GE To Sample 500GB DVD-Size Discs Soon 179
siliconbits writes "GE Global Research announced earlier today that it has managed to cram up to 500GB worth of data on a standard DVD-size disc, an increase in storage density of roughly 100x. What's more, the tech arm of conglomerate General Electric Company says that the storage solution will record data at the same speed as Blu-ray discs while increasing storage capacity by 25 times. The Blu-ray Disk Association says that the commonly available 12x speed Blu-ray writers have a maximum writing speed of up to 400Mbps (or 50MBps) which means that in theory, it would take just over three hours to fill that new holographic hard disk. GE has confirmed that its R&D and licensing team will be sampling the media to qualified partners that may be interested in licensing the technology."
Just when I was hoping... (Score:2)
...that optical media was dead.
Re:Just when I was hoping... (Score:4, Interesting)
...that optical media was dead.
If it costs more per gigabyte than pocket sized hard drives, it's dead to me.
--
it does.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Tape is more practical for offsite for large amount of data. LTO 5 is 1.5TB raw, and if they made them bigger we would be buying them.
500Gb is nothing.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If they figure out a way to make an optical disc that is as fast, reliable, and infinitely rewritable as a hard disc...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It would to slow to use. Check out the burn times on even blu rays.
Re: (Score:2)
Not only that, it would over heat and it would cost a fortune. One of the reasons HDDs are cheap is that the read heads cost almost nothing to make. A laser capable of reading data is not so cheap.
There's been many attempts to make enclosed optical media, none of it was very successful due to speed, price and heat concerns - lasers do run hot.
Re: (Score:2)
But, like I said, thi
Re: (Score:2)
So use tar. Simple solution for a simple problem.
There are proprietary ways to do it, don't use them.
Medium on which the tar streams are stored (Score:2)
So use tar.
tar(1) just combines multiple files into one stream. How will you read this stream off the backup tape years later?
Re: (Score:3)
um... tar with the "x" option. Just like it's been done for the last 30 years.
I'd be more worried about the "tape" part than the "tar" part, since there's no guarantee the drive that could read your tape would exist in 30 years, let alone the tape itself still being readable.
Doing more with less (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
So use tar. Simple solution for a simple problem.
There are proprietary ways to do it, don't use them.
Two problems there:
- First, you haven't solved the complete problem. Specifically, you haven't dealt with the wide range of tape formats with dubious or no inter-compatability. I haven't tested interop issues between different LTO drives - there shouldn't be any but it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if there were.
- tar(1) is a great solution to the "I need to back up one server" problem. It's a dire solution to the "I need to back up 50 servers and they're all going to the same tape robot" problem -
Re: (Score:2)
1. you buy a bunch of drives at once.
2. As you said Amanda uses tar. You are still using tar. Bacula does indeed rock if you own a library.
Re:Just when I was hoping... (Score:5, Informative)
It's also insanely expensive. I can pick up a BluRay writer for about a hundred quid, and blank disks are about £1-2 for WORM disks and £3-5 for rewriteable ones. I couldn't find any LTO-5 drives, but I found an LTO-4 one... for over £2000. I did find LTO-5 tapes, but they cost about £85 each. So, LTO-5 works out about half the cost of BD-RE if you just factor in the cost of the media, but you need to back up a lot before it becomes cheaper overall. Cost of backing up 20TB with BD-RE is about £900. Cost for LTO: about £2500.
Sure, if you're backing up a few TB every day, LTO is good value, but for home users it definitely isn't. BD-RE is big enough for incremental backups, and a lot cheaper - not to mention the fact that BD-RE disks have been dropping in price for a long time. You need to back up about 50TB before LTO's cost per GB is similar to BD-RE, and that's a lot more than a lot of small businesses produce.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I swear by tape, use it every day, know first hand that optical media has a pile of reliability and aging issues but would never bother using tape at home or in some organisations with different requirements. Redundant copies of cheap media gets the job done if the volume is not huge and you are prepared to do a format shift every few years, or if the data doesn't need to last many years.
The real reason I use tape is because the data in my wor
Re: (Score:2)
The real reason I use tape is because the data in my workplace will still have a value in thirty years time
And you think tape guarantees that? I did some work for a company a few years ago that makes a lot of money out of people like you. Turns out that those tape drives that 'everyone's using and will always be available' stop being made, and wear out...
