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Hardware

Penny-size 180 Gigabits CDROMs 159

Posted by Hemos from the fun-with-disc-size dept.
Noel writes "Princeton University electrical engineer Stephen Chou who directs the NanoStructures Laboratory, has created CDs that can concentrate data 800 times more efficiently than current discs. " Tiny storage is my friend.
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Penny-size 180 GB CDROMs More

Penny-size 180 GB CDROMs

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  • This is an interesting device, but I'm leery of trying to use an AFM probe for readout. They're fragile, so I would suspect that the mean time before failure for these devices will be less than spectacular.


    This is only one of many possible high-density storage technologies on the horizon. The article itself contains a link to many others; read them, and see what other interesting things are going on.

  • I'm glad someone else saw this as well... 180 Gbits on a penny, or 22.5 GBytes. Kinda takes the wind out of the sails, I know. Gadzooks, what am I saying??? I'm brazenly spewing "giga" here, and I'm getting ready to say "IBM MicroDrive..." Uh, not even remotely close...

    Now, on to more serious matters... I saw an article a few months back in Popular Science about this same discovery / researcher. PopSci's website is completely blank on searching for info, and I don't have read access to my archives at the moment. (Sorry.)

    I'd like to know what kind of transfer rate this device would be capable of... Transfer rates are turning into the limitation that we need to address, instead of raw storage...

    Anyone remember Men in Black? Agent K standing in their 'alien tech museum' and saying "This little thing is gonna replace CDs in a few years... Looks like I'm going to have to buy the 'White' album again!"

    My, how fast fiction is becoming reality these days!

  • divide 70 by percent growth and you get the doubling period. which is currently about 1.2 years. 6 years is then 32 times increase, 9.6 years is 256. But that is the rate for hard drives. Anyway, these sort or dries aren't writeable--ever. And with desktop terrabyte hard drives, why will you care for a non rewritable easily lost CD-ROM?
  • Even it if it is only 5 bits.....which I doubt.....that's 5 bits of unrecoverable data. That could be 5 bits on my brand-spankin new BEOS v.8.0 SSCD..right in the middle of somethign really important=a total loss to the SSCD.

    --Ben
  • Even it if it is only 5 bits.....which I doubt.....that's 5 bits of unrecoverable data. That could be 5 bits on my brand-spankin new BEOS v.8.0 SSCD..right in the middle of somethign really important=a total loss to the SSCD.
  • With something this sensitive to shock, penny-sized is probably pretty close to as big as you get. Somebody else mentioned that bigger disks wobble more. Definitely a problem. I would guess that if you want bigger, it will have to be some kind of disk array, like a bunch of pennies laid out next to each other on the table. Maybe like a caddy system that holds 18 disks instead of 1, and then it would be big enough to not lose. And maybe even big enough to hold Windows 2008 :)
  • Delivered in a really big box, where you REALLY have to search hard for that tiny box containing the CD. Finally, you find the cd, try to put your thumb on the thing in the middle so you can get it out (the special tool made for this purpose you lost during the first week you just got the drive), but the thumb's too big.

    After a few minutes you get it out (managing to drop it on the floor first of course). "Now if I could just find that eject button, it's supposed to be here somewhere...". A while later, you give up and eject it using the OS (Windows 2007?).

    Then you're greeted with the install screen, after lots of tiring, pointless texts you don't want to read, you're asked to input the 192-digit serial number, found on the back of the CD cover. Luckily, you're a nerd, so you do have a microscope, but it isn't easy to read it. After about half an hour of trying, you get it right and reach the "real" install screen.

    Recommended install: 100 GB
    Full install: 140 GB

    Uh oh, time to free up some diskspace...

    And so on.
  • Transfer rate isn't limiting. It is possible (and IBM has done it) to make arays of 1000's of AFM read heads, with integrated electronics. These are lithographically patterned and etched, so don't present terrible difficulties. It is even possible to pattern a LED or laser onto the reader, and then couple an output fibre to that. Rates can be amazing.

