Sanyo Invents 12X High-Speed Blu-ray Laser 194
Lucas123 writes "Today Sanyo said it has created a new blue laser diode with the ability to transfer data up to 12 times as fast as previous technologies. The laser, which emits a 450 milliwatt beam — about double that of previous Blu-ray Disc systems — can read and write data on discs with up to four data layers, affording Blu-ray players the ability to store 100GB on a disc, or 8 hours of high-definition video."
I don't get it (Score:0, Interesting)
Optical media seems like it sucks with how easily it can get dirty and damaged. Between hard drives and flash memory why are we still using optical media?
mayhaps someone can clue me in...
obligatory! (and more serious..) (Score:5, Interesting)
and on a more serious note, what would a normal PC user use this for?
archiving video (see above)?
archiving MP3, I guess not many people have >100GB of MP3s?
an easy method of archiving an entire HDD in a few disks?
when you look into it only video/HD makes such a disk make sense.
and on a *much* more serious note, stop waxing lyrical about the storage capacity and start talking about the durability, its life span, its resistance to UV, its archival qualities. I would be much more interested in a 4GB disk that actually had a change of lasting >10 years in a normal environment (for me..? room temp, light sealed bag).
CD sometimes not so good... (Score:3, Interesting)
honestly, CD are too easy. simply google for "lost cds uk" and see what a total balls up various government agencies have made of giving all our data away freely,
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=uk+lost+cds&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=com.ubuntu:en-US:unofficial&client=firefox-a [google.co.uk]
hell teeth, it should of been easy enough to encrypt it on the CD as a minimum, or VPN it without using a disk.
yes, they are easy to use - but too easy and too insecure in idiotic hands (though that goes for just about any storage medium I suppose).
but I agree with you totally, I'll not entrust a HDD to parcel force, its bad enough buying one on the 'net anyhow and they are professionally packaged.
Ouch! (Score:3, Interesting)
Yep. And in other news, those metal things inside toasters get dangerously hot.
Personally, I've given up on using half-disassembled devices.
Re:450mw beam (Score:4, Interesting)
They are not retailing a bare laser, they are (well, someday) selling a drive. How is that any different than selling a microwave? Do you know what parts they use in those?
arrrg, should have been a car analogy. -slaps head-
Re:obligatory! (and more serious..) (Score:3, Interesting)
Asking what a user will use it for is shortsighted. DVDs have not been enough for me for several years (I backup using HDDs, cheaper considering my time). Even 100GB disc isn't all that exciting - perhaps HVDs will come out with 320-1TB data, but I suspect flash will be there sooner anyway.
Yes, there is porn for some but that's hardly the only use. For me, I tend to scan in a lot of books that were never printed in quantity. Depending on the book, if it's just for information or if there are important pictures - they can take up a lot of room very quickly.
With the invention of epaper, books are going on the list to music (mp3), movies (not just porn), and images as stuff people look to a PC to store. Movies will become a factor again as HD rolls out -- they take up a ton of space. Not too mention images from an high megapixel camera take up a lot of space. In the next 20 years, I also expect more and more devices that will feed data into computers automatically, feeding the need for more space.
I'm not of the crowd that wonders what we'll do with the space, I'm actually disappoint that it seems we stagnated in HDDs with capacity. We went from 10GB to 500GB in such a short time. I don't think the push to 10TB will be so easy. I could use it.
Re:obligatory! (and more serious..) (Score:5, Interesting)
and on a more serious note, what would a normal PC user use this for?
It's telling that people are likely, these days, to ask how a normal PC user would use these disks to store his own data, rather than how media companies will use this to distribute their products more cheaply.
Anyway, yes, this would be handy for backups/archives. What else do people use physical media for? I have to back up 5TB of data every week, so don't tell me that these disks have gotten too big for practical application. Even at home, it'd be nice to be able to back up my entire computer onto one disk.
Go ahead and figure out how to store massive amounts of data on cheap plastic with no moving parts. I'll figure out a use for it.
External hard drive (Score:3, Interesting)
WD My Book Essential Edition External 1TB Hard Drive - $166.99 (link [pricegrabber.com]), enough to store 80 hours of High-Definition video (Lord of the Rings "extended edition" should fit in one).
That's $16.70 each 100 GB - I bet that both: the player is more expensive that this external HD and each disk is more expensive that $16.70.
The only reason one cannot easily use an external HDs to store and play video content is because the mainstream Movie Industry won't sell their movies in a non-DRM-encumbered format (say, XVid in an AVI wrapper) - after all, how would they force people to buy the same movies again and again with each new format if they went with an open data format ...
That said, get a "Digital Media Player" with XVid/DivX support and HD capability and attach one of these external HDs. Then Rip and re-encode your movies (or don't re-encode - there's enough space for high-bitrate files in there) or get the HD version of the movie/tv-series from the Internet in a non-DRM-encumbered format (funny how the pirates provide a better product) and voila - days worth of movies and TV series at the touch of a button (with no pay-per-view charges).
PS: Yes, I am sour that the dream of having your personal movie library accessible from you remote without moving anything but a finger is being hindered by the big studios ...
Relevance (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:obligatory! (and more serious..) (Score:4, Interesting)
How, precisely, do you scan in books? Do you have to manually scan each page?
I'd really have no trouble spending a few hundred dollars on a scanner that would basically do it for me. I really want to move to an e-book, but most of the books I love are rather modest Fantasy books that aren't available in e-book form. A flat bed scanner would take me probably a year to get my entire collection scanned in, and that just won't do.
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Interesting)
One caveat, flash memory is not as reliable of a storage medium as some believe, particularly as densities increase, particularly as they use smaller and smaller processes. Depending on the specific technology, and the level of error correction built into it, optical (even with dust and scratches) is more robust. Flash is great for sneaker net, or the family vacation pictures, but I'm not sure it's suitable for anything you care about.
As long as the market driving this media is digital photography, the concern about the occasional bit being flipped isn't going to change anything. Flipping a bit on almost anything else, is catastrophic.
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Interesting)
Guess you've never heard of OUM memory technology. Same glass substrate that's used on re-writable optical media, but instead of using a laser to flip bits you use an electrical pulse to change the state of the glass from amorphous (bit 0) to semi-crystalline (bit 1) and voila no more worry about bit flip. It also is stronger than silicon wafers and can tolerate more heat and requires less power for changing bits. Also, due to using the crystalline structure representing 1 or a 0, it's non-volatile. Access times are faster than standard flash devices today. The read/write cycles are several orders of magnitude higher as well than current flash memory.
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Interesting)
So, can I buy it? Where? What does it cost?