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Hardware

DVDead? The Future of Memory is in Fluorescence! 279

Posted by michael from the don't-worry,-it's-already-copy-protected dept.
Adas writes "We've slapped an article discussing and presenting something that could make your brand new 6X DVD-ROM drive blush in its bay. It's called FMD-ROM and is is slated to be ready for production before the end of this year. The 12mm (CD-ROM/DVD-ROM) disc version of this memory will store up to 140GB! In the future, we're looking at capacities of up to 1,4 _terabytes_ per disc, and transfer speeds of up to 1GB per second. Wipe the drool off your collar and read on here. "
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DVDead? The Future of Memory is in Fluorescence! More

DVDead? The Future of Memory is in Fluorescence!

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  • Re:Sounds good, but... II (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Why do we have to go with CD type media?

    because it looks more attractive. the shiney surface of the CD is an awe-ing aspect of CD's and boring plastic containers of floppies don't draw attention. So when CD's came out, they LOOKED a lot fscking cooler than tapes (and they sounder better, or something... who cares THEY ARE SHINEY... AHHHHH) minidisks are shiney and tiney (hehe) but they have a boring computer-nerd aspect of looking like a floppy disk.

    We are a visually intrigued society. The computing illiterate society obviosly doesn't understand the vast expansion of technology and goes with fads (I have to say no more than tommy hilfigger) So if a fad is in the form of a self-maintaining media, then us computer nerds are in luck. otherwise we are stuck with shitty, shiney media.

    what ever happened to jams anyway :P

  • I'm sure there are technologies like this for other platforms, but . . .

    It's name is XIO. The interconnect system used on SGI's Origin, Onyx2, and Octane systems. With a slower cpu (250MHz R10k) you get around 720MB/s peak. That means, with a Origin2100 (the lowest-end of SGI's "supercomputers", others can do much better, maybe even by an order of magnitude or so) you would get around 5.0GB/s sustained (or 6.24GB/s peak). As you speed up the cpu (the 300+ MHz R12k), the bandwidth is increased.

    This of course means that even a desktop Octane is able to do 1.6GB/s/port (six ports of course). With only two cpus the Octane would begin to run out of steam after a little while, but that still blows the pants off of standard pcs.

    Of course, this has been around since 1996; sgi should be releasing a new line to replace the current in the coming months, so it will be exciting to see what *it* will be capable of.

  • Took a look at SGI's 2800 Rack specs. I/O bandwidth goes is 160GB/s *sustained* (199.68GB/s peak). That'll handle a whole slew of 1GB/s devices.

    Of course, by the time this disc technology pans out, at the possible 1GB/s speed, most new desktops will be able to handle 1GB/s probably.
  • Yeah, they could, if they're allowed to control it. I'm sure something can be done, though. Remember that DVDs are primarily specifically designed for videos, then additionally made to work for data storage. FMD-ROM is a data storage medium; there's no standard for putting video on it yet.

    I dunno, maybe I'm just rambling.....

  • Depend on the previous layer bits averaging out? Bet I can find special cases that still cause problems.

    CD's, like hard disks, use run-length limited (RLL) data encoding to prevent too many 0's or 1's from showing up in a row. Presumably one could devise a similar code for FMD's to ensure that no part of the disk has too many layers with the same value.

    Devising compact 2D and 3D RLL codes for holographic storage is actually an interesting (and AFAIK still open) theory problem. A good description of the math involved may be found in the book Symbolic Dynamics and Coding by B. Lind and D. Marcus.

  • I actually found more info (of the sort *I* was looking for :) on their press releases page.

    They expect production to start in the first quarter of 2001. Hey, if we've got cheap 140GB removable storage by 2002, I'll be pretty happy. :)
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [152.7.41.11].
  • This technology sounds fascinating, and I firmly believe that we'll keep being able to store more information more cheaply for a long time.

    But when can we expect this to happen? I didn't see a timeline or anything. Could someone who knows more about this technology speek up?

    Sure, it'd be great if some new technology obviated the need for all this DVD madness, and it'd be wonderful if we didn't have to worry about commercial interests messing it all up. But how likely is that?

    I was interested in buying an ORB drive, since they hold more than ZIP drives and are supposed to be pretty speedy. But I didn't, because I had a ZIP drive, and I didn't really need an ORB drive. I'll probably upgrade to a 30-40GB hard drive, and if I'm not storing full-motion video on it, I can't really conceive of needing much more right now. I'm sure the future will find a way to prove me wrong, though. :)
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [152.7.41.11].
  • >This is on par with technological trends. In particular, note that when CD-ROM first came out, hard drives were around 300MB, and that was huge, and CD's had a whopping 640MB.

    The first cdrom game (I believe) was ManHole for the Mac. It came out in 1988, and hard drives were definitely not averaging 300MB at that time. I think a 300MB hard drive at that time would have been ~ $1500.

    I got the ManHole date from here since I couldn't remember. http://www.indiana.edu/~slizzard/gameDesign/game_d esign2.html

  • "Hard disk drives are the fastest seekers of disc memory today, and speeds under 5Ms"...

    Apparently they have very old hard drives with access times in the order of mega seconds!

    Personally I thought that the article was very badly written. It had the tone of a second rate salesman - infact, it reminded me of spam.
  • Let's ask the important questions, now shall we?
    1. Can I record on it at home?

      Honestly. I don't want to wait for someone to release 140GB of data for me to read. I want to make it myself. An FMD-ROM does me no good, really. I'd have to by new equipment to read it, and no one's producing discs for it. But if I can make it, I will.
    2. Where do I write on it?

      I am not going to try to fit my CD label information on that silly inner ring. If I write on the disk, isn't that going to ruin it?


    Mm .. journalism.

  • Re:dvd (Score:3)

    by Joe Rumsey ( 2194 ) on Saturday February 12, 2000 @05:46PM (#1280606)
    The madness will stop when you can store the sum total of every bit of information any intelligent being anywhere has ever recorded in something too small to be seen with the naked eye.

