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Data Storage

100 Terabyte 3.5-inch Optical Storage 345

Posted by CmdrTaco from the finally-enough-room-for-all-our-pr0n dept.
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."
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100 Terabyte 3.5-inch Optical Storage More

100 Terabyte 3.5-inch Optical Storage

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  • In other news (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 15, 2004 @11:06AM (#9973769)
    Microsoft announced that the next version of Windows will have a base install size of 99 terabytes
  • I just bought a DVD-Burner.
    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. ... It was the same thing for CD-rw drives back in the day.
    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)

    by erick99 ( 743982 ) <homerun@gmail.com> on Sunday August 15, 2004 @11:06AM (#9973775)
    This is very cool! Writing data by flipping a molecule "on" or "off." I wonder though if at the molecular level do you end up with data that is "fragile" once written to media? I don't worry too much that a burned or impressed "pit" in a CD, for example, is going to be affected by background radiation or other similar phenomena. But, if your bits are now single molecules, how robust is the media in terms of preserving the data? I am obviously not a physicist.....

    Cheers,

    Erick

    • well not just radiation, if it is just a single molocule, what prevents entropy from scrambling the data? all you'd have to do is heat it and boom its all scrambled

    • Re:How fragile is stored data? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ajs ( 35943 ) <ajs.ajs@com> on Sunday August 15, 2004 @11:19AM (#9973869) Homepage Journal
      We're certainly getting to the level where we're going to require some redundancy in order to maintain data integrity, but I'm ok with buying three of these things to store my data that many times... or you could have redundant sectors on the media, perhaps fully duplicated or just maintain parity.

    • Re:How fragile is stored data? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Tlosk ( 761023 ) on Sunday August 15, 2004 @11:32AM (#9973936)
      With the capacity, throughput, and rewritability being claimed by the company, the issue of fragility is readily solved through any number of different means. It's just an engineering problem. Data redundancy, robust error checking, hardier media (diamond coatings, enclosures, smaller form factor, etc), etc.

      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.

      • 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:5, Informative)

      by scrod ( 136965 ) on Sunday August 15, 2004 @11:39AM (#9973979) Homepage
      Well, This paper [celis-semi.com] would suggest that such a ferroelectric disk would be resistant to stray electromagnetic fields.
    • You know that your processor stores memory in register files and flops and these devices are also prone to failure by stay particles, right? So people are trying to deal with these problems just the question is.. how? We have the most basic element covered: Identifying a failure. A single parity bit can do this. Two simultaneous failures can occur making a parity test reveal false negative so we can use more parity bits, although the chance of the failures increase exponentially.

      There is a major diffe
    • From what I've seen of nano data techniques, they'd probably put the bit on a bunch of molecules instead of just one. Y'know, just in case. But even then, I'm sure that if they came out with 100-terabyte storage, there'd be a bit more protection around it than your average easy-break CD.

  • The drive alone is as much as my pc! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by RoboTuna ( 799839 ) on Sunday August 15, 2004 @11:08AM (#9973786)
    And that's understandable. The drive and disc might cost a pretty penny, but you'd only need one drive and one disc, so who cares?

    • Why bother with the discs? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by caitsith01 ( 606117 ) on Sunday August 15, 2004 @11:14AM (#9973833) Journal
      With 100 TB, why not forgo the whole notion of removable media and make it a permanent, integrated storage device? As you say, you'd only need one disc and one drive.

      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 :)
    • I've learned the hard way never to run without back-ups, redundancy and multiple machines.

      Hell! I expect to supper hardware failure personally once myself.

  • Not quite $45 per disk (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 15, 2004 @11:08AM (#9973792)
    Don't forget the $1/megabyte tax that the RIAA will undoubtedly impose. The price becomes a little prohibitive.

  • Graphics inaccuracies (Score:5, Informative)

    by nstrom ( 152310 ) on Sunday August 15, 2004 @11:09AM (#9973798)
    The graphic [physorg.com] in the article says 10 petabyte, not 100 terabyte. That's a factor of 100 different.

    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)

      by Mark_in_Brazil ( 537925 ) on Sunday August 15, 2004 @11:43AM (#9973996)
      No kidding. Lots of red flags in this article.
      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
      • If you're trying to make UFOs and such into false occurrences, then you should probably stay away from the media and (especially) the area of physics. Input from people who are afraid of what goes on outside their front lawn is usually just laughed at.