Re: (Score:2)
Better do something about that short attention span before pointing at "people like you"
I do have a pile of nine track reels in storage since the 1980s but they are theoretically a third copy made only for transport and belong to the companies that shipped them so I probably can't l
Re: (Score:2)
"I suppose you could assume that I was only writing about non-tape media when I wrote that but it's a bit of an odd conclusion to jump to."
"Redundant copies of cheap media gets the job done if the volume is not huge and you are prepared to do a format shift every few years, or if the data doesn't need to last many years."
Seems like the right conclusion to me. You go on to talk about tape which is not cheap media, is made for high volumes, and per your needs is needed to last for many years.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
An even better solution is to use a removable drive caddy and tray as I do.
Reasons include
Suprisingly, a decent drive caddy/tray system with drive doesn't cost more then an External USB based drive yet it's far faster. In fact, you can find enclosures that include 10/100/1000 ethernet ports and can be placed onto the home network as a NAS.
Re: (Score:2)
Or even better, use offsite backup. As long as you don't have Comcrap with asinine data caps you can use a service like Carbonite for about 60 bucks a YEAR and keep continuous incremental backups of pretty much anything.
Not trying to sound like a commercial or anything, but it does make sense. Keep either an eSata, USB, or removable drive for a local backup, and keep your offsite backup software running as well.
In case of a local server failure, you have a full backup on disk and can restore the most curr
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
"though improbably I can still suffer data loss from 2+ disk failure"
It's no that improbable. We just had three old systems lose their data due to multiple disk failures. All raid 5's that could only lose one drive at a time.
The problem with these systems is that all the drives tend to be bought at once to fill it up, and all the drives are rated for the same number of operational hours.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It basically is. This is comparable in size to an HDD, meaning it doesn't really outpace a RAID for storage potential, and most people do over-the-net transfers for all but the biggest chunks of data. This only makes sense as a replacement for backup tapes.
Re: (Score:2)
No it's not. You rarely ship media around in on HDs, and burning things to glass has legal ramifications.
Re: (Score:2)
This is way too small for backup tapes. LTO 5 is 1.5TB raw. If they made them bigger people would buy them.
Re: (Score:2)
LTO5 is unaffordable for most people, and even most small businesses. Another poster here commented that LTO5 doesn't make economic sense until you're backing up 40TB or more at a time. The drives alone cost thousands of dollars.
What this could be, IF the media price is low, is a good backup solution for home users and small businesses, instead of having to simply buy spare hard drives as backup media. Based on what BD-R drives cost, we should expect the drives to be no more than $100-200 early on, and i
Re: (Score:2)
Too slow. For a home user drive to drive is a better solution.
That poster is not counting the value of good backups to a business.
Re: (Score:2)
If the media is dirt cheap, the slowness might be fine. Just pop it in and leave it overnight. Having 2 or 3 spare HDs for backups is a little steep for a home user on a budget, but if this stuff is super cheap, then it might be fine for people on a budget who want to keep multiple backup sets.
I'm skeptical, however; BD-R has been out for a while and it's super expensive, and it seems like the companies who make these super-capacity optical technologies never really understand that the media needs to be s
Re: (Score:2)
These just won't be Mac compatible that's all.
Re: (Score:2)
If anything, this is more evidence of the imminent death of optical media(at least as we know them).
When everyone had CD drives it was generally easy to use a disc from one location in another.
Then some people got DVD discs, and for a while there were a lot of people who didn't have a DVD drive. If you brought a DVD from one place to another there was no guarantee you'd be able to use it.
Then we got to a point when most people had DVD drives, and it was generally easy to take a DVD from one place to another
Re: (Score:2)
Incompatible formats, lack of portability, lack of rewritability, fragility, and overall inconvenience in terms of storage are what are putting an end to optical media.
The core problem really just comes down to price. Lack of rewritability is a non-issue when discs are cheap. Fragility also not much of an issue if discs are cheap and lack of compatibility would go away if the things would be cheap enough to become standard part on any PC. But as it is right now you have BluRays that are more expensive then DVD+R and more expensive then USB HDD, while providing essentially no real advantage, so no wonder that they haven't taken off.