    I've looked into my crystal ball and found some comments that will be posted to slashdot the day those are announced:

    "Dammit, I just upgraded to the grain of sand sized sum-total of all knowledge, and now this!"

    "Can you make a beowulf cluster out of these?"

    "I tried installing linux on one of these, and I STILL had to put the kernel in the first 1024 cylinders. Will someone PLEASE fix that?"

    "Mine is already full of archived natalie portman posts, I need another one."

  • This is all well and good, but I can't help thinking this is exactly what the MPAA boys need right now. A nice new format to sell to the public, obsoleting that leaky-as-a-sieve legacy DVD format.

    They can lock it up WAY tighter than DVD, make sure no software players are made available, further curtail fair use, and make damned sure there's nothing us hapless customers can do about it. Anyone fancy one region per US State?

    Paul.
    (Apologies for the sour note. It's late.)
  • Sorry about the drool but I really don't have a towel that big. Let's get this straight. 140GB on a tiny thingy with insane ( RAM like ) transfer speeds and I am not supposed to drool ?

    The only downside I can see with this is that regardless of production costs it will be priced "for high end servers". I.e. at more than 10X the per megabyte cost of regular Fiber channel ultra SCSI 3 drives.

    However maybe in a few years it will drift down to what we can afford. Although RAM might become so cheap that a couple GBs of it will be the norm. A UPS will then be made a standard part of power supplies ( makes more sense with Crueso ) just so your machine will have time to dump it's "working data" to "disk backup".

    So the race is on for what we will be able to afford 1st. As for me personally I plan to put my pocket in the high end anyway :)


  • The Register had a report back in last October, 05, of the same thing.

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/991005-000013.html

  • Now is the time to mail the companies that are making this and tell them we won't accept or buy anything as hacked around for extortion purposes as DVD has been. No area locks, no encrypted data weak or otherwise, no "licensed players".
  • If anyone cared to look at the contact page, they could notice the addresses of the company labs: Israel, Russia and (unlisted, but mentioned) Ukraine. Seems like some clever people tapped into a very rich source of brains: Russian scientific community (many Israelis are former Russians :). I hope they'll have more money than the Elbrus team, because we could live without faster processors (RC5-64 can wait :), but you can never have enough storage.
  • Yeah, if you store them in liquid shit.

    If you take good care of your CDs, they aren't going to die anytime soon. Seriously, that 5-10 years thing is a worst case senario.
  • I try not to store the only copy of data on a CDR... I've had the stuff on the back tear off by accident.

    Anyhoo, how old are CDs? I didn't know you could get them 20 yrs ago...
  • LCD Projection Device? Does it project LCDs?
  • I think that pretty soon storage will get so out of hand that nobody will care... becuase they have the option to store more data than they could reasonably use in their lifetime. Of course, there are physical limits to storage because there are physical limits to physics, but before we even reach that point we will be able to store more data than it is feasible to do anything with.
  • Apparently, Sony's tight control over the Beta format meant that they wouldn't allow porn to be pre-recorded on it. VHS had no restrictions. Which format succeeded? :)

  • Re:12 mm? (Score:1)

    by eht ( 8912 )
    typo i assume, i think he meant 120mm because that's what a cd actually is
  • I completely agree. The Disc method sounded too complex and limiting from what I read on their page [c-3d.net].

    The card idea sounds much more marketable. Forget flash memory, minidiscs, and CD's - these are inexpensive (relatively - they said something of about $10 to produce one), shock resistant (nearly no moving parts - I'm sure they could be made very resistant to all but the heaviest shocks), small, fast, and very big (1tb on a 50 layer card? wow!).

    I could see having a wallet in my car full of these, with 'better than cd quality' sound (24 bit audio at something like 48k), uncompressed, and a car player that can hold and change 3 of them right there in the deck! (because the cards are so small).

    Then there's the portable applications... notebooks, portables (like webpads), cameras, players, etc. that have a media that is quick, large, and small.

    ...drooling profusely is an understatement...

  • I agree(d) with you about floppies. I think that, from the get-go, cd's should have been designed similarily. Remember cd-rom drives that required caddies (a hard shell, much like a 3.5" floppy's, that you put the cd in, then put the caddy in the drive) to be used? Now, compare them in size to the jewel case that cd's come in. About the same, huh? Why not sell cd's in caddies, rathar than jewel cases? Same size, price difference negligeble, no scratches, no dust. Only thing lost is the art/info inside the case. Cover art and track list would still be there. Oh wait, the portability of a 64-cd binder is lost too. Not to mention the fact that about 100 of my cd's have been in said binders for years without a single problem. One of my cd's has been scratched, due to a faulty cd player. Was it readable? No. Was it fixable? Yes, thanks to toothpaste (use as a rubbing compound to fix virtually all scratches).

    You know, come to think of it, a caddy system like I described is not needed, and more trouble than it's worth. As it is, you almost have to wreck cd's on purpose for them to be completely and irreversably unreadable.

    --

  • I am not going to try to fit my CD label information on that silly inner ring. If I write on the disk, isn't that going to ruin it?

    Since you will never be able to fill up 140 Gb, you will only need one and thus will never need to label it!

  • Why can't we have a format that's protected?

    But pre-pressed CDs yoy buy are protected - sort of. What is scratched is usually the covering layer of plastic, which can be cleaned in various ways to remove the scratch.

    (Of course, if the scratch is deep enough, the metal will also be scratched, in which case you may need a replacement.)

    Still doesn't beat those 5 1/4" Apple floppies people could fold double to take in their wallet, unfold, insert and they would still work. :-) Unless that was an urban.legend.

  • Moderate this up - This is indeed questionable. (Score:3)

    by Christopher Thomas ( 11717 ) on Saturday February 12, 2000 @09:58PM (#1280622)
    Once in December of last year (by CmdrTaco), and once even earlier. It was shot down then, and I don't see why it'd fly now.

    This is quite correct. Many of the claims made were shady, and while the technology itself may be feasible after a lot of engineering, the article cited here is certainly a lot more questionable.