        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.
    • Yes, the article is rife with typos, grammar problems and graphics inaccuracies. Most of the "sell" (and I'm pretty sure that's ALL this is -- a snake-oil sale) is actually vapid b.s., especially given that the claims are based upon some science which has not come about (stable molecular switches, as one poster pointed out, e.g.), some science which is really horribly described ("an Ultra Violet Photon and an Electric Field" -- photons and electric fields are THE SAME THINGS) and things which are flat-out

      • Complete balderdash. (Score:4, Informative)

        by argent ( 18001 ) <peter@slashdot . ... t a r o nga.com> on Sunday August 15, 2004 @01:39PM (#9974691) Homepage Journal
        make me wonder if either an editor of PhysOrg had a fun time being bought off

        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)

      by SuperBanana ( 662181 )
      From the Physorg website:

      "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

    • Is this a rework of FMD? They always seemed suspicious, making grand schemes. It didn't help that their trade show listing was basically empty and the science behind it seemed to be snake oil.

      Supposedly they demonstrated a functioning system, somewhere but by then they were dead anyway.
    • No, Maxstor [maxstor.com.au] is right. They store volumetric molecular data [maxstor.com.au].

  • Replacement lives needed ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by foobsr ( 693224 ) on Sunday August 15, 2004 @11:10AM (#9973805) Homepage Journal
    we are close to being able to record our entire lives on a single 3.5" optical disc ...

    Obviously, we now need a technology to either spawn or backup our lives.

    CC.
  • Microsoft has announced they are working on a totally different standard for these disks (even though a standard hasn't been officially announced) and will incorporate it into Longhorn, causing it's production to be moved back again.

    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)

    by karmagardless ( 800169 ) on Sunday August 15, 2004 @11:11AM (#9973813)
    I am really happy about this. Once a week I travel 50 miles to transfer data from our main office to a remote site. You'd think that in 2004 nobody would be using sneaker net to transfer data, but when it comes to scientific data, it's much cheaper to do it by car than by fiber.

    I'm looking forward to getting my hands on one of these babies.

    Remember to moderate properly, or else be banned [slashdot.org]
    • Here's what I see as a problem with this technology.

      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)

    by nstrom ( 152310 ) on Sunday August 15, 2004 @11:12AM (#9973815)
    http://www.colossalstorage.net/ [colossalstorage.net] -- it's pretty ghetto, in a circa 1996 sort of way. Animated GIFs abound.

    • This stuff writes itself! (Score:5, Funny)

      by caitsith01 ( 606117 ) on Sunday August 15, 2004 @11:21AM (#9973881) Journal
      "Welcome to the 3D Atomic NanoTechnology of the 3rd Millennium! Atomic Holographic Optical Data Storage NanoTechnology! Patents Granted on Revolutionary NanoTechnology for development of Rewritable Ferroelectric Volume Atomic Holographic Optical Storage NanoTechnology! ...will NOT be effected by extreme high energy EMF or Cosmic Rays i.e. Solar Flares and Solar Winds!"

      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)

    by two-tail ( 803696 ) on Sunday August 15, 2004 @11:12AM (#9973819)
    The 100 Terabyte iPod! Now available for the 300%-profit-margin price of $99999!

  • data storage devices get better over time.. (Score:3, Funny)

    by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Sunday August 15, 2004 @11:13AM (#9973821) Homepage Journal
    ..news at 25.00
  • meeting our needs for the next millenium, it says. Well, at least it's realistic. I'd even be willing to say that this technology may be viable in a mere nine-hundred years!

    • I'd even be willing to say that this technology may be viable in a mere nine-hundred years!

      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)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Sunday August 15, 2004 @11:13AM (#9973826)
    According to PhysOrg we are close to being able to record our entire lives on a single 3.5" optical disc.

    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)

      by Zarhan ( 415465 )
      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.

      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
    • Read and write, actually.

      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
  • It looks really cool, but there are a couple things that worry me.

    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.
    • I don't think the patent matters when they're unable to bring it into life.

      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).

    • Yes, their website says "Colossal Storage nanoTechnology will push the bandwidth limits beyond 1000 GB/sec". Of could, a transfer technology isn't good without hardware and a computer bus (of whatever type/configuration) that can push or translate that kind of data.

      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)

    by ajs ( 35943 )
    50 cents per terabyte, huh? I guess that's ok, but it still seems a bit pricy ;-)

    Does anyone else remember full-height 20MB drives for home computers that cost $700? I feel like I'm in a Virginia Slims ad....
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • thru and thru (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kraegar ( 565221 ) on Sunday August 15, 2004 @11:18AM (#9973865)
    "I gave up two times because I was not able to work thru a concept of non-volatile, non-destructive readout," says Michael. "I finally had a break thru when reviewing Einstein/Plank and Niels Bohr Atomic Theories."
    An article so well written, with all that there proper spellin, and usin words like "thru", sure does inspire me to trust their unbelievable claims.
    • "Planck" is also spelled wrong.