The only advantage that optical media sti
Re: (Score:2)
BD-R is still something like $0.25/GB. Horribly expensive compared to little 2.5" external drives which are about $0.12 to $0.14 per GB. You don't have to divide your data up into little 25GB chunks or deal with switching disks 20x to store 500GB. Most machines have USB ports, not many machines have B
Re: (Score:2)
That's weird, I was hoping the opposite, that someone would finally come out with a cheap, disposable media, like CD-R and DVD-R, that could replace actual hard drives as a backup or mass storage media. This new technology looks like it might fit the bill.
The question is how cheap the media will be. For instance, we already have BD-R with 25GB/disc, but they're quite expensive, and if you're trying to back up a 1TB hard drive, it's cheaper to just go buy a second 1TB hard drive and use that for your backu
Re: (Score:2)
Won't ever be. In a few decades, the dominant storage methods are more likely going to be some form of (holographic) optical memory and flash.
(Though I don't think the disc form will survive, because the surface is too exposed. Higher density will make it even less durable. It's more likely going to be embedded in sticks or cards, which are also less fragile and more compact.)
Incorrect claim 100x! (Score:5, Insightful)
Standard blu-ray discs, which are the same size already store 50GB and there are already blu-ray solutions that are supposed to store multiple times that. So, at most 10x, certainly nowhere near 100x!
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
It's even smaller than a 5 1/4" floppy to be precise, since CD format is 120mm / 25.4 mm/in = 4.72".
Can you imagine?: "Please insert disc 372,685 of 399,999"
Re: (Score:2)
There's a difference. Just about everyone these days has a DVD burner. They're $20 new, and most computers come with them, even laptops.
Blu-ray, however, even though it's been out a while, has had about as much uptake as the Iomega 250MB Zip drives. It's not really a de-facto standard, because no one has them. You can buy the burners somewhat cheaply now (though still much more than DVD burners), but they're not common. Typical computers don't come with them standard. The media are simply too expensiv
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
How many times have you seen a DL DVD-R? I've never seen one myself, except on store shelves. The cost for a DL DVD-R is MUCH more than 2x the cost of a regular DVD-R, so no one buys them, except people wanting to make a faithful 1-disc copy of a DVD movie. With everyone going to media players now, that's probably fading out fast.
The 100x claim is perfectly valid, because it's comparing to the dominant optical data storage media currently in use. No one uses DL DVD-Rs, BD-Rs, BDXLs, or any such thing in
But... (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
There's only one.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Not impressed (Score:3)
500GB divided by 50 GB == 100 times??? This must be that new math I heard about. Maybe it's time to do a refresher course at my local college.
(1) I thought Pioneer has already developed a twenty-layer bluray disc that stored 500 GB. So not that big of a deal for GE to do the same.
(2) Optical media will not be dead if ISPs keep putting 150 GB (i.e. three-to-six hd movies) limitations on their internet lines.
(3) Optical discs allow me to KEEP the movie for life. Downloads do not, thanks to DarmnRM.
Re:Not impressed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
(2) Optical media will not be dead if ISPs keep putting 150 GB (i.e. three-to-six hd movies) limitations on their internet lines.
So it'll be a US thing like the imperial system, I guess. /speaking from a 60/60 Mbps fiber connection @ $100/mo, no caps. So I am slightly ahead of the curve but almost all large, new buildings now have fiber. They'll deliver me 800/800 Mbps here if I wanted to pay $1100/month, the last mile is no longer the limit.
Re: (Score:2)
So it'll be a US thing like the imperial system, I guess.
I get it already. The United States is lagging behind in telecommunications and can't be fixed from within. Have you any tips on qualifying for legal immigrant status in a more "civilized" country?
Re: (Score:2)
I don't own anything BlueRay for precisely the DRM that they are putting on all the devices. Not interested, Fuck Off.
Now if this 500GB disc from GE does not contain any measures like this... and they have readers that they can install into media players, I will be very interested in doing so. That's probably anywhere from 130-150 DVD's on a single disc. Make 3 or 4 backups and keep one in a safety deposit box and you will have all your media (music, pictures, and movies) backed up pretty well.