    Logic errors picked at random, because I'm too tired to cut it to ribbons thoroughly right now:

    • You won't magically make the layer-selection problem go away here.
      Previous layers will still fluoresce as your UV beam shines through them - just not as brightly. However, they will fluoresce over a larger area, conserving total luminosity. Therefore, you'd better have extremely good selectivity in your readout optics if you don't want stray light mucking things up. Depend on the previous layer bits averaging out? Bet I can find special cases that still cause problems. Summary: This is not magically superior for layering.

    • Using dots of light vs. pits.
      The problems facing multi-layer pit surfaces are exactly the same as those facing multi-layer fluorescent surfaces as described above. No better, and no worse (well, a few implementation differences in error correction, but you get the idea).

    • "...store data in a way that is embarrassingly similar to Thomas Edison's old gramophone records"
      Shady support. Wheels have been around for thousands of years. Does this mean that they are obsolete now that we have alternatives?
      Analogy, as well as logic, is stretched a bit thin here. Data layout is similar, readout scheme is unrelated. FMD, by coincidence, would use very similar layouts in any spinning-disc devices (I have yet to see a convincing description of how they'd make a credit-card sized solid-state device with this technology).


    Short version: Technology is mildly interesting but nothing spectacular. DVD technology has the same potential; neither is much easier to implement. Article itself is vapour, heavy on hype and short on actual thought.
  • It depends on how long you do it. A few seconds shouldn't damage a modern microwave oven.

    The safe way of doing it is to put a cup of water inside the microwave. This provides a load for the magnetron.

  • One of the problems with early CD-ROM titles was "shovelware". This was where the developer had a huge, at the time, amount of space. The developer would sometimes feel that the whole CD-ROM needed to be filled up and generally ended up filling the CD up with useless crap. This might end up being a problem with these disks.
  • Also, they use it in other countries besides the US, like Mexico.
  • The release of DVD devices was delayed for several years while all the providers of media content debated how best to hamstring DVD players with encryption and region control. I expect that, if FMD is marketed for media playback, we may be in for another long and frustrating delay.

    Even if FMD devices show up in stores in a year, I wouldn't expect many movies to be released in FMD format for quite a while. It would not be a mistake at all to just buy a DVD player now (or wait a month and buy a Playstation II -- they do DVD, right?). DVD is just taking off, you'll have to wait years for the next big consumer media format.
  • Urban Legend, by the way.

    The CD is not arranged in this manner:
    Ink Label
    Plastic
    Metal
    Plastic

    That would actually be a pretty good design, and well protected. However it is actually like this:
    Ink Label/Metal
    Plastic

    So, you can scratch the bottom plastic layer very deeply before it becomes a problem. But if you so much as lightly dink the other side, you'll have a completely unfixable mess because the Ink/Metal side is the actual data layer. I find it interesting that most people take special care to keep the plastic side safe, when actually the most vulnerable and dangerous side is the label side. Try it out with an old CD. Take a sharp instrument and scrape the label, then turn the CD over, you'll see it is permamently damaged.

  • Still doesn't beat those 5 1/4" Apple floppies people could fold double to take in their wallet, unfold, insert and they would still work. :-) Unless that was an urban.legend.

    Not an Urban Legend. We used to take Apple 5.25 media out of the jacket, play frisbee with it, and then put it into the drive and be able to use it. Think of the bit density on those things. 120k over a surface area something like 19 square inches. My back-of-an-envelope calculations say that's only 1350 bits/sq inch on average.

    (I know that's a crude calculation -- I didn't take into account the actual size of the media, I guessed it was 5.25 less a 1.5" hole, and I didn't take into account intertrack spacing or intersector spacing either, but I think intersector spacing is a nonfactor because I think those drives used constant angular velocity).

    Been there, done that.
  • Yeah, I noticed that too. I think it's centimeters, not millimeters.

    -Smitty
  • umm, well, the standard fs used on most DVDs (video ones, anwyay) is "UDF" but i think you can use anything you want. (note "using anything you want" will almost certainly result in not being able to use the resulting DVD in a video-only player.)
    the standard video format that has come to be known as "dvd" when used in conjunction with DVD-video is MPEG-2 with i forget what sound format, i think dolby (if that's actually a digital format), and some other tricks to allow interactive stuff, different sound/subtitle tracks, etc. Sometimes all this is encoded with CSS encryption, sometimes with country codes and some other junk. There's a _lot_ of information on this-- it's _very_ well documented by the DVD consortum (except the CSS bit, which is documented elseware by the people who reverse engineered it) if you would just look it up [google.com].

    The FMD thing is, at the moment, just a way of storing data. Like the DVD drives were at first. No mention was made on planning to make video drives out of FMD. There may be eventually but this is probably a little early. in the meantime, there is nothing stopping you from just making an FMD disc and just dumping a bunch of MPEG-2 or whatever format you like on it. Well, nothing stopping you except for the fact that the equipment to make it is not available.

    I dunno. either way, you can look this stuff up just as easily as i can.
  • alright.. so it's based on returning flourescent light.

    so what happens if you look at it under a blacklight? is it cool?
    and do you get the same spectacular lightshow if you put it in a microwave as you did with a CD-ROM?

    how can we expect to adopt this technology without clear answers to these questions?
  • "Constellation 3D, Inc., formerly known as C3D, Inc. prior to its name change on 28 December 1999," has links to other news reports on its site (http://www.c-3d.com/), such as stories from Bloomberg [c-3d.net] and EETimes [c-3d.net] (most informative, with quotes from the IBM folks who started DVD). Also interesting is that they own Strata, which makes a well-known 3D-editing/rendering package.
  • As I was driving today, listening to CD's (no, I don't have an MP3-Stereo, but that's another issue), I came to a part of the CD where it started skipping like mad. Yea, I treat my CDs like crap, but even after a while with normal usage, they start scratching up.

    Why can't we have a format that's protected? 3 & 1/2 inch floppies were held inside plastic casing (that broke a lot, but that's another issue), Minidiscs are held in plastic casing...

    Why do we have to go with CD type media?
  • Beta provided better image and sound capabilities, and was the choice of alot of TV Studios throughout the 80's.