      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)

    by Nevo ( 690791 ) on Sunday August 15, 2004 @11:24AM (#9973894)
    "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,"

    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)

    by BillsPetMonkey ( 654200 ) on Sunday August 15, 2004 @11:28AM (#9973912)
    100Tb is a lot of storage, but it won't be enough for a ultra hi-res 60 degree widescreen movie that's been running for just under 32 years.

    Even if a third of it is with the lens cap on.

    • In human vision the field of view is larger than 60 degrees, more like 180 horizontal x 90 vertical. But the ultra hi-res is a rather small part of it, no more than a few degrees wide. That's why we need to move our eyes so much.
    • 60 degree ultra hi-res ?

      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.
    • Heheh.. and imagine when the first write-speed is 1x, measured similarily as with cd's (realtime music playback) or dvd's (realtime video playback). It will take a lifetime just to record it.. :-)

  • I can record my life on a 3.5" floppy... (Score:3, Funny)

    by fejes ( 799784 ) on Sunday August 15, 2004 @11:46AM (#9974007)
    Sleep, eat, work, eat, work, eat, sleep... repeat ad nauseum.

  • Numbers Numbers... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tcc ( 140386 ) on Sunday August 15, 2004 @11:49AM (#9974016) Homepage Journal
    Every Week or so, there's a new "breakthrough" in storage that will allow us xTB or yPB to be stored on zMEDIA. In real end-user life, however, we're still behind 5 yrs ago practical announcements of tangible products.

    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.

  • Nice to see a kooky theory get so much attention, just because of its high "ghee-whiz" appeal. But, let's face it, this "technology" is utterly fake -- even a casual read of the article should make this quite clear. Let me count the ways:

    -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)

    by CdBee ( 742846 ) on Sunday August 15, 2004 @11:55AM (#9974050)
    I'm not convinced modern machines could even handle this: Bear in mind that IDE buses run at what - 250mbps max?
    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.....
  • There's bells ringing in the back of my head about an article back in the '90s touting unreasonable information density using "volume holographic storage". It made a lot of nouse on the nets and turned out to be a scam. Is this round two?
    • OK, this is from 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 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
  • Over a hundred comments so far, and I can't find a SINGLE comment raving about the tremendous amount of pr0n that this device can store!

    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!")
  • All of these disc based media are limited to a RPM speed of 7200-10,000 before they basically tear themselves apart. Given that his beam size is roughly 1/10th the size of current, wouldn't that only translate to a gain of about 100X in storage capaicity? And if we accept his density claim, its gonna take a damn long time to read/write the whole disc.

  • What - everrrrrrrr (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ckedge ( 192996 ) on Sunday August 15, 2004 @12:17PM (#9974163) Journal
    .
    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.
  • I highly doubt this would ever get off the ground, even if they managed to create a disk that is stable and managed to produce a drive which can cope with the tolerances being 8 times tighter than a bluray drive the write speeds would be horrid.

    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
  • When DVD came out by the time it was affordable it was all but pointless (given the size of current hard drives). So I suppose that when this is affordable I guess the current hard drives will be 500 or 750 terrabytes. I'll stick to fibre channels arrays.(Ebay has enough of them)

    Anyone know where I buy a fibre-chanel to SATA RAID bridge board?

  • 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

  • This article fails to even touch upon the most important question: When?

    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

  • I mean: When can I REALLY buy it?

    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.

  • As the cost of mass storage and processing are approaching zero, various people are predicting [wired.com] that soon hardware [dotnetjunkies.com] will be free [redherring.com]. Only the software and content will cost money. But the shift towards content being the only source of profit will make copyright enforcement more and more important. This will mean tighter copyright laws and ever more draconian restrictions on consumer use of technology.

    But there's a much deeper shift going on. It's a transition from paying for things because we can't do them o
  • These "AHD" discs are nice and small, 70% the size of DVDs, at 100x the projected capacity of even the new DMDs [dvd-intelligence.com], which are 142x the size:info of AHDs. But they cost 180x the 1TiB DMDs (at $45:$0.25), for only 56% the cost:capacity. Crank up a 200-DVD changer [dvdchanger.com] capacity to 15x200=3TB with the new 15GB DMDs. Once they get to 1TiB multilayer discs for $0.25, like DVD-R, we're talking about a full 200TiB changer for $3500, $17:TiB. If you record 5.1 channel, 16bit, 48KHz surround sound, and panoramic stereo views
  • locked in some safe to not be used?

    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.

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