Researchers Create DVDs With Massive Storage

[GaryC 7]

I think this is different from the holographic storage from a different post. One thing is for sure, storage capacity will go up very soon.

Researchers Create DVDs With Massive Storage

Thursday, May 21, 2009

LONDON — "Five-dimensional" discs with a capacity 10,000 times greater than current DVDs could be on the market within 10 years, researchers reported on Wednesday.

A team from Swinburne University of Technology in Australia said that by harnessing nanoparticles and a "polarization" dimension to existing technology, storage can be massively boosted without changing the size of a current disc.

The researchers, who have signed a deal with Samsung Electronics, said the technique had allowed them to store 1.6 terabytes of data on a disc with the potential to one day store up to 10 terabytes.

One terabyte would be enough to hold 300 feature-length films or 250,000 songs.

"We were able to show how nanostructured material can be incorporated onto a disc in order to increase data capacity, without increasing the physical size of the disc," Min Gu, who worked on the research, said in a statement.

"These extra dimensions are the key to creating ultra-high capacity discs."

Discs currently have three spatial dimensions but using nanoparticles the researchers said they were able to introduce a spectral — or color — dimension as well as a polarization dimension.

The researchers, who published their findings in the journal Nature, created the color dimension by inserting gold nanorods — which form so-called surface plasmons when hit by light — onto a disc's surface.

Because nanoparticles react to light according to their shape, this allowed the researchers to record information in a range of different color wavelengths on the same place on the disc.

Current DVDs are recorded in a single color wavelength using a laser, the researchers said.

The researchers also created an extra dimension using polarization, a technique in which they projected light waves onto the disc, to record different layers of information at different angles.

"The polarization can be rotated 360 degrees," another member of the research team James Chon, said in a statement.

"So for example, we were able to record at zero degree polarization. Then on top of that we were able to record another layer of information at 90 degrees polarization, without them interfering with each other."

Some issues, such as the speed at which the discs can be written on, need further work but the scientists said their research could have immediate applications in a range of fields.

For instance, they could help store extremely large medical files such as MRIs as well as financial, military and security areas by offering higher data densities needed for encryption, they added.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,520951,00.html

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Terabyte sounds like it's from the time before dinosaurs.

Discs seem so clunky compared to other ways of storing media.

[GaryC 7]

Terabyte sounds like it's from the time before dinosaurs.

Discs seem so clunky compared to other ways of storing media.

Not when you could get 500 HD quality movies on one disc. Seems pretty elegant to me.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Terabyte sounds like it's from the time before dinosaurs.

Discs seem so clunky compared to other ways of storing media.

Not when you could get 500 HD quality movies on one disc. Seems pretty elegant to me.

I'm sure how many hours a DVR can hold, but it's a lot and their capacity will improve. I don't know if you've tried one, but they're awesome. We have DishNetwork and the deal we signed up for included an HD DVR. We can record or view from 2 different TV's in different rooms.

[GaryC 7]

Terabyte sounds like it's from the time before dinosaurs.

Discs seem so clunky compared to other ways of storing media.

Not when you could get 500 HD quality movies on one disc. Seems pretty elegant to me.

I'm sure how many hours a DVR can hold, but it's a lot and their capacity will improve. I don't know if you've tried one, but they're awesome. We have DishNetwork and the deal we signed up for included an HD DVR. We can record or view from 2 different TV's in different rooms.

I had one for quite a while, loved it. But it is kind of hard to mail a DVR via netflix. For portable storage a DVD sized device is perfect.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Terabyte sounds like it's from the time before dinosaurs.

Discs seem so clunky compared to other ways of storing media.

Not when you could get 500 HD quality movies on one disc. Seems pretty elegant to me.

I'm sure how many hours a DVR can hold, but it's a lot and their capacity will improve. I don't know if you've tried one, but they're awesome. We have DishNetwork and the deal we signed up for included an HD DVR. We can record or view from 2 different TV's in different rooms.

I had one for quite a while, loved it. But it is kind of hard to mail a DVR via netflix. For portable storage a DVD sized device is perfect.

I guess it depends on what you want it for.

This is the digital age - the way to rent movies these days is to download them. Even Netflix is gearing up for it. I think we're already seeing a gradual moving away from portable disks as a way to store media.

[GaryC 7]

Terabyte sounds like it's from the time before dinosaurs.

Discs seem so clunky compared to other ways of storing media.

Not when you could get 500 HD quality movies on one disc. Seems pretty elegant to me.

I'm sure how many hours a DVR can hold, but it's a lot and their capacity will improve. I don't know if you've tried one, but they're awesome. We have DishNetwork and the deal we signed up for included an HD DVR. We can record or view from 2 different TV's in different rooms.

I had one for quite a while, loved it. But it is kind of hard to mail a DVR via netflix. For portable storage a DVD sized device is perfect.

I guess it depends on what you want it for.

This is the digital age - the way to rent movies these days is to download them. Even Netflix is gearing up for it. I think we're already seeing a gradual moving away from portable disks as a way to store media.