    Beta is still the choice of many TV studios. Beta is not dead, it's just limited to professional use.
  • VHS stored 6 hours on a tape, Beta 4 and change.

    This is your argument? I'm sorry, but that's a really stupid argument. So I can store 3 movies on one cassette instead of two (never mind the added hassle of fast-forwarding when I just want to watch the third one); that's not enough to outweigh far superior video and sound quality, not to mention a freeze-frame which looks like a photo, and adjustable slow-motion which is completely free of any interference lines; and that's on my Beta which I still own from 1985. Of course Hi-Fi stereo was already standard on Betas by then.

    For most users, VHS was BETTER because that was the feature that mattered.

    Is this an assumption? Or is it what you preferred? I think most people who observed the decline of Beta will agree that it was the flooding of the market with VHS recorders while Sony stupidly hung on to its patent which resulted in an ever-shrinking base of Beta users (proportionately), which in turn led to fewer movie studios releasing their movies in Beta; there was also an interesting phenomenon where most retailers spouted extreme amounts of FUD along the lines of "You don't want to buy Beta, it's on its way out and will probably be dead in a year", leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy, which nonetheless took a lot longer than a year.

    What's next? You're going to tell me that the Mac is better, too?

    A far better analogy is MP3 vs. CD Audio:

    'What's next You're going to tell me that CD Audio is better than MP3?' Ummmm... sure. It's just that MP3 allows up to 10 times as much music in the same space. Imagine if MP3 only gave you a 3 to 2 compression ratio; not too impressive right? I think we can safely assume MP3 would be a non-issue if that were the case.

    GET A LIFE!

    Thanks, I have one already. Can I get you one perhaps?

    Chris

  • MEMS [darpa.mil] (Micro Eletromechanical Systems).

    I belive this is the project you are looking for: 10 Gbyte Personal Multimedia MEMS ROM Data Storage Card [darpa.mil].

    There is a fun index of projects here [darpa.mil].

  • The article mentions transfer speeds of 1 gb/s, which I don't believe, actually. What is driving this? There is nothing inherent in the technology that makes me thing of how this is possible; by having 8 layers, for example, one can multiply a CD's transfer speed by 8;

    So if they can push CD transfers to something like 100 mb/s, I'll believe that this FCD can be pushed to 1 gb/s...

    Actually, I can think of some nifty tricks one could try, but then it wouldn't be backwards compatible with CDs...

    There's nothing saying that a 'pit' in the FCD needs only store one bit of info; each pit could, for example, store 2 bits of info, intensity and phase.

    So I shine a laser at a pit, and get back 2 bits of info; it can be reflected at intensity 0 or intensity 1, as well as be returned in the same phase, or opposite phase as the original laser. 4 different signals can be returned, which can be mapped onto a 2 bit value.

    Then, with 8 layers, I can get 16 times the throughput of a similar CD, which is still only going to be 97.6 mb/s... Great, but nowhere near 1 gb/s!

    Any other ideas?

    -AS
  • So I got to thinking that one could also encode chirality into the 'pit'.

    I dunno if phase can actually be encoded; anyone with a better grounding in optics able to correct me?

    Anyway, intensity can be encoded via size of a pit.

    Can phase be encoded by the depth of the pit? Changes of a quarter wavelength will change what phase bounces back; it can either constructively interfere or destructively interfere with the original beam... that might work.

    Then one can also encode chirality into the pit, as well, so that the light gets reflected as either right or left handed... thus we can actually get 3 bits of info into 1 CD sized pit; That still gets us, with an 8 layer disc, 3 bytes of data at a time, or only about 200mb/s throughput.

    I guess FCD pits can be smaller than CD pits, because they actively flouresce? This affects the areal density, but it seems I can't think of any real way to increase the throughput beyond 200 mb/s...

    -AS
  • I dunno about the layer selection problem you mentioned.

    If each layer flouresces at a different frequency, such that all layers flouresce at once, you get a single beam that is the sum/product/total of every layer. All that needs be done is that the piece of hardware reading the beam demultiplex it into component signals; a decent prism will split it into it's respective signals, to be read(in parallel). You would not select one layer at a time, then, but all n layers at once!

    So a 40x CD becomes 320x, read, because you can read 8 bits at once, rather than 1 bit at a time.

    Notice this is not nearly as simple using pits, because one can not encode frequency selection in a passive medium; phase, maybe, and polarity, but not frequency.

    And I agree that there is no need to reinvent the wheel

    -AS
  • Oh, well, I use UWScsi anyhoo, so I'm not as worried about bandwidth...

    But I don't particularly want 1 gb/s; I just don't believe it unless they have other tricks up the sleeve to increase throughput.


    -AS
  • Some of what is mentioned in the article makes sense, and a lot of it really is just hype and excitement.

    For example, if you get a nine layer disc that flouresces at 9 different frequencies, one laser could then do a read on a byte + some sort of parity at once; feed the combined signal into a fast enough demodulator, and you can effectively increase the speed of the drive by a factor of 8 over the current top of the line; a 40x CD becomes a 320x FCD. That's about 46.8 mb/s, on the assumption that the hardware demodulator can keep up with the data stream. A 5 layer disc of the same type would only be 23.4 mb/s, but that's still plenty =)

    This, however, saturates the SCSI bus, excepting for the fastest/widest standards, I think.

    However, this isn't all that great, as the author expects. Latency/seek on the disk would be the same, so even if you can stream data at this tremendous rate, except for linear reads, as in music, movies, or copying, it wouldn't be all that useful(any more than standard CDs and DVDs)

    It is to note, however, that I can't see how one could make a writeable version of this technology; Would one need an N laser system, one for each layer? Or would we have to wait for semiconductor lasers that could adapt and change it's own active frequency based on current or voltage?

    Anyway, all the FCD proposes is to apply towards CDs what has already been done for HDs; by placing disks in parallel, increase the speed of read or write, ala RAID, though in this case because it is optic, you can crowd all the data into one channel(fibre optic) until it needs to be demodulated or something...

    Or am I missing something else?