  • approximate capacity of a cd-sized disk: (Score:3)

    by conform ( 55925 ) on Friday July 30, 1999 @07:15AM (#1774313)
    assuming that the unusable portion at the center of a CD has a radius of 1.25 inches, i get:


    ((5.25/2)^2*pi - (1.25)^2*pi) * 400 / 8

    (21.6475 - 4.9087) * 50

    ~837 GigaBYTES per CD.
  • HEY!!

    Just as soon as I get done posting this deep and intensely researched post, TacoBoy goes and makes the point moot by changing the subject line! =P

    Whyyoulittle...!

    For the record, this story's original topic was "Penny-size 180 GB CDROMs"

  • It's great that read-only storage devices are improving by leaps and bounds, and even read-write storage is making good progress, but will any of this be useful if we don't have similar advances in miniaturizing processing power?

    That is, a 400 Gig disk in your wristwatch won't do you much good if you don't have the processing power to make it useful (the example of making voice recordings seems to neglect how the expensive process of encoding voice for transfer to disk might be handled).

    As well, I'm sure there will be the usual irresistable pressures from existing CD makers to postpone implementing such technology until they can figure out how to make money off it...

  • :-)

    If people ever design an interface to allow people to implant "skill chips" or anything along those lines -- a chip/neural interface, or "jack" in certain parlance -- they're going to need to store lots of read-only data in whatever chip or cartridge that's used. Or, as it turns out, really tiny CD. Unless, of course, people would plug external drives into themselves...
  • Nah. You are giving M$ to much credit. They will ship each part of office 2009 on seperate disks. One for Word, one for Excel, etc. You will need to enter a DIFFERENT 192 digit serial number for each one. Also. those serial numbers... you need to convert them from decimal to binary before you enter them. And if you enter it wrong.... mad NSA people show up at your door.

    Scarry huh?


    ---------------
  • I saw the paragraph where the possibility of single-chip AFMs was put forth... You're right, multiple heads would pull the data off noticably faster. Still, it this 'penny' form factor persists, just how many heads will they be able to fit over it?

    Personally, I'd like to see something along the 3.5 inch size. Small enough to be stiff and stable enough that the spinning disk doesn't wipe out your AFM read heads, and large enough to hold all the info that you'll ever need for your whole life! (Yeah, right! Give me one, I guarantee that I can fill it up!)

  • This may be hard to do. AFM's can only read so fast. The larger
    your outside diameter, the larger the velocity at the edges,
    the harder it is to read. Personally, I am not so sure this tech is
    feasible: dip it in hard water once and the residue will mess up
    your data, touch it and your fat will screw up AFM force calibration,
    and don't even think about scratching it in any way. This may only
    be feasible for sealed systems, like a wristwatch.
  • Unicode uses 16 bits and is supposed to be the new standard. It supports 65536 characters. Chinese and various other languages are fully supported.
  • I beleive a wrist watch type thing would be very nice to accompany the micro disk. As for the interface I would love somthing like on the TV show Earth: Final Conflict, you know a holographic user interface type thing? That would solve the interface problem. Or even like a Global, a little pocket sized thing with a slide out screen.

    :/ Well how about we let the technology for thoes catch up to us. :)
  • Why not make a normal sized CD that holds obsecene amounts of data? Now *that* I would like.
  • There used to be mini-sized audio CDs, maybe 3" in diameter. Have no idea whether they work for CD-ROMs

    They do. I once got a demo of some game on one. If you look in your cd drive, you'll see a small indentation, which they fit in.
    Cheers,

    Rick Kirkland
  • America Online gives out their software now on these miniature CD-ROMs.
    ..................................@ @
  • That's basically what would happen with this could hold like 50Tb or something. I would hate cdroms that small could loose them really easily.
  • that's what i like about cd's ... they are small enough to be portable but big enough that i don't lose them so much ... don't make them the size of a penny! ... i'll never find them ... a penny? ... cripes ... i lose that in the sofa ... those fall out of the wholes in my pockets ... that sounds awfull
    -
  • I just picked up a slew of this kind of 3.5 inch CD media. It really kicks ass! I'm selling singles of one of my friend's track's on them. They're actually pretty cheap if you manage to find them (or a CD-R that will burn them). Damn cool. I remember seeing a fly-by-night teeny-bopper band putting out singles on this kind of media.

