
100 Terabyte 3.5-inch Optical Storage 345
ignipotentis writes "According to PhysOrg we are close to being able to record our entire lives on a single 3.5" optical disc. This article talks about using ultraviolet light since focused laser beam is smaller in diameter than other frequencies of light. The expected cost per drive upon production is $570-$750 with discs costing $45."
In other news (Score:5, Funny)
Too bad (Score:2)
Although it would seem to me that if this is a reliable media the prices would be cut a lot of it becomes popular. At least considering how the prices of high-speed DVD burners (and media!) has dropped over the last year as it has gotten more popular.
Although the question is if this will become popular on the market, especially with more worked-in standards as dvd already out there (think blue-ray).
How fragile is stored data? (Score:5, Interesting)
Cheers,
Erick
Re:How fragile is stored data? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:How fragile is stored data? (Score:3, Funny)
Ever observed an old fashioned CD ROM in a running microwave?
Re:How fragile is stored data? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:How fragile is stored data? (Score:2)
So I doubt this "invention" is even real. But then what do i know about UV rays flipping molecules...Maybe he just does not know computers.
Re:How fragile is stored data? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:How fragile is stored data? (Score:2)
What's this "going to"? Perhaps you are unaware that a standard CDROM (vintage 1980's) uses 1/3 of its true capacity with error-checking data? Interestingly, a DVD uses much less of its capacity for such but also uses a more sophisticated algorithm to make up the difference.
Re:How fragile is stored data? (Score:5, Interesting)
But it won't surprise me if between now and a product launch the specs are brought way down. While it makes great press now, cooler business heads usually prevail and squelch any advancement too far ahead of the current tech, preferring to milk the techonology over many years, a la 1X, 2X, 4X, 8X, 16X etc etc like we saw with CDs, and now seeing again with DVDs.
Re:How fragile is stored data? (Score:2)
That's a dumb explanation for why it will not be released as such a huge breakthrough. The reason it won't be released with such an amazing difference between the current technology and it is because there are never any huge leaps in any field of science or technology. Everything is always a progression with stuff being built on older stuff.
As for the guy saying its impossible to store data with molecules, that's dumb, too. Do you realize that nanotubes can be up to 1 micron long, far larger than the s
Re:How fragile is stored data? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:How fragile is stored data? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How fragile is stored data? (Score:2)
There is a major diffe
Re:How fragile is stored data? (Score:2)
The drive alone is as much as my pc! (Score:4, Insightful)
Why bother with the discs? (Score:4, Insightful)
If we're talking around $1000 for this type of capacity, one would think the advantages of an integrated device (longevity, reduced mechanical movement, ability to seal or create a vaccuum in the interior) would faaar outweigh the advantages of being able to remove data and carry it around in your pocket.
Of course, at this stage it's preposterous science fiction mumbo-jumbo anyway
Re:Why bother with the discs? (Score:2)
Uhh, And when the drive breaks? (Score:2)
Hell! I expect to supper hardware failure personally once myself.
Not quite $45 per disk (Score:4, Funny)
Graphics inaccuracies (Score:5, Informative)
Also, the second graphic [physorg.com] refers to Seagate and "Maxstor"... perhaps they mean Maxtor?
If Colossal Storage Corp. can't even get their infographics right, I don't know what that says about their ability to make these drives.
Re:Graphics inaccuracies (Score:5, Informative)
Besides the graphic problems described by the parent post (and "COLOSSAL" in big letters on the drive in the linked cheesy graphic [physorg.com] in the PhysOrg article) and Colossal's oh-so-cheesy animated gif-filled site, there are pseudoscience-y claims:
"Michael invented and patented the world's first and only concept for non-contact UV photon induced electric field poling of ferroelectric non-linear photonic bandgap crystals"
"He was invited to present this fascinating discovery to the National Science Foundation in February 2004."
Puh-leeze. The "science" part sounds like something from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the NSF bit sounds like something out of a cheesy Hollywood script.
And when we get right down to it, how reliable a source is PhysOrg? This [physorg.com], for example, doesn't strike me as the kind of news one would find on a really serious physics site...
--Mark
Re:Graphics inaccuracies (Score:2)
And as for the claim that "they misspelled something so they don't have technology", the hole in that logic is wide enough to drive a truck through.
Re:Graphics inaccuracies (Score:2, Insightful)
Complete balderdash. (Score:4, Informative)
From other evidence it looks like PhysOrg is part of the scam. Have you read their "whitepaper"?
The holographic optical drive will use the Einstein/Planck Theory of Energy Quantum Electrons to control molecular properties by an atom's electron movement/displacement. The FeDrive - FeHead Semiconductor Integrated Optical Read / Write Head plans to use lenseless Ultraviolet/Blue laser diodes with Voltage transducer to write, new definition of the term include photon induced electrical field poling...