    -AS
  • Then we will have DVD-like cartel all over again. Mark my words. With such a technological risk, they must have applied for lots of patents for FCD.

    Hasdi
  • Sure, this will be (the?) a way to go.
    But Michael at INCH.COM !!! sure does not know how to convert metric (decimal) sizes!!
  • How is a CD-ROM 12mm in diameter? That's like 0.5"


  • I remember reading somewhere that cd's only have a lifetime of about 10 years, and cdrw's only 4-5 years. This kinda worries me since I have cd's that are getting near 10 years old... Does this technology offer anything to improve this? Of course, wherever I heard this (and for the life of me I can't remember where...) could have been competely inaccurate, so feel free to correct me...
  • I don't think DVD is going to die very soon. FMD players are still in the prototype phase, and I'd be very surprised if a consumer version came out that was affordable by the end of the year. Usually when a new technology comes out in the audio/visual field, it should have a good feature lacking from previous technologies. For example, vinyl records. Records were great, but 8-Track and cassette tapes were more convenient. Then cd audio came out, and offered a lot better sound reproduction from tapes, while still being portable. Then MiniDiscs came out, being even more portable and supposedly providing better sound through use of 24-bit audio. The list goes on and on. Point being: I'm happy with VHS and DVD's.

    Now what I do with 140 gigs of space? I can see it being used for computer storage, but not many uses in the audio/visual market. The latest Audio and Video technologies are very very impressive, but I don't see any way we can improve on them unless you can find a person who can hear 6732466khz audio frequencies, and view super-high resolutions on your average television set and justify ditching high resolution DVD's for it. Now, we'll always have the audiophile/techhead market, but the masses won't abandon DVD's just yet.
  • Information on what has actually been achieve can be found by reading Constellation 3D's website. Constellation 3D is the company that actually develops the discs.

    The URL for the info is: http://www.c-3d.net/tech.htm [c-3d.net]

    Here is a choice section that tells what has actually been achieved:

    3.1.4) Results
    10 layer disks with CD density have been demonstrated (650 Mbyte per layer). The above mentioned requirements have been fulfilled:

    1. 650 nm laser, 680 nm peak of the fluorescent light.
    2. Stable media, no degradation during read-out.
    3. The conversion efficiency is more than 90%.
    4. The time response is approximately one nanosecond.
    5. The saturation level is with 1MW/cm2, above the read power intensity.
    6. In a disk player device demonstrated in Israel on 4 October 1999, digital audio was played using different content from each of the layers. The signal to noise ratio SNR was better than 36 Db (across a bandwidth of 1.5 MHz). The jitter was typically less than 30nsec (i.e., within CD specs).

  • I'm getting pretty disgusted with the unexamined assumption here, that more speed, more storage, bigger monitors, flatter panels, etc etc etc are ever worth getting excited about, in themselves.

    If people put their energy into writing better code instead, we'd be a lot farther along. Gizmo-porn is just a distraction, imho,

  • Once you get over ~40x CD-ROMs, you start to run up against IDE transfer limitations

    That's not true for UDMA drives, which can handle 33mb/s

    single speed cd = 150kb/s
    40speed = 150x40 = 6000 kb/s =~ 6 mb/ s


    ----------------------------------------------
  • Does CD-R media suffer from this same flaw (of having the data layer exposed to scratches)? I don't have any handy to check with

    Definately. Even more so than audio cd's. Therefor, it's a good idea to invest in a cd labeler.

    However some CD-R media have a protective coating (I always use Verbatim, which have such a coating)



    ----------------------------------------------
  • They do seem to have some reliablity problems though. Check out the www.bxboards.com review [bxboards.com] for more information. -- Gellor
  • Just some numbers:

    140 GB translates into
    28 movies (~5 gb each)
    28,672 mp3's (~5 mb each)
    2,446,677 jpegs (~60k each)

    That's an aweful lot of nudie ...

  • This is on par with technological trends. In particular, note that when CD-ROM first came out, hard drives were around 300MB, and that was huge, and CD's had a whopping 640MB.

    Now, hard drives are pushing past 40GB. A read-only media of 140GB is not particularly far fetched. But remember, when CD-ROM came out it was excessively expensive.

    Perhaps DVD's were fast to catch on partially because they are an interim technology, and don't reflect any new-great-and-improved technology. A new tech like the 140GB disc might go through harsher momentum gaining, like CD-ROM did when it was first introduced. Hope for the best. Expect the worst.

  • According to Inktomi [inktomi.com], the web today is about 1 billion pages. I haven't found any estimate of how much data there is in gigabytes (somebody knows any?), but if you just limit yourself to the textual data, there should be more than enough room on one disc to backup the entire "hypertext part" of the web (and maybe some graphics too :-)

    But then again, when (if at all) this becomes available, the Web has probably grown way beyond that... Oh well.

    Another good reference is this page [searchenginewatch.com] at Search Engine Watch.

  • Re:What about shelf life? (Score:4)

    by ScottG ( 30650 ) on Saturday February 12, 2000 @07:51PM (#1280655)
    I fear we may be wandering off topic, but according to the CD Recordable FAQ (www.fadden.com/cdrfaq/ [fadden.com]):

    Pressed CD's may last as little as 10-25 years.

    CDR's once recorded should last at least 75 years, but strangely only have an unrecorded shelf life of 5 to 10 years.
  • Umm, the orb drives are currently available and have been for 3-6 months, and they've gotten good reviews also.
  • The reason that this is not getting more attention is because this is a company that nobody has heard of before, with no known exployees, that is making extraordinary claims, yet has never publicly demonstrated any working technology. This is complete vaporware.
    I'd like to see more press once these people actually do something. In the mean time, I have incredible new processor technology in the works that will increase performance 1000-fold while only consuming 1 watt and maintaining x86 compatibility! Really!
  • You are highly restricted with VHS. You can't successfully copy most purchased movies on it without a Macrovision remover. Most of these are patented, so you are looking at a sync restoring piece of gear (big $$$) or being lucky enough to find a non-patented macrovision remover (moderate $$$) or an illegal one (reasonable $$$), or build one by yourself (cheap, but a lot of effort for most people).