  • This sounds really neat, but... It should be ready in 5-10 years, and it can store 800 times the data. Hmm. Gee, this sounds like what we can expect from normal exponential growth, eh?
  • There are two problems with having 32bits/byte.
    One is that your neo-ascii table would need, let's
    see...2^32 ~= 4e9 characters, 40 chars/column,
    3columns/page, 500pgs/book, 25books/encyclopedia
    set, 2encyclopedia sets/shelf, 6shelves/book shelf
    .... about 200 large book shelves to hold it. 16
    bit/byte would "only" take a 500 page book. While
    i suppose 16 bit is still reasonable considering
    the benifits of supporting chinese and such, 32 is
    just rediculous. And either way, it is much more unweildy than a 4 page ascii table. The second problem: i dont want to quadruple the size of my text files. In fact, if it were reasonable to use 6bit bytes for 64 characters, i'd be happy to use the 25% compression. Our hard drives have not progressed to the point where we can just throw space away yet, i have some 8meg text files that i would rather were 6megs and really dont want to be 32megs.
  • I personally would consider 180GB to be an obscene amount of data. especially if it fits inside my watch.
  • Currently a CD holds 650 MB of data

    650MB * 800 = 520000 MB or 520 GB

    My standard (POS) ruler measured a 2 3/8" radius disc and a 7/8" radius 'unuseable' center.

    Math (Area of a circle = pi*radius^2):
    pi * 2.375^2 = 17.721 sq.in.
    pi * 0.875^2 = 2.405 sq.in.
    17.721 - 2.405 = 15.316 sq.in. ('useable' area on a CD)
    650MB / 15.316 sq/in = 42.44MB sq.in.

    So, a typical 650MB CD holds 42.44MB/sq.in.
    800x's this is 270 gigabits/sq.in.
    (42.22 * 800 = 33776 MB/sq.in = 33.776GB/sq.in * 8 bits/byte = 270 gigabits/sq.in.)

    400 gigabits/sq.in. / 8 bits/byte = 50 gigabytes/sq.in.
    That would make 765.8GB CD sized disc (245.8GB LARGER that 800x a CD)

    So 800 times translates into 270.208 gigabits a square inch. (~130 gigbits/sq.in. SMALLER than 400)

    Conclusion(s):
    400 gigabits a square inch is ~1178 times, or
    800 times is ~270 gigabits a square inch.

    a) my math is wrong (most likely)
    b) ... ???
    c) all of the above
    d) none of the above

    Disclaimers: I know this is an old post but I was reading through and thought I'd try the math. Also, please excuse the scatterbrained and redundant presentation.
  • 180 GB in a wristwatch sounds great, but what about the physical shock factor? IANANTS (I Am Not A NanoTech Specialist), but what are the chances of a "head crash" on a device this size?
    ________________________

  • We will be able to use lasers to read the data off of these structures after all:

    Light Microscopy: Resolution beyond the lightwave barrier [www.mpg.de]

    Hopefully this will quell the reliability issues raised elsewhere regarding these devices.

    It will be practical to use these devices in very small ruggedized devices by use of an array of solid state lasers. This will allow very fast, highly parallelized reading. [washington.edu]

  • Would that be a real computer or just a storage system that is inside that watch? I don't think I could type on something that small easily.
  • Think about it... 180 gigabits = 22.5 giga bytes.. an mp3 player that could hold enough music to play continuously for like a year of non stop music.

    Lets say that a grain of sand is about
    0.0001 mm in diameter, and for the purposes of this examination it is round and close enough top be flat. Therefore it will cover
    pi* D^2/4 = 0.00000000785 mm^2 of the disc (Asuming the AFM doesn't push it out of the way.)
    400gbits/645 mm^2 (1 inch = 25.4 mm, in^2 = 25.4^2 mm^2) ~= 62015503 bits per mm^2
    therefore 1 partical of dust would destroy about
    ..

