years, and the co-founder / CTO is Dr. Peter Rentzepis, former head of Bell Labs and by all accounts a brilliant optical scientist.

      Nichia is a huge chemical manufacturer that specializes in LED and laser technology and currently supplies over 2 million lasers for Blu-Ray per month.
  • Well, 1 TB holographic drives have been available for 1 year & look how far those have gone. No expectations for this one either.

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