Do you realize how long it would take to download 10 terabytes? The next generation of HD will need all the storage space it can get. With this the sky is the limit.

[scandal 951]

Terabyte sounds like it's from the time before dinosaurs.

Discs seem so clunky compared to other ways of storing media.

Not when you could get 500 HD quality movies on one disc. Seems pretty elegant to me.

I'm sure how many hours a DVR can hold, but it's a lot and their capacity will improve. I don't know if you've tried one, but they're awesome. We have DishNetwork and the deal we signed up for included an HD DVR. We can record or view from 2 different TV's in different rooms.

I had one for quite a while, loved it. But it is kind of hard to mail a DVR via netflix. For portable storage a DVD sized device is perfect.

I guess it depends on what you want it for.

This is the digital age - the way to rent movies these days is to download them. Even Netflix is gearing up for it. I think we're already seeing a gradual moving away from portable disks as a way to store media.

I've been hearing of the end of mass storage since the days of the 5 1/4" floppy and the 10MB Winchester Drive (roughly 1984).

Mass storage will always be around.

All forms - mechanical/magnetic (aka hard drives), optical (DVD/CD), and solid state flash (as in your USB pen drive, or MP3 player, or memory card for your digital camera) have all been following their own forms of Moores Law. Each generation increases storage capacity and drops price, with the MB/$ ratio improving for consumers at an eye popping rate.

If/when flash can get the storage densities and cost profiles of flash memory better than those of mechanical (spinning platters, be they optical or magnetic), things will gravitate to flash. But I don't see that happening. There will be room for all of these technologies for years to come.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

I've been hearing of the end of mass storage since the days of the 5 1/4" floppy and the 10MB Winchester Drive (roughly 1984).

Mass storage will always be around.

All forms - mechanical/magnetic (aka hard drives), optical (DVD/CD), and solid state flash (as in your USB pen drive, or MP3 player, or memory card for your digital camera) have all been following their own forms of Moores Law. Each generation increases storage capacity and drops price, with the MB/$ ratio improving for consumers at an eye popping rate.

If/when flash can get the storage densities and cost profiles of flash memory better than those of mechanical (spinning platters, be they optical or magnetic), things will gravitate to flash. But I don't see that happening. There will be room for all of these technologies for years to come.

Sure, but in terms of delivery system for media, the future is digital. More people now get their music from downloading MP3's than buying CD's and that trend will continue. It's already happening with movies and video games.

[Niels Bohr 72]

I posted this 5-D disc as well as the holographic disc.

[scandal 951]

I've been hearing of the end of mass storage since the days of the 5 1/4" floppy and the 10MB Winchester Drive (roughly 1984).

Mass storage will always be around.

All forms - mechanical/magnetic (aka hard drives), optical (DVD/CD), and solid state flash (as in your USB pen drive, or MP3 player, or memory card for your digital camera) have all been following their own forms of Moores Law. Each generation increases storage capacity and drops price, with the MB/$ ratio improving for consumers at an eye popping rate.

If/when flash can get the storage densities and cost profiles of flash memory better than those of mechanical (spinning platters, be they optical or magnetic), things will gravitate to flash. But I don't see that happening. There will be room for all of these technologies for years to come.

Sure, but in terms of delivery system for media, the future is digital. More people now get their music from downloading MP3's than buying CD's and that trend will continue. It's already happening with movies and video games.

Yes, downloading bits is the future. In many cases, it's the present! But that still begs two questions:

1. The servers from which you are downloading need storage. Google, Apple, Microsoft ... all are investing in enormous server farms with terabytes, and in some cases petabytes of attached storage. Every storage acronym you can think of : RAID, SAN, NAS, iSCSI and more is behind the scenes of your "on demand" content. Yep, even VJ message archives are getting hosted on a server with attached storage And underneath all that snazzy RAID SAN array is sitting magnetic spinning platters. Piles of them.

2. Once the bits get downloaded, what do the clients do with them? Well, in some cases you consume the stream immediately on your device (think of streaming Internet radio, or Youtube clips). In many cases you want to keep the streamed bits either temporarily or permanently (your daily newspaper subscription, or that movie you just downloaded). In those cases you still want some combination of magnetic/optical/flash for your laptop, iPod, USB stick, DVD, whatever. I don't foresee that ending as we move to always-on streaming media.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

I've been hearing of the end of mass storage since the days of the 5 1/4" floppy and the 10MB Winchester Drive (roughly 1984).

Mass storage will always be around.

All forms - mechanical/magnetic (aka hard drives), optical (DVD/CD), and solid state flash (as in your USB pen drive, or MP3 player, or memory card for your digital camera) have all been following their own forms of Moores Law. Each generation increases storage capacity and drops price, with the MB/$ ratio improving for consumers at an eye popping rate.