    Oh hell with it. Alot. These things would need clean room conditions (probably better) to be any good. Which tends to suggest putting them in vacuum sealed containers. But that means the AFM would have to be packaged in there too. Somehow I don't see these being in stores anytime in the next like 10 years anyways.

  • because... (Score:3)

    by Misha ( 21355 ) on Friday July 30, 1999 @07:27AM (#1774340) Homepage
    ...with a cd this small, i could get a boxed-set worth of the backstreet boys and literally shove it up their asses, seeing as how that's where their music came from.

    *cough* i apologize for that outburst, but i am just sick of their annoying voices on the radio.

    seriously though, i for one would like a storage space that small. a normal sized cd would never fit into a pilot sized computer. with the penny-sized media we can finally make the desktops and the palmtops closer in accessiblity. plus, didn't that russian E2K processor supposedly would provide a desktop-power chip for a pocket-sized computer? (i seem to remember reading that in russian on a page at www.el2000.ru). normal cd's are a little too big. minidiscs are almost the perfect size to carry around, but still they are too big for palmtops. perhaps they could half that size without making the discs too easy to lose.

    also, if we make normal sized CD's with fast read (/write?) access, then we will give all the more reason for microsloth to bloat, bloat, bloat, and bloat some more.


  • Wow (Score:2)

    by Beached ( 52204 )
    This would be cool. It'll make good use of all those piggy banks. Just replace those pennies with little mini-disks and instead of 5 dollars in pennies I have 87 Terabits of storage :)
  • Well... if you expand the disc a bit and put in a hole, you can put it into a type of caddy system.
  • I think the 3.5" floppy is the best size, or maybe just a little smaller... 3" or 2.8"?
  • After reading the article, I got the feeling that the technology to read these penny cds is sort of far off from the mainstream consumer. I mean if scientists are using the technology now to push around atoms (which conjures up images of guys in labcoats in a room full of equipment), is it reasonable to expect that same technology to not only get cheap enough to mass produce, but also fit into a watch?
  • This was posted 7/27/98 ...1998..I imagine, a year has passed, and that we could maybe even store more now. =] I agree with the previous post of losing the CDs in the couch though. Hah. Though, I would still fear the cost of such a drive to read (Or write? Eek) to such medium. Anyone figure about how much we could store if the platter was the size of a standard CD? Or how much could be stored in a nice washer-sized disk array? *grins*
    Finally, when people call and ask how to download the internet, we can say "Go buy this nifty nano-CDR" ..
  • And yes, 32X is still rather slow.

    I thought 50x was the king: Asus 50x review [sharkyextreme.co.kr].

  • I don't know how i feel about a wrist watch size computer, but it would make a really kick ass radio/cd player type thing. You could easily fit a headphone jack into a wrist watch. Or just put the player into the headphones and drop the disc into the side. It would be very cool indeed.

    Also, wrt the mechanical components supposedly IBM is working on a read for one of these that is the size of a computer chip, so that really isn't an issue. Also, w/ something this small the power requirements would be very low. The really scarey part, is it kinda looks realistic.
  • Yes and no.

    For typical consumer use, you'd just try to scale this up to a mini-disc or CD size. As several people have pointed out, it's a good tradeoff of portable vs. large enough to not lose easily.

    However, I can see penny-sized (or smaller) disks in embedded applications as a very nice thing indeed, assuming that the drive can be made small, too...

  • Why waste CPU cycles on compression? With this much space you could store audio and video in uncompressed form. Just dump everything through an ADC and write it to the disk. This would eliminate all of the compression artifacts that you get with MP3 and MPEG.
  • But with data storage space this plentiful, actually losing one of these cds would amount to losing about a penny's worth of data. Just make sure you keep backups of anything more important than a penny. Of course, you could point out that you would have to have a burner for this to hold true, but since we are speculating five to ten years down the road, let's just assume we can all afford read/writables by then.