"Those words, I don't think they mean what they think they mean"
Disclaimer: IANAP, but I try to keep my chops in 20 years after leaving college.
scam artists (Score:3, Insightful)
"If you have recently published a paper and want to give it publicity or your company wants to publish a press release please click here to contact PhysOrg team."
Someone else mentioned the strong emphasis on patents and whatnot. There's also the genius sole inventor, who is president of the company- kinda sketchy. Lastly, outlandish claims- "bandwidth limits beyond 1000 GB/sec".
Um. Riiiiight. Call me when he has published results and a working prototype he's shown. Until
Re:Graphics inaccuracies (Score:2)
Supposedly they demonstrated a functioning system, somewhere but by then they were dead anyway.
Re:Graphics inaccuracies (Score:3, Informative)
Replacement lives needed ... (Score:5, Funny)
Obviously, we now need a technology to either spawn or backup our lives.
CC.
It has been done (Score:5, Informative)
In other news... (Score:2, Funny)
Seriously though, what is the rot rate going to be on these things. For the average user, the media will probably become unstable before the disc is filled.
luggableness (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm looking forward to getting my hands on one of these babies.
Remember to moderate properly, or else be banned [slashdot.org]
Re:luggableness (Score:2)
Lets just say this technology exists. I looked at this site and I half expected to see a "Looking for investors to get the revolution started!" scrolling across the bottom.
Great, so you've got your self a 10PB disk. You pop it into drive and you suck your entire production / prototyping and development data onto the thing. While your at it, you decide to drop a copy of every file server you've got, etc.
How long is it going to take to put all that dat
Colossal Storage Corp.'s Website (Score:4, Informative)
This stuff writes itself! (Score:5, Funny)
Gold!
This is what happens when you train monkeys to speak using only a 1950s physics textbook and a biography of PT Barnum.
Coming Soon... (Score:5, Funny)
data storage devices get better over time.. (Score:3, Funny)
Realistic timeline (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Realistic timeline (Score:2)
Nah, in 900 years we're be storing information by rearranging stars and changing their spectral characteristics (by, for example, adding specific substances on them or surrounding them with gas clouds of specific substances).
Assuming, of course, that civilization manages to remove the sand of Intellectual Property Rights from the wheels of progress. Otherwise said wheels will grind to a halt, since no one will d
Thanks but no thanks (Score:3, Insightful)
If I trust what I learned with the 12cm optical disks I currently use (CDRs), my entire life would last about 2 years before getting unreadable.
At any rate, even if the media lasts for a long time, which will remain to prove with this new technology, the problem with computer storage is almost always finding drives to read them in the long run. Tried to read a 5 1/4 diskette recently?
Re:Thanks but no thanks (Score:3, Informative)
Frankly, if you've CDR's that have gone unreadable in 2 years then you must have somehow mishandled them or gotten a bad batch. One of my friends lost a bunch of photos because he had accidentally marked them with a marker that contained solvent.
However, correctly handled, the CD-R:s should last quite long. I've a few that are over 10 years old (burned back
5.25" drive (Score:2)
Though to be honest, I'm about to kick the drives out along with the rest of the hardware - just one big backup session of all the disks I've got, and they can go too (after cleansing the personal ones).
Same applies to my QIC-80 tapes and drives (1 internal, 1 external)
They're not that hard to find, though - just have to know where to look. In the end, there'll be a restoration company that has these drives and then some, and you can get stuff restored for a fee, and that sounds
What i see (Score:2)
1. Being that the technology is patented is stressed highly in this article. Patents may not prevent adoption of the product, it will stifle inovation by anyone else.
2. Is there any supposed transfer rates? If we couldnt write very fast to it, it would be pointless to have so much space.
Re:What i see (Score:2)
the website reeks of "Give us some capital now, we'll take over the world!" and that the technology is pretty much on the theory level at this point(with someone working on a proof of concept or something).
Re:What i see... PROBLEM! (Score:2)
Of course, that doesn't say they're going to hook their new data transfer mechanism to their new storage medium, or that it'll even be able to read/write anywhere near 1000GB/second (1 terabyte/second).
If that were so, they could fill up their
50c/TB (Score:2)
Does anyone else remember full-height 20MB drives for home computers that cost $700? I feel like I'm in a Virginia Slims ad....
Re: (Score:2)
thru and thru (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:thru and thru (Score:2)
And I certainly hope they didn't base their theoretical work on Einstein and Planck's work and Bohr's atomic model.. In fact.. it's quite odd that they are even mentioned.. That's pre-quantum physics?!
It gives me the feeling they don't really know what they're doing: If you want to model photonic processes, you need to work with quantum physics, e.g. the time-dependent Schrödinger equation.
Was this written by the Star Trek script team? (Score:5, Insightful)
Say what?
Captain Kirk to the bridge, please!