    Buy a $100 "color corrector". Perfectly legal, strips it right out. It's just a decoder+frame buffer+encoder.

    Copying DVD, on the other hand, is VERY easy (IMHO). I just backed up a movie overnight... Was as easy as getting some software and clicking a few buttons. And, yes, you unpaid piracy "fighters" (snitching assholes), I *DID* buy the movie.

    You may have bought the movie, but if it was an encrypted disc, you committed the act of "circumvention of an access control mechanism" and thus violated the DMCA, fair use be damned.

  • From the article:

    An in-phase beam means a `0', while an in-phase beam means `1'.

    I had a Sony CD-ROM at a previous job that apparently worked just like this!

    Seriously though, despite the current DVD bullshit, this (the FMD, I mean) does not make much sense at this time.

    There is a fairly large base of DVD players in the homes of consumers (I have one, but I haven't used it in about a month, for fairly obvious reasons).

    Basically, we *have* to get the DVD people to play nice or we're pretty much screwed. Good luck getting a more open format in...
  • I remember a job posting from Industrial Light and Magic that was posted in a magazine about two years ago...

    They were looking for a computer science wizard, specifically "...someone who can provide innovative solutions for the management and transfer of multi-terabyte(!) sized image data sets."

    If you set your wayback machines, you'll realize that things like FibreChannel and other Really_Flipin'_Fast(tm) things are not as old as that 'help wanted' ad!

    There will always be someone who wants more, faster, (and of course) cheaper!


    Ever notice that MCSEs advertise the fact, but Sun & Novell certified people don't?

  • I visited the page and it makes me VERY happy. Here I was thinking that the little clear discs on my spindles were just packing material, but now I know the TRUTH. Wow, 140 gigs on what I had thought were just protecting the other CDs, glad I didn't throw those away! Doesn't seem to work in normal CD drvies, so I guess I'll have to pay a lot of money for the drives to read them. Hope the people packing those spindles of blank don't find this out, or else tehy'll start chargiung a lot more!
  • Y'know, I had always assumed that CDs were made the sensible way. But now that I look at a couple of audio CDs (scratched one), I can see that you are correct. Even that R.E.M CD with both sides playable (new adventures in hi-fi, now that I look) is made like that.

    This would also explain why putting a CD in the microwave puts cracks in the Ink layer...
    Shit, I'm feeling pretty unobservant right now.

    Does CD-R media suffer from this same flaw (of having the data layer exposed to scratches)? I don't have any handy to check with.
    --
    Will Dyson
  • A case would probably triple the price of a CD.
  • RIAA doesn't quadruple the price of cheapbytes cds.
  • Having read, an article a couple of days back about Holographic memory reseach (I think it was in Nature Mag). I was wondering what the "big" diffrence is between the two type of technologies.
    I mean, it seems you can just add as many layers as you want up to the point the transparency of the accumulated layer gets too bad.

    Murphy(c)
  • Remember cdrom caddies? were real popular once a upon time. I beleive plextor still makes a caddy version for a couple of their drives. If you've never encountered cdrom caddies they are basically jewel cases with the same sliding guard thingy 3.5" floppies use. They are kind of a pain in the ass though, unless you keep all your CD's in their very own caddy but then there's the space issue. That and I don't think anyone ever made audio cd players that used caddies, but I may be mistaken. A caddy drive may be an option if you wanted to build your own car MP3 player though. ;->
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • That is pretty damn fast. I am working on an Fibre Channel adapter and I know that blows any single port FC adapter on the market out of the water. Also, that kind of speed is going to need a tight driver so that it doesn't just suck up all the processor. I wonder how many I/Os per second per processor percentage they can get? What about megabytes per second per processor percentage? This is the real question. It is one thing to be fast but it is another to be able to run well. For example, some EIDE drives are nearly as fast as slow SCSI drives, but EIDE controllers require much more host cpu power.
  • This thing makes a lot of claims at their site. This article then goes crazy with it. Their site claims that it is possible to make things with this technology that could go at 1 gigabyte per second. I say perhaps. Maybe. But probably not. This thing is vapor ware and the author of this article is totally irresponsible, if not unethical, in hyping this thing. The greatest thing since WWW opened shop? Please! He then goes on to take the someday numbers from the company's site and assume that this technology that is different from CD-ROMs will increase in performance at the same rate as CD-ROMs. He ignores the issues of a controller and a BUS for this thing. PCI sure isn't going to do it. Perhaps one of its successors will handle it. Oh...and we will use it instead of RAM. Sure. Perhaps it will also be used for primary cache on the processor? Give me a break!
    If I want big and portable, I will go with DVD. If I want big and fast, I will go with a RAID over Fibre Channel. Only if I wanted vapor would I go with this!
  • Computer components have been getter faster and faster. This may be the start of truly pervasive computing...pervasive in the sense that it will be everywhere, unnoticeable, and unexceptional. All the rules blur, then change when computing is implicitly and immediately accessible to everyone and everything, everywhere, any time. Think of electricity. First it was a novelty, powering the useful light bulb. But soon, when it became pervasive, huge new fields and inventions sprung up because of it. The time between articles proclaiming a new technology or discovery, and its application, get smaller and smaller. This might be the real thing (tm), the nodal point. We might now be starting to take our first step into Neuromancer or the Matrix.

    Or this could just be another step in the mundane march of progress...what do I know?

    Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla [sourceforge.net]
  • They can lock it up WAY tighter than DVD, make sure no software players are made available, further curtail fair use, and make damned sure there's nothing us hapless customers can do about it.

    This is a serious concern, but there are two reasons which may make things work out for the best:

    1) These disks are so big that they may be seen as an industrial thing (permenant daily backups, large databases for crap government publications and reports, movie cameras and editors instead of distributing, etc.) instead of a consumer thing. This could mean that formats get established by people who do not need to play the political game with the MPAA. It really depends on their being a large market which is ready to shell out for a functional version soon and dose not want to wait for the MPAA to add all sorts of crap.