  • Re:Real Technology (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Well, something like this could be packaged in an advanced hard casing or something like that, sorta like mini-discs. They could develope an impact resistant, water-proof casing to enclose this small cds in...
    If this happens, then they wouldn't be as hard to loose, and you wouldn't have to worry about scratching em

    -OnyxArrow (I keep on forgetting my password)
  • That's why slot-loading CD/DVD drives are your friend. Of course, then someone will think it's a toaster slot...
  • First off, these products will not be out to market in less than ten years, depending on how many different companies try and enforce proprietary standards and how long the lawsuits take.

    Second of all, imagine the horrible skip protection on these!!! The "needle" is floating a few micrometers off the surface of the disc - If you kicked the table it was sitting on then KA-CHUNGG, you'd have a big fat dent in your SSCD (SuperSubCompactDisc) and a bent player head (I bent my Wookie). At least with current CD technology the laser has a few mm's of clearance from the disc surface.

    Cool story, and it's a sure thing that this electron-beam imprinting will be used in future storage. Keep on working, boys!

  • Nad! That's 15 to 20 movies, you can barely put a Arnold collection in it. It's not enoght to contain the variety favorite of Starwar re-release though ^_^. Personally I would like to have a media that can actually store fair amound of PBS documentaries.


    CY
  • Nah, the Kenwood? TrueX 52x is a little faster. Moreover, it's better because instead of spinning much faster it reads multiple tracks(?) in parallel, so the drive isn't as noisy as many other fast drives. Combine the multi-read tech with faster rates and 100-200x shouldn't be out of reach.

    Note that with a smaller disk, higher RPMs should be practical, with current CDs rotational imbalances are a problem with going faster. I just hope that if they do an incompatible size, they finally put them in cases a la 3 1/2" floppies so we can write on them, put stickers on them, avoid scratching them, etc.
  • Of course, then someone will think it's a toaster slot...
    If toast was that small to start with.....
  • with LP's you could play two at once. but the top one had to be sufficiently thin and elastic (back in the day when they made them on magazine covers and other paper think materials), and the bottom one was prefereably hard and thick. that way you could get the interference of the two. the hardness of the lower provided an easy way of distinguishing which one is which. bacically the sound of the top one faded (vibrated sortof) very noticably because it would lay slightly unevenly but the sound of the lower one sound be strong but deader than usual. kind of like listening someone talk through a cloth. i never tried it with three or more records.

    i realize this is offtopic but perhaps the AFM head could pick up two layers with appropriate decoding wavelet employed. although there would still be a huge step to go from analog to digital. i don't know anything else about the subject. not a physicist. 8)


  • All this talk about tiny CD's being easy to lose and stuff aside, imagine using a laptop to serve 16 penny sized cd's to a LAN. That would be killer. Also imagine how much data (although static) you could fit in a mega-tower server with daisy-chained SCSI penny CD drives. Penny CD's would probably find a good market with laptop folks though, you could fit a lot more nifty stuff in there without the huge tray and everything...

  • What you are suggesting is the conditions that we have to operate our current fixed disks in. Break the seal on a hard disk and see how long it lasts.
  • I'm not quite sure about some of these mass data storage devices- having 50 megs of data the size of the dust landing on your storage medium would be catastrophic.

    Granted, this is a hard drive and operates in a sealed environment, but still, corruption would be so much more absolute, pending there was a failure at all.
  • I think that had more to do with athetics then anything else. would *you* like to haul around an 8" zip disk? I wouldn't. I mean look at lazer disks, no one ever got into them, dispite the wonderfull video quality. they were just *to* large. I personaly would like to see 2.5inch disks myself, like Sony MDs. who knows why he chose a penny, maybe he just thought it would be a good size, and that 180gb was plenty....
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • Wouldn't imperfections on the data side have a greater effect if there's such incredibly increased data density? I mean, a small scratch, dust particle, fingerprint is no big deal on a regular CD, but you'd think something like this would be much more suscepible to it.

