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Philip's SFFO 3cm 4Gig Optical Discs 202

Posted by CmdrTaco from the can-i-use-it-in-vending-machines dept.
JL writes "New Scientist reports that Philips has a demonstration in Japan recently of a 3cm rewritable optical disc that can store four gigabytes. The drive is small too!" Interesting that they note that 4 gigs can store 5 2 hour movies on the thing :)
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Philip's SFFO 3cm 4Gig Optical Discs More

Philip's SFFO 3cm 4Gig Optical Discs

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  • Units of Storage (Score:5, Funny)

    by Mignon ( 34109 ) <satan@programmer.net> on Friday October 18, 2002 @08:48AM (#4477570)
    Interesting that they note that 4 gigs can store 5 2 hour movies on the thing :)

    Indeed. How many Libraries of Congress is that, anyway?

  • Pics (Score:5, Informative)

    by thebudda ( 519095 ) on Friday October 18, 2002 @08:51AM (#4477586)
    found a Japanese site with pics http://www.zdnet.co.jp/news/0210/04/nj00_sffo.html

  • hm (Score:5, Funny)

    by dusanv ( 256645 ) on Friday October 18, 2002 @08:51AM (#4477588)
    Philip's SFFO 3cm 4Gig Optical Discs

    That Philip is a mighty smart guy. I wish I could make optical discs.

  • Obligatory pr0n reference (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 18, 2002 @08:52AM (#4477590)
    2G of pr0n in 3cm! Wow, that's smaller than my... oh, never mind.

  • Ah, I see... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Jugalator ( 259273 ) on Friday October 18, 2002 @08:52AM (#4477591) Journal
    First versions of the disc will be:

    a) Ready for sale in two years.
    b) Store only 1 Gb.
    c) Expected to cost £70 / drive.

  • ...And hopefully no DRM... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Opiuman ( 172825 ) <redbeard@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Friday October 18, 2002 @08:53AM (#4477600) Homepage
    I hope they don't try to burden this format with built-in DRM, because then it will 'flop' commercially so bad that it would put even Betacam to shame.

    • Philips has been ok'ish in that regard (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I think IF there is no legal obligation for DRM mechanisms they will license the technology for players of open standards. They have been pretty consistent in argueing against mandatory DRM lately.

      Of course that might have something to do with them ditching their media production divisions a long time ago and having little commercial interest in DRM.

      If Disney buys enough senators to get what they want it will hardly be Philips's choice of course ... and you will have to go to Europe and Asia for your player. Until globalism and corporate dictatorship spreads their laws beyond US borders (EU will fall first, rest will follow).
  • can they fit it on one? would be nifty.. !

    seriously, though. what happens to all those great storage options? it seems to me that every few months someone comes up with a clever technique, but I'm still stuck with 700mb CDr's !

    • ...every few months someone comes up with a clever technique, but I'm still stuck with 700mb CDr's !

      Yeah tell me about it, I am still stuck with 5 1/4" floppies! If only they invented a way to transfer the information to the newer media types....

  • WHY? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by YrWrstNtmr ( 564987 ) on Friday October 18, 2002 @08:56AM (#4477614)
    Two years from now the world's smallest optical disc will let your cellphone store five two-hour movies...

    OK, I can see a small disk like this being very useful, but WHY does everything have to relate to the cellphone? "You can do this with your cellphone...you can do that with your cellphone."
    How about simple things, like actual coverage?

    Watching a movie on a 2.5" screen, no matter what the resolution, is simply silly.
    • How about simple things, like actual coverage?

      Amen. Here I sit by the window in my office in downtown DC, watching my Sucks PCS phone going Searching For Service....

    • Re:WHY? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by 91degrees ( 207121 ) on Friday October 18, 2002 @09:03AM (#4477650) Journal
      WHY does everything have to relate to the cellphone?

      Well, most of the world has pretty good coverage. The US is the exception largely due to its vast size, but this means that unusually for a piece of technology, the US market is considered secondary. Hence, so is increasing coverage.