I would l
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, that's what they did but it's stupid. When Intel comes with a new chip, they don't announce it's a leap of 100x speed!!!*
*Compared to a 10 year old P4.
Plus the same write speed as Blu-Ray is pretty bad. It should have scaled up. Oh well, it's something.
Re: (Score:2)
(over the capacity of a punched card)
Re: (Score:2)
But that's not the current standard, they might as well reference 5.25" floppy discs if they are trying to inflate their breakthrough.
For consumer optical storage, it is. Bluray might be the big thing for content producers (though I think DVDs still out sell them), most people still use DVDs for back-up, when they aren't using platters. I don't actually know anyone who bought a Bluray burner, much less anyone who uses one. The hardware is expensive, the media is expensive, it isn't wildly popular (for data or PCs), so you can't share it as well.
There are other issues, since it doesn't work like it should thanks to restrictive and ubiqu
Holographic Disk (Score:2)
GE can take their time (Score:2)
I am not buying a new disk player for 10 years at least.
Obligatory... (Score:2, Funny)
I guess I'm going to have to buy the White album again
LOL (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
How about a smaller disc? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
The way I see it, the only way this technology will really take off is if they make it cheap and convenient. There is little need for 500GB of portable general purpose optical storage - portable HDs work fine.
Sure there is, for backing up your TB+ hard drives. It seems ridiculous that to back up a 2TB HD, I basically need to buy a second 2TB hard drive, or multiples if I want to keep multiple backups.
Hard drives are cheap if you're just buying one, but as a backup media, they leave a lot to be desired.
We c
Re: (Score:2)
Hard drives are cheap if you're just buying one, but as a backup media, they leave a lot to be desired.
Not really. They're cheap per GB. They can be read and written fairly quickly (~100 MB/s). The apparatus for reading back your backups is self contained - usb will be around for a long damn time. They're sealed and don't degrade much over time (unlike high density optical media). And you can back up 2 TB of data without changing media 40 times.
Re: (Score:2)
Here here!
I am pretty careful about keeping my original media, and retaining the tag files from my installation and such on my home machines. So I really only need to backup my home directory. Within that I am pretty organized as well. There is lots of stuff I keep because I can that I don't need and would not cry over if something happened to it. The stuff I do want to keep either because it would take lots time re-rip and prepare form the original media or because its my own content (software I wrote
Like MiniDisc? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
3.5" small disks? (Score:2)
Small write-once read-only media? Make the 3.5" small disks a fully support format - and I might get slightly interested. Because the 5.25" disks are f****ing huge by all modern standards. Even 3.5" might be too largish. UMD-like media (2.5" or smaller; with a case) if it is still above 10GB, might be interesting too.
If you are again with the same old 5.25" shit - do not even bother. Blu-ray - disks and drives - just got sufficiently cheap to be even considered. Your tech, with the current download/clou
Re: (Score:2)
I know the capacity is small, but I think the best format so far are the Sony Mini Discs. Too bad discontinued. The cases didn't take more space than the disc and for some of them you slid and snapped it in. No Scratching the media to worry about.
Re: (Score:2)
I agree. It's great that they've found ways to improve data density, but that can just as easily be used for reducing the size of the disks as for putting more data on them. Especially with today's miniaturization of everything, some sort of microdisk that could hold at least dvd-quality video would be much better. Then you could have a reader built into a laptop, tablet, or even cellphone.
Just great, now I get to buy Star Wars again... (Score:2)
With the state of media companies today, I dread new physical media now. Just means that they will use this as an excuse to sell you the same garbage you already bought them, and to use this as an excuse to flex their IP muscle. Can't wait for Star Wars the definitive GE super extended edition!
Anyway its all about cost, how much are these suckers going to cost, and how much is the burner. Wait and see. Might at least be a legitimate backup option for consumer PC's eventually if not expensive. Still, even wi
Re: (Score:3)
Looking over the first few comments to this story, I'm hardly the only one.
Re: (Score:2)
All the people that are still employed at GE and still creating new technologies can buy cloths and food, as do the people that buy their goods from.
Re: (Score:2)
the problem is, stop number 2 or 3 on that chain is China and or India
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The government bailed out General Motors, not General Electric.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, GE got a lot a "Government Help" in the form of green energy regulations that favor them and penalize others and sweet tax deals.