If/when flash can get the storage densities and cost profiles of flash memory better than those of mechanical (spinning platters, be they optical or magnetic), things will gravitate to flash. But I don't see that happening. There will be room for all of these technologies for years to come.

Sure, but in terms of delivery system for media, the future is digital. More people now get their music from downloading MP3's than buying CD's and that trend will continue. It's already happening with movies and video games.

Yes, downloading bits is the future. In many cases, it's the present! But that still begs two questions:

1. The servers from which you are downloading need storage. Google, Apple, Microsoft ... all are investing in enormous server farms with terabytes, and in some cases petabytes of attached storage. Every storage acronym you can think of : RAID, SAN, NAS, iSCSI and more is behind the scenes of your "on demand" content. Yep, even VJ message archives are getting hosted on a server with attached storage And underneath all that snazzy RAID SAN array is sitting magnetic spinning platters. Piles of them.

2. Once the bits get downloaded, what do the clients do with them? Well, in some cases you consume the stream immediately on your device (think of streaming Internet radio, or Youtube clips). In many cases you want to keep the streamed bits either temporarily or permanently (your daily newspaper subscription, or that movie you just downloaded). In those cases you still want some combination of magnetic/optical/flash for your laptop, iPod, USB stick, DVD, whatever. I don't foresee that ending as we move to always-on streaming media.

That makes sense. IMO though, DVD's will become less prominent just as CD's have become. USB sticks and memory cards are way more convenient and have come into their own in terms of storage. Will the average person need portable storage of terabytes of media? I can't imagine they do, but if they will in the future, I'd say it will most likely be portable and small, like a USB stick or memory card.

[Niels Bohr 72]

With signal processing, the larger the sampling rate the better. To get better resolution onto digital film, it is necessary to increase the storage. I can foresee that people will using the larger capacity discs.

[scandal 951]

I've been hearing of the end of mass storage since the days of the 5 1/4" floppy and the 10MB Winchester Drive (roughly 1984).

Mass storage will always be around.

All forms - mechanical/magnetic (aka hard drives), optical (DVD/CD), and solid state flash (as in your USB pen drive, or MP3 player, or memory card for your digital camera) have all been following their own forms of Moores Law. Each generation increases storage capacity and drops price, with the MB/$ ratio improving for consumers at an eye popping rate.

If/when flash can get the storage densities and cost profiles of flash memory better than those of mechanical (spinning platters, be they optical or magnetic), things will gravitate to flash. But I don't see that happening. There will be room for all of these technologies for years to come.

Sure, but in terms of delivery system for media, the future is digital. More people now get their music from downloading MP3's than buying CD's and that trend will continue. It's already happening with movies and video games.

Yes, downloading bits is the future. In many cases, it's the present! But that still begs two questions:

1. The servers from which you are downloading need storage. Google, Apple, Microsoft ... all are investing in enormous server farms with terabytes, and in some cases petabytes of attached storage. Every storage acronym you can think of : RAID, SAN, NAS, iSCSI and more is behind the scenes of your "on demand" content. Yep, even VJ message archives are getting hosted on a server with attached storage And underneath all that snazzy RAID SAN array is sitting magnetic spinning platters. Piles of them.

2. Once the bits get downloaded, what do the clients do with them? Well, in some cases you consume the stream immediately on your device (think of streaming Internet radio, or Youtube clips). In many cases you want to keep the streamed bits either temporarily or permanently (your daily newspaper subscription, or that movie you just downloaded). In those cases you still want some combination of magnetic/optical/flash for your laptop, iPod, USB stick, DVD, whatever. I don't foresee that ending as we move to always-on streaming media.

That makes sense. IMO though, DVD's will become less prominent just as CD's have become. USB sticks and memory cards are way more convenient and have come into their own in terms of storage. Will the average person need portable storage of terabytes of media? I can't imagine they do, but if they will in the future, I'd say it will most likely be portable and small, like a USB stick or memory card.

Like I said earlier - if the density of flash and the $/density of flash can rival optical, it's a no brainer flash will take over. Neither criterion is true yet. USB pen drives max out today at around 64GB and currently priced at ~ $150/64GB. Compare that to magnetic (1 TB hard drives for ~ $150) or optical (8GB DVDs and BluRay today, these massive density optical discs not too far in the future) at pennies per disc.

You wonder if we'll ever "need" portable TB? (Blecch! Tuberculosis???? Gawd no. Terabytes ).

If you'd asked me a 15 years ago what would I ever do with portable Gigabytes, I'd be hard pressed for an answer. We didn't have MP3 (or FLAC) or HD movies to contemplate then. You can't today guess at future applications that will demand the 10X or 100X CPU processing and storage densities compared to today. If there's one thing constant about technology, it's that our expectations for application performance always seem to stay one step ahead of where the hardware is.

[Niels Bohr 72]

Lately, Toshiba just came up with a transistor with the feature size at 4 nm. How much can Moore's Law continue on? I build those transistors daily when my boss send me the list of spec to build of what the client wants. Then I just sit around and post VJ after I'm done.