    I don't know about you, but I'm fairly reckless with my CDs, and sometimes just plain clumsy. I'd hate to ruin a $100 piece of software because I drop it on the floor, resulting in a small scratch. (or fingerprint picking it back up)

    What is the current method of error correction (for lack of a better term...I'm not an optics expert) for CDs and could it be applied to something with a much greater density of data?



  • Maybe, but people hauled around LP records for quite a while...
  • as is, you would think the seek rates would be horrible at best... pick up the needle, track to the right spot, wait , wait, drop....

    Granted, it doesn't actually "touch" the surface, but I'm sure you probably couldn't just zoom this across the whole surface... ???
  • Mom: "Junior, I just found this right next to the remote. I loaded it up and it was 'Cheerleader Orgy Fest 2004'. What do you have to say about it?"

    Junior: "It's not mine! One of the guys lost it here when we were watching HDTV! I swear!"

    -Chris
  • Ok, assuming that these little suckers come out in 10 years. What would it be good for besides whatever movie formats the future holds (3D/Holographic/etc). Even at the rate M$ is going, I doubt even they will be able to produce bloated software that would not waste any space on these things. Maybe it'd be useful if we could write to them but how long till that's possible (20 years?!??!).

    It'd be a waste of money to make them the size of a CD/DVD because almost no one would be able fill even a penny sized one. What do yuo think?

    ***But could you imagine all episodes of every Star-Trek ever made on 1 disk?

    -capt.
  • >If toast was that small to start with.....

    Matzoh, maybe? :-)
  • well, I've got 1.03 gigabytes of MP3s on my computer, and I've "only" got a 31hour playlist (although not all of them are on the playlist) you would have about 16days worth of music without repeat.

    Of couse *any* mp3 player could go "nonstop" :)
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • That would be great if these were writable like CD-R, but they aren't. They must be pressed, according to the article. They aren't read/written by laser, so you can't "burn" them.
  • One way to characterize software is to think of it as a compression of the near-infinite into a finite space. You have at every point in the use of a program a good number of parallel paths you could choose. Some of these paths could arguably be unrolled and stored on a disk this big, instead of determining the value at run time.

    For some calculations, it's very speed sensitive, so slow drive access would potentially eliminate this sort of size-speed tradeoff.

  • Well, you could space them 5-10 microns apart, I believe. that would be 100 heads per millimeter. It is possible to do better, but not too much. An array could be made with an effective 1 micron spacing, or 1000 per millimeter. Perhaps smaller. So transfer would be very, very, very large. However, you couldn't write to it. It is a "press only" solution.
    Can't put your whole life on it
  • Nah, They'll think it's a coin slot


    Tech Support: May I help you?

    Customer: Yah. My computer won't turn on

    TS: Is it plugged in?

    C: Of course! And I fed it two quarters --TWO!-- and it still won't start up!

    --

  • Nope, the slot-loading ones are no good. A few weeks ago I was helping a coworker set up Linux on a box with a slot-loading CD drive. We were making a boot disk, and he reached down to put the disk in. Accidentally missed the floppy drive and stuck it in the CD drive instead. Then we got to spend the next half hour trying to get the floppy back out without ruining anything. :)
  • If they're not writeable, then they're all empty. Perhaps you meant not re-writeable?


    Not writeable, period, as far as I can tell from the article - at least in home drives. You would stamp them in the production plant, and that would be it. The drive reads out the waviness of the plastic coating the metal substrate - there's no easy way to etch that yourself (you can't even use lasers to carve it, as the feature size is much too small).

  • I believe that 3 inch CDs should be the new storage standard. Why?

    1. Work in existing CD-ROM Drives (well, most)
    2. Small enough drives for 3.5 inch drive bays (if needed)
    3. Small enough medai to fit in pocket easily
    4. A format that can be evolved easily (recordable, high density, etc)
    5. Media will not break easy like a Zip or floppy design.
    6. Many more I am sure.

    Also, how come nobody has made a DVD drive that is also a CD-RW? Not DVD-ROM, I mean CD-RW. That is what I would buy.