    2) The MPAA is really violating consumer fair use rights with their region coding. It might not fly a second time arround. The only reason the MPAA got their shit in DVD is the traditional consumer advocates with clout didn't undrstand the technology. We can fight the MPAA tomarrow by killing SDMI today and making people wake up.

    Jeff
  • Your argument is very convincing, but the fact of the matter is that these guys did a successful demo of their product in Silicon Valley just a few months ago. So, while the article may be vaporous, the technology has already been created and does in fact work.
  • What do we need 140 gigs of space for? HDTV, current dvd's can't even begin to store an entire movie in HDTV format. The DVD's you buy now may have digital movies, but the quality on them is terrible compared to what HDTV will have. (assuming the cable companies get off their asses and start working out a standard for transmision) I believe my DVD Player can play back 500 lines of resolution, but i belive HDTV is like 2000 something X 1000 something, that at least 4 times the data, plus if you don't compress it, you have even more problems. So we do need something like this, but not untill HDTV takes hold. And i doubt that will happen any time in the next 5 years. But after that we may all be buying new players for our home theaters, i think the days of going 20 years with only one video standard are over. Get ready to shell out that $300 every 5 years.
  • I agree with your statement completely and wholeheartedly (one of my housemates just commented "It'll just get bought out and shut down"), and congratulate you for your clear-sightedness. It would be fantastic if some good-natured company with scads of fake (i.e. overvalued) stock money snatched this company up and did some good with it. But I think there are some good reasons why it won't happen. First of all, any company which has gone public is inherently responsible to its shareholders to make the largest profit possible. That tends to make management a little more conservative then they were when they were a wee fledgeling startup. Second of all, most investors agree that the software/internet stock situation today is overvalued, so the millions upon billions that Red Hat has in stock value isn't really liquid cash.

    It's like Betamax vs. VHS, like DAT tapes and all those other cool technologies that lost out because they weren't backed by the big money. The MPAA and assorted hoodlums have poured cash into DVD, and you're damn right they're not going to give up. FMD is, admittedly, scads better than DVD (as opposed to the nearly equal Betamax/VHS), but the problems remain the same.

    One other thing - From what I understand, to manufacture one of these, you need to laminate the disk in 10 steps (or however many layers you have). Does this technology allow for FMD-burning, i.e. FMD-RAM? I see nothing about it in their tech or marketing pages... That takes out another advantage of CDs, that you can make your own, for the UNIX/NT tape-backup market and other things (mp3). You need to have big money to set up a plant to make these, and that means you need to get studios releasing movies and software companies releasing titles on this format, which means you need to get coalition backing to assure everyone that they won't get left out in the cold with an incompatible product, and... guess what, it's been done already and they're not about to give up. Yay DVD-consortium.

  • Just an offtopic question - Do you do your microwave any harm by melting a CD in it? Aside from scorch marks on the inside, that is.
  • I seriously doubt it. I've guessed that the amount of data on the Internet is more like the petabyte range.
    --
  • I recognize this as way too late to get moderated up but perhaps at least you will notice this extra reply.

    When this technology was first publicly disclosed a year ago or so, I talked to several people at C3D and questioned them about the 1 giga*byte* rates described on their home pages. (Search past threads for my handle and C3D). Since this bandwidth was as fast as RAM and an even bigger breakthrough than the capacity jump I was intrigued and highly skeptical.

    You're right that they get one factor of 10-100x from the extra layers. Disk bandwidth grows essentially linearly with the number of layers. But the other factor of 10-100x comes from another technique (and there's a catch.) They can split the laser beam into multiple beams and read the results with a CCD-like sensor array for parallel read capability. Cool. This is described somewhat in the white paper on their website, if I recall correctly. The big catch is that this parallel-read capability does not occur with the high-capacity round spinning disks, but only occurs with the smaller flash-card form factor devices that don't rotate (and have simple rectangular regions for data, I suspect).

    Unfortunately this suggests a technology with a very small market niche. For starters, most I/O busses actually run at slower speeds, creating somewhat of a disconnect until Intel's PCI and PCI-X successor "Infiniband" comes out in 2002 or whenever... And what good are 1 GByte/sec read rates when they're for a flash-card device that only holds 10 GB?

    --LP

    P.S. Read-write was also a serious technical challenge requiring significantly different materials when I talked to them ~9 months ago. Keep your eye out for progress on that.

  • The card idea sounds much more marketable. Forget flash memory, minidiscs, and CD's - these are inexpensive (relatively - they said something of about $10 to produce one), shock resistant (nearly no moving parts - I'm sure they could be made very resistant to all but the heaviest shocks), small, fast, and very big (1tb on a 50 layer card? wow!).

    I could see having a wallet in my car full of these, with 'better than cd quality' sound (24 bit audio at something like 48k), uncompressed, and a car player that can hold and change 3 of them right there in the deck! (because the cards are so small).

    This is what got my attention. Yea, those 140 GB discs are a neat idea, but not terrible practical just yet. However, the 1 GB cards are. If this company could make them affordable (i.e. about $20 each and reasonably priced read/write drives), this could finally begin to kill Zip/Jaz disks, and would definately put floppies to shame. I hate magnetic media...

    My only concern is, again, the price. Flash cards could have killed the floppy disk years ago, but even now they're still too expensive per megabyte to do the trick. The key is to make these cards affordable, and we may finally be able to have reliable portable storage.

    On another note... how about a device the size of a modern hard drive using this stuff? :) Like I said, I hate magnetic media... even if this is a little slower on the seek time, I'd like to see what could be done in making a hard drive replacement out of this stuff.
    ____________________
    Tension, apprehension
    And dissension have begun

  • You are very wrong.

    Most radio stations use(d) audio CD players with caddies.. not something too popular in the home market, however.

    I say used because a lot of them don't even use CDs anymore.

  • I had just targeted THIS MONTH to grab a DVD drive to slap in my Win98 box and now this! I ain't even finished converting from tapes to CD's yet. Jeeeez. The storage thing is gettin' to be as bad as the Intel/AMD processor race--not that I'm complaining. Heh heh heh. . .