GE is the definition of "Crony Capitalism".
A lot of regulations are written by these large companies like GE and Monsanto and their lobbyists to drive the middle sized and small operators out by making them comply with ridiculous regulations that are easier to comply with if you are a large company with a herd of full time lawyers. This kills their competition and allows th
Re: (Score:2)
i wish they'd insure my subsidiary debts (Score:2)
because then my interest rate would go to 0
which would be like getting free money
from the taxpayer.
if only there were some word to describe that phenomenon...
Re: (Score:2)
in which factual errors get rated higher than (Score:2)
actual facts.
====
GE is GE Capital, which is a gigantic fucking hedge fund.
If the taxpayers had not bailed out big finance, almost all hedge funds would have collapsed overnight.
Re: (Score:3)
When you say "bailed them out", to be clear, you mean that they took advantage of tax incentives, by presumably doing things we were trying to incentivize that cost GE money (like green initiatives)?
GE Capital (Score:2)
When you say "bailed them out", to be clear, you mean that they took advantage of tax incentives, by presumably doing things we were trying to incentivize that cost GE money (like green initiatives)?
I can't be sure but I expect that the GP was referring to GE Capital, the financing component of GE.
Re: (Score:2)
Why the hell are you even paying for an internet connection? That's just messed up.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And 5 pounds, or even 5 dollars here in the USA (which I think is a typical-to-high price for them here), is still severely overpriced when you compare to the cost per gigabyte of a hard drive. For storing large amounts of data (such as HD backups), BD-R discs make zero sense. You're much better off just buying a second HD.
Re: (Score:2)
Why split your data up into 25GB chunks when you can just load everything onto a 2.5" drive, then make a backup onto a 2nd drive.
Simple: I produce about 1GB a month of new data. If I took a lot of photographs, it would still be under 25GB. It's easy to burn a disk containing the new data for this month and pop it in the post to a relative. You've now got cheap off-site backups. Oh, and one of the main reasons for backups is to protect yourself against theft. When thieves broke into my father's house, they concentrated on high-value items. They took his laptop and external disk, but they left his DVD backups...
Re: (Score:2)
1) Wow, I didn't realize that capacity existed yet.
2) I thought it was bad when drives had 3 or 4 different speed ratings, but I guess that was nothing:
Pioneer BDR-206MBK - BDXL drive - Serial ATA - 24x (CD) / 8x (DVD) / 6x (BD) 24x (CD) / 8x (DVD±R) / 8x (DVD±R DL) / 6x (BD-R) / 6x (BD-R DL) / 4x (BD-R QL) / 4x (BD-R TL) 24x (CD) / 6x (DVD-RW) / 8x (DVD+RW) / 2x (BD-RE) / 2x (BD-RE DL) / 2x (BD-RE TL) - Internal [google.com]
Re: (Score:2)
How many people do you know that have BDXL discs and burners? Heck, I've never even heard of such a thing, just the regular and DL BD-Rs, and even there, I've never actually seen one outside of a store. No one uses them, because the media cost is way too high.
What kind of moron would spend $$$ on 128GB BDXL discs (and a special burner) when they can just buy a 1TB HD for $50? How much would it cost to use BDXL to back up a 1TB hard drive (you'd need 8 discs)? Is it more than $50? If so, then it's a stu
Re: (Score:2)
A good backup strategy with incremental backups is to make a fresh backup every so often, and then make incremental backups at shorter intervals in between. Then you can keep 2 or 3 of the full backup sets, plus the incrementals, and have insurance in case your most recent full set fails. You should never have only one full backup set if you're doing incrementals.
18 hours may sound ridiculous for backing up your 3TB HD, but how long would it take to make a 3TB backup onto a second 3TB HD? I don't think t
Re: (Score:2)
You mean slightly more. It's either 4.3GB or 4.7GB, depending on whether you prefer the old or new definition of "gigabyte".
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps a bigger question: Is it a double layer disc that will suffer from cracked spindles all the time? Never had that problem with my own DVDs, but that doesn't mean I don't like renting stuff from the library.
Another big question: Will the surface be made of some fancy nano-self-healing polymer, or will it still get scratched to s***?