    EC
  • How long ago was it that CD's were pressed, so you couldn't write them because they just didn't work that way? I dobut that this technology would take long to become writable, if I remember right one of the companies was working on making ones of these that use AFM's to write it in the first place. The only reason this guy's were better was because he could make a bunch of them faster.
    -Ted
  • fingerprints??? Wouldnt that destroy the ability of the atomic tip to read the CD electrostatically? I know what you're thinking--just put it in a case that the drive can open to read it---but then its still susceptible to dust and foreign particles in the air, which are HUGE in scale compared to the data on the disc. So, the only application I see for these devices is in sealed hard drives :-(

    VFV
    Time is honies
  • The article says 400 gigabits per square inch, or 180 on a disc the size of a penny.

    Adjust accordingly.

  • Well it would have to be extremely air tight to avoid a head crash due to foreign particles and such. Wouldn't trust it with my important stuff.
  • Tech Support: Thank you for calling, how may I help you?
    Customer: Yeah, this computer you sold me is crap.
    TS: What seems to be the problem?
    C: The cupholder is too @#$% small. What do you think I am, a #$%^ midget. How am I supposed to fit a Grande Tiazzi on one of these? Are you stupid or something?
  • Well *YOU* can't have one!
  • Not only that, but they're really, really small bits. Most unsatisfying.
  • *Exactly*. Nobody's complaining about CD sizes. I can hold 50 or so in a case the size of a hardcover book. I'm kinda spoiled though. I'm a big fan of CDs now that CD-R drives are so commonplace. I really don't give a damn about these new CD's though, until there's some way to burn information onto them. There's a little piece of me that wouldn't mind having the entire TSX-11 and Sunsite archives on a disk along with the 12 or so distros out there and all kinds of packages that are just floating around. Damn. For that matter, someone could take *every* Linux kernel ever created and put it on one CD.

    Yummy.

  • pick one up, all day long you'll have 180 gigs..

    Seriously though, I agree with the consensus that it needs to be larger sized, penny sized for the most part is pointlessly small for everyday use.. Only becomes harder to keep track of.. CDs and DVDs are just about the right balance of portable/easy to keep track of..
  • where are you going to put your coffee cup when they shrink the drawer on the reader?
  • How do you keep it from getting scratched?
  • Awww, only 22.5 gigabytes on something the size of a penny. I guess the technology is worthless.

    it uses electro-static for reading, and reads by changes in frequency. Wow. It shouldn't be TOO hard to make multi-layerd disks, just by allowing for different resonating frequencies. Each distinct frequency for each layer, have the player be able to diffenciate between the two and boom, very nice. Imagine if we had something that was as thick as a nickle, was dual sided and multi-layered. Imagine walking around with ~1 terabyte worth of data with the bulkyness of ~10-12 nickles, but no where near as heavy.