The article is long on buzzwords and short on fact. Color me skeptical.
100Tb is nowhere near enough (Score:5, Funny)
Even if a third of it is with the lens cap on.
Re:100Tb is nowhere near enough (Score:2)
Re:100Tb is nowhere near enough (Score:2, Informative)
Angle of view is about 150 degrees, but hi-res is only about 2 degrees in the middle.
The rest you could cover with a low-res mpeg.
Re:100Tb is nowhere near enough (Score:3, Informative)
I can record my life on a 3.5" floppy... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I can record my life on a 3.5" floppy... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I can record my life on a 3.5" floppy... (Score:2)
Numbers Numbers... (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember when the DVD was announced and started shipping, what was it, 18GB onto 1 single disk, dual layer dual side. We're starting to see that dual layer out, with almost no medias, a technology that was promised way before today, remember fluorecent CD drives with over 100GB of information that were supposed to be commercially available before this year?
We're still drooling on the blu-ray drives DUE to ship with consumer-level prices somewhat by the end of this year or next year, yet, we're still far from what we were discussing that was "so close" less than a decade ago.
I don't want to sound bashing or anything, but what I don't like about all those announcements, it's when they dare saying a date of availability out of vapor, this, besides showing off, has the adverse effect of pissing off people that could actually design hardware/concepts around that technology, and miss their deadlines even with delays accounted in (months of delays is reasonable in some fields, but years isn't). The other bad effect is you might actually kill the funding of your technology just because lots of consumers might just wait for that "other better" technology. I'm not talking about those 50$ dvd writers, I'm talking about early adopters of new technologies (my first CDR costed me 2500$US) that pay a premium per devices, or OEM that helps to build a market for that new technology, whatever you do, it ends up pissing people off.
Then again, I guess you have to BS a bit to get some funding sometimes just to iron out that last bug or to go from R&D to commercial, but I still don't think that giving out timeframes out of the blues or based on the "miraculous positive planning scenario" is being honnest towards the consumers and OEMs. Don't get me wrong, I love to know what's around the corner, and how it works and the fields that they are aiming, I just don't like being lied to with false hopes.
Did you know 'gullible' is not in the OED? (Score:2)
-The "prototype" drawing shows "optical data" and "power/control" connectors, neither of which are exactly standard on today's (or yesterday's, or tomorrow's...) PCs. If this drive where anywhere near real, a controller card or at least an existing interface standard (IEEE
Write Speed? (Score:3, Insightful)
How would an OS react to suddenly having to catalogue a multi-terabyte disk? By locking, I suspect.
That said, just think of what the thought of this disk would do to the RIAA: A single disk, no larger than a floppy, which could hold a high-bitrate Mp3 copy of every song ever produced.....
Holographc memory storage? Beware... (Score:2)
Re:Holographic memory storage? Beware... (Score:2)
"The holographic optical drive will use the Einstein/Planck Theory of Energy Quantum Electrons to control molecular properties by an atom's electron movement/displacement. The FeDrive - FeHead Semiconductor Integrated Optical Read / Write Head plans to use lenseless Ultraviolet/Blue laser diodes with Voltage tansducer to write, new definition of the term include photon induced electrical field poling..."
I ask you, does this sounds like it's written by someone who actual
Re:Holographc memory storage?-"Bench" marks. (Score:2)
Shame on you! Shame on you all! (Score:2)
This should have been the FIRST expected topic. And the third, and the sixth or so, and so on with reasonable frequency.
What has Slashdot come to? Are we at the dusk of Slashdot culture?
Shame on y'all!
(Oh, and just to make the picture complete: "w00t, imagine how much pr0n you can store with a beowulf cluster of these! In Soviet Russia, pr0n hoards YOU!")
capacity and time to read/write questions (Score:2, Interesting)
What - everrrrrrrr (Score:5, Insightful)
An analysis of the "company" "ColossalStorage" and it's founder "Michael E Thomas". [physorg.com]
See all the waving flags on their website and his proud "United States Veteran - Top Secret Clearance" at the top of his bio page?
Yeah, there's no way in hell these guys are delivering jack shit to the marketplace in the next 20 years, let alone the next 5.
And who the hell is physorg.com anyways?
Registrant:
Alexander Pol
Metallistov 63
St-Petersburg,
Uh huh. Some amateur "science/tech news site". It is NOT a respected authority on ANYTHING.
According to google, there are ZERO websites in the world that link to physorg.com, and the first 4 pages of google "pages that contain the term" show zero references to physorg.com from anyone in the physics or real world technology industry.
Re:What - everrrrrrrr (Score:2)
My bet is on "investment scam".
Sure, oh and a flying pig... (Score:2)
We can't continue using disks, there slow, access times are bad, and they tend to require excesive protection as the data is stored on the surface of the disk (CD's being an exception but the surface of the disk is still vunrible).