    I Estimate this thing won't be out for another year or so, so I've still got time to start building a library of Ranma, Cowboy Bebop and Sailor Moon DVD's before the changeover occurs. The fact that this new doohicky can be made backward compatible with crusty old archaic-ass DVD's is a plus. Ooooh, gods--and what will Quake IV be like?? I imagine the Id guys must be droolin' with the prospect of all that space to play around in. God I love technology!!

  • I thought they were describing what must be in a laptop.. however... 25lbs.. that's one big fat laptop. Seems to me if all they want is less than 25lbs.. they could actually use a desktop. I doubt my computer system would weigh more than 25lbs if it had a LCD monitor.
  • I'm still waiting for someone to properly implement a molecule-based data storage system (using a light-sensitive protein like rhodopsin), but in the meantime this is a pretty nifty new technology. 3D data storage is the way to go. :)

    smallstar
  • "They" need to make a format that is economical to make for the common jo3. Folks, until they do, we're stuck with high quality VHS for our means of casual recording. It's sad to think that we can do DNA testing and clone sheep but we are forced to record onVHS!!!
  • But then they would lose money on re-sells and they won't let that happen....
  • These days many have switched to Minidisc (which doesn't skip, doesn't get dirty, doesn't get scratched, and which, despite its compression, sounds the same on the radio as a CD).
  • Call me paranoid, but I'd bet the farm on one of two things happening from here:

    1. The technology will never come to the market. It will be swamped under a flood of bureaucratic regulations/"standards", and dead before it hits the ground. A few years from now, we'll have an "Ask Slashdot" feature that asks "What ever happened to FMD-ROM?".

    2. The company, Constellation 3D, will be bought out by another company, who will force encryption/proprietary extensions on it and the whole DVD-fiasco will ensue again.

    You see, the MPAA and others of their ignoble ilk have invested a hell of a lot of time and effort in DVD. They don't want that screwed up by some other format just because it is technologically superior and far better for the consumer. If this ever does come out to the market, watch for FUD saying "It's not secure; it can't be played in your DVD-player; it's not The Official Product; it's nonstandard" and another thousand lies.

    So, what can we do about this?

    Well, I'd advise Red Hat/VA Linux/Some Other Linux Company that's filed an IPO and has now got stacks of cash coming out of their ears, to act soon, as soon as the thing seems viable. Invest in the company - if it looks like the Next Big Thing, consider buying out Constellation 3D. Find out what the standard is, make a FMD-ROM driver, open-source it. Get the information out there, make it clear that DVDs are *not* the way to go. Use facts, not FUD - in fact, actively *fight* FUD, something that I don't see many Linux companies doing.

    But don't stand still, or I can guarantee that we'll never see this product become accessible to us all.
  • http://slashdot.org/articles/99/10/04/1124236.shtm l [slashdot.org]
    AND
    http://slashdot.org/articles/99/12/01/133232.shtml [slashdot.org]

    Must... find... new... material... sleep.. overpowering ... reason... I .. never... sleep... damnit...

    Why is it good stuff gets mentioned once (if ever) and vapourware gets repeated over and over and over again? Is it wishfull thinking?

  • I understand the need not to use lossy compression for professional-quality video storage, but that's not the only option. Even non-video-oriented compressions like Lempel-Ziv or the things in gzip can work decently on a wide variety of data, using lossless modes that let you reconstruct the exact original bitstream. You should be able to do much better by taking advantage of video's properties (e.g. lossless encoding of differences from frame to frame or row to row.) If you can even get 3:1, that takes your 20 minutes of video to 60, which starts to be useful.


    The last time I worked on this stuff was doing meteorological imagery a decade ago - good-resolution satellite pictures compressed about 3:1 using "compress" (the LZW-based predecessor to gzip), which was enough that I didn't need to do anything fancier. (Radar images got into trouble, because they compressed about 50:1, so my first cut at the software compressed the stuff faster than the input across the network :-)

  • That's a good point. You can definitely notice the difference between 30 and 60fps. 60fps rocks!
  • Total myth, I can see the difference between 30 and 60 straight away...so much smoother, looks much more life like, and much easier on the eyes.
  • Exactly. I'll believe it when I see it AND am able to afford it. This definatly isn't the first time we've seen crazy claims like this that claim they can leap a whole generation on the technology scale.

    Also note their self-congratulatory article on their stock as well. hmph.
  • You won't magically make the layer-selection problem go away here. Previous layers will still fluoresce as your UV beam shines through them - just not as brightly. However, they will fluoresce over a larger area, conserving total luminosity.

    Perhaps each flourescent layer will only respond to a laser of a particular frequency, or (now that I read the article a little more closely), it looks like they might be able to make each layer flouresce at a difference frequency, so they can use that to pick out which layer they are exciting.

  • Then, with 8 layers, I can get 16 times the throughput of a similar CD, which is still only going to be 97.6 mb/s... Great, but nowhere near 1 gb/s!

    I saw a year of so ago in one of those science mags... maybe Popular Science, not sure. Anyway, some guy was doing research with mini-disk sized CDs that held 4 bits of information / pit. Getting a full 8 bits of info (ie one byte / pit) would give good bandwidth (depending on the bus you're running it off, IDE can do 33 megs, the better SCSIs can do 160 megs/sec) and ~5 gigs of storage.

    However, I'm confused about this:

    So if they can push CD transfers to something like 100 mb/s, I'll believe that this FCD can be pushed to 1 gb/s...

    CD transfer speed is limited by drive speed and bus speed. Once you get over ~40x CD-ROMs, you start to run up against IDE transfer limitations (since IDE is a POS). SCSI can handle up to 160 megs/sec (I think there is a new one that does 320 megs/sec), but 1 gig/sec is still a long way off. And who the hell needs a gig of data in a second anyway? Full screen video + stereo sound is probably only 50 megs / sec tops.
  • For more information, check out c3d [c-3d.net] including their tech [c-3d.net] and products [c-3d.net] pages.

    Of course, you could always read this article [slashdot.org] :)

    -----

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