    I like.
  • Well, probly not. Electron beams are very, very slow. For making templates and lithography masks, they are fine--for anything else, they are way too slow
  • "Dang, I left my GNU sources in my pocket and they went through the wash again!"
  • The stuff they are working on is already little..
  • If they're not writeable, then they're all empty. Perhaps you meant not re-writeable?
  • That's 180 gigabits, mind you. Nobody, even on slashdot, seems to be able to understand the distinction between gigabits and gigabytes. Divide gigabits by 8 to get gigabytes. This penny-size "CD-ROM" can hold 22.5 GB.
  • Read the headline, darnit. This is the third comment I've seen, on a supposedly technically literate site like slashdot of all places, which mistakenly assumes that "180 gigabits" means "180 GB." Since all modern desktop computers use 8-bit bytes, this penny-sized device would hold 22.5 gigs, not 180.
  • Well, if she had a nano-tech immune system booster...
  • um, no, it should not be base ten, computers are binary, therefore the bases it uses only make sense if they are a power of 2. Granted we _could_ use 10 bit bytes, but it would make things more messy and it would be a waste of space. 8 was chosen as the standard because there are 26 letters, two cases (52) and 50 or so special characters (~102). To store these characters at one character/byte, you only need 7 bit bytes, but no one wants to use a prime number when you could use a power of two, plus you want to leave room for expansion, so they settled on 8. 10 would make avaliable 1024 characters, more than anyone needs, and consequently, most of them wouldn't be used, wasting the extra 2 bits.
  • How do you have a 31-hour playlist with only 1.03 gigabytes of MP3s? Even at 128kbps, 1.03 gigabytes only fits around 17.5 hours of music. If you want good quality music, push the bitrate up to 160 or 192 kbps, and you fit even less.
  • sure, Chou's method would be writeable
    only at the factory,
    but the article also mentioned IBM is working
    on something similar, which would write the bits one by one...
    It sounds to me like the technologies are equivalent, and that you could read both by the same method...
    the Chou's method for mass production,
    IBM's method as the heart of a personal CDR...
    though I don't see (easily) how you could get
    CDRW with these...except maybe by using as a material some polymer which flattened back out under a given electrical charge...hmmm.
  • This would be more interesting if it were in the commercial stages already. I think by the time it comes out in say 7 years that we'll have such better memory and communications technology that it is likely to be irrelevant to ordinary consumers. Maybe big distributed data servers could use them to store hundreds of terabytes of data... but you see if you've got a chunk of space on a huge server somewhere and you've got unlimited connectivity, there's very little advantage to having "much" local storage, and there are some pretty significant disadvantages. The advantages of moving away from mechanical storage (you have to spin the disc and move the needle still!) like this are also pretty great. I would almost expect a breakthrough in memory technology where we end up with cheap multi-GB flashcards would pretty much kill this product in consumer markets.




  • all modern desktop computers use 8-bit bytes

    Uhhh, yes, and most of them use 1000-millivolt volts, too. It's a definition: 8 bits is one byte.

    this penny-sized device would hold 22.5 gigs

    Maybe. There's a reason why the density is given in bits: since there's no encoding spec, it may well take more than one pit to encode a bit. CDs, for example, use an 8-into-14 hashing scheme which guarantees no more than 3 consecutive bits will be identical.

    Another poster had a highly relevant comment about how much data a dust mote would wipe out; It may well be that to attain any reliability at all, you need an 8-into-800 hash scheme, where every bit is repeated hundreds of times across different regions of the disk surface. In that case, you get .225 GB from your 180Gb disk (note that this doesn't contradict my first comment; you must distinguish between physical bits and encoded bits, in the same way that a zip file may have 5 million bits encoded in 1 million physical bits).

    cheers,
    mike

  • Yet another technology that gets smaller, but takes longer to get to us when we really need it...



  • And the EULA will be printed on one of those disks. Talk about your fine print.

  • You could have a backup for cd-rom.com all in the palm of your hand. However this raises an important if this keeps happening people will soon be accustomed to software bloat. Windows 10,000 will be somewhere on the order of like 900 Tb for the base install.
  • Anybody ever watch TekWar? I wasn't wild about the show, but they used discs about the size of a CD single.

    I'd prefer something that size...something I can palm, or even drop in a shirt pocket.
  • Normal exponential growth in the computer industry has been a fairly normal occurence so far. An intersting graph to plot is the number of flops a super computer can do vs time in years sense 1970.
    It is basically exponential.
  • A really nice way to damage your drive. What do people like me who have removable trays for their drive do for a cup holder? :)
  • Did anyone else notice that the sizes quoted are Gigabits, not GigaBytes - simple arithmetic will give you the real figure...Don't get me wrong, I don't wish to belittle the great work these guys are doing, just put it in perspective.
  • So when are they finally going to perfect the technology that will make pennies the size of CDROMs?
    ---
    Put Hemos through English 101!
  • Uhhh, yes, and most of them use 1000-millivolt volts, too. It's a definition: 8 bits is one byte.

    No, it's not. It has come to be generally accepted, since nearly all (all?) computers now use 8-bit bytes, but "8 bits" is not the definition of "byte." Some of the old PDP computers used 10-bit bytes.

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