If I was going to back any storage
So....? (Score:2)
Anyone know where I buy a fibre-chanel to SATA RAID bridge board?
Welcome (Score:2)
Welcome to the web site of the early 1990s! [colossalstorage.net]
Not really anything new. Just a diff MO drive. (Score:2)
At first, reading the headlines and the article, I thought this was a hoax. Then I thought about the "technology" used and realised it is kinda old hat.
Think back a decade or two when the Magnetic Optical drive was release. Basically, it was a high powered laser used to weaken the ferromagnetic domains so that the region could be written to, but once the temp went down, the region could not be so easily affected by stray magnetic fields due to the "burned in" domain alignment.
The only difference from then
When? (Score:2)
No time frames are mentioned, even for the older technology. I have no doubt that when this thing goes mainstream (if it ever does), it could definitely sell for the stated price. But it's clearly at least five years away, and probably more.
They also fail to mention the source of this wonderful UV light. And from the looks of the graphic comparing densities, this is very deep UV light. I have a feeling it'll be a while before the
When can I buy it? (Score:2)
Every now an then there's an article on Slashdot mentioning some über-cool storage media. But even years after that you can't find them in any store.
Another Paradigm Shift a-Comin' (Score:2)
But there's a much deeper shift going on. It's a transition from paying for things because we can't do them o
We'll make great petas (Score:2)
Re:We'll make great petas (Score:2)
And the patents are where??? (Score:2)
Seriously, wouldn't this put a really big downer on storage manufactures and such?
Let me guess, to wipe a disc blank you use a black light and a air ionizer. Of course the microwave is always a good data destroyer.
Re:"record our entire lives" (Score:4, Funny)
Re:"record our entire lives" (Score:3, Funny)
So it's 3.5 inches across by 4 feet tall?
Re:"record our entire lives" (Score:3, Funny)
Well, I don't like to brag.
Re:"record our entire lives" (Score:4, Funny)
And if you filled the Library of Congress up with these bugs, how much bandwidth would it have? This is the real question.
-ft
Re: (Score:2)
Re:"record our entire lives" (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:"record our entire lives" (Score:5, Interesting)
A good quality 2 hour MPEG4 movie can fit in 1GB, so one of these discs stores 100,000 movies. If you can spend 4 hours per day watching movies, it will take more than 140 years to watch them all.
Re:"record our entire lives" (Score:5, Funny)
Ah, finally something to hold my anime collection :).
Re:"record our entire lives" (Score:3, Informative)
He also quoted a surprisingly small number for movies which mostly comes from India apparently and he separated movies and video into two categories. It was a fascinating interview.
Re:"record our entire lives" (Score:5, Funny)
Exhibit A: the number of 'how much of my p0rn collection would fit on one of these babies' jokes posted in the first 0.025 nanoseconds after the story was posted.
Re:"record our entire lives" (Score:4, Funny)
Re:"record our entire lives" (Score:2)
Re:"record our entire lives" (Score:4, Funny)
Re:"record our entire lives" (Score:2)
Re:"record our entire lives" (Score:2)
Re:"record our entire lives" (Score:5, Interesting)
If you constantly recorded an MP3 at a decent 1MB/minute rate for an entire lifetime of 80 years, you would end up with 4.2e13 bytes, which is only 42% of 100 TB. So you could record every sound you experience or produce, with room to spare.
Re:Vaporware? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Vaporware? (Score:5, Insightful)
It is pretty suspicious when any company comes along with a technology that is an order of magnitude better than the state of the art. In this case the state of the art is about 10Gb and they are claiming 4 orders of magnitude better.
Why would the disk be removable for that amount of storage? Surely keeping the heads free of dust would make you want to seal the thing up. Why the incredibly precise price range when we know that every new technology starts high then drops in price?
If the technology was real you could charge $20K for a device easily. You would also find that at this point you had to use some pretty expensive electronics to keep up with the necessary data rates. 100Tb takes a heck of a lot of time to move along a firewire or USB2.0 connection.
Getting the beam size small is not all you need to do. At the beam size they claim you would have to do quite a bit to avoid the effects of vibration etc.
Re:Vaporware? (Score:3)
Re:Vaporware? (Score:4, Informative)
In addition I refard physorg.com as a highly unprofessional site. They spam the usenet and various web forums a lot. They also have the nerve to steal entire threads(!!) from the usenet and insert them to their forum, so it looks populated.
Remember magnetic bubbles? (Score:2)
Re:terabytes / petabytes? (Score:2)
Hmmm... if my estimates are correct, even with Firewire 800 (and ideal bandwidth usage), nearly 13 days. (Hopefully your hard disk wouldn't melt in the process.)
Re:Pack of Lies (Score:2)
Watts/hr????? (= Joules/sec/hr) What is that unit, the acceleration of energy consumption? What a bunch of retards.