      The rest of the world is running out of things that cellphone companies can use to convince us to buy a new phone. It's stupid, but it serves as a quick easy application for marketing types.

      Watching a movie on a 2.5" screen, no matter what the resolution, is simply silly

      It would be pretty cool if they could build a decent screen into a pair of glasses though. Then the portability of something this size would be a definite benifit.
      • Agree entirely, how long before the same approach to lightbulbs is applied to cellphones ? Once everyone's got there's, no one will buy any. I see cellphones that go pop after a years use rapidly approaching.

      • The rest of the world is running out of things that cellphone companies can use to convince us to buy a new phone. It's stupid, but it serves as a quick easy application for marketing types.

        How about reliable service and decent prices? I would get a cellphone if the rates were such that I could have two phones and service for rates comparable to a land line.

        All I see cellphones doing for me is contributing to a reduction in the number of available pay phones. It seems much more difficult to find one now than it ever used to be.
        • How about reliable service and decent prices?

          I meant marketing for the new disc. True, they could try to do this, and sell the the few people who still don't have a mobile, but that doesn't help the PR people for this disc. On the other hand, they can latch on to the easily graspable concept of a video phone, even if it does turn out to be a bad idea in reality.

      • Re:WHY? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by kent ( 90435 )
        It would be pretty cool if they could build a decent screen into a pair of glasses though. Then the portability of something this size would be a definite benifit.

        Like this [gatech.edu]?

        They havent got it quite right just yet. However, I've been wearing a version that clips onto your classes for over 3 years now.
      • >It would be pretty cool if they could build a decent screen into a pair of glasses though.

        Done [i-glasses.com] and done [reviewfinder.com] and done [olympusamerica.com].

        One day I'll have enough throw away money to buy a pair...

    • Re:WHY? (Score:2, Funny)

      by SpitFU ( 617828 )
      Yeah, kinda like a DVD player on your Dell PowerEdge 1650 or Sun Microsystems E250. Or even your 12 inch active matrix display on a laptop showing Lord of the Rings.

      -Heh
    • WHY does everything have to relate to the cellphone?

      Maybe because that is one of the few places you would actually want to use discs that small. 3 cm is actually too small for convient use on PC's. Too easy to misplace, and to finicky to insert into tiny drives for people with poor vision or poor coordination.

      On the other hand, can you imagine a cellphone with a DVD drive? That image is just begging to be used in all sorts of humorous ways :)

      -

  • Pictures to look at (Score:3, Informative)

    by terrencefw ( 605681 ) <slashdotNO@SPAMjamesholden.net> on Friday October 18, 2002 @08:56AM (#4477616) Homepage
    There are some nice pictures at: http://www.zdnet.co.jp/mobile/0210/04/n_sffo.html James

  • nice tech but when will it be available? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by chamenos ( 541447 ) on Friday October 18, 2002 @08:56AM (#4477618)
    i don't mean to be a wet blanket here but announcement like this on slashdot are pretty common, and most of the time it takes a few years or so for the product to become widely available. more often than not, due to bad marketing decisions or various other reasons, the product doesn't even see the light of day.

    yea i know its nice to read about it and the article says 2 years more, but that's what they say all the time. rewritable DVDs were such a hot topic once but when they actually came out all the different formats and standards adopted by the different companies made it pretty much unsuited to mass-market adoption, not to mention the price of the drives themselves, though those have dropped a bit since.

    speaking of drives, the article mentioned the cost of the discs, but not the cost of the players themselves. the discs might be dirt cheap after a while, but are the drives going to cost too much for the average consumer to afford? and should it be cheap enough to be competitive with DVDs and HDTV will this get any opposition from rival companies who may view this as a threat to their products?
    • Wayne Fletcher at Philips's Southampton lab says SFFO will be ready for sale in two years. Chris Buma, who heads Philips's optical division at Eindhoven in the Netherlands, says discs can be made for "a few cents". The drives will initially cost around £70 but this is expected to fall.

      Did you not read the next sentance?
    • Well... Every new technology is expensive.

      DVD wasn't competatively prices compared to vhs or cd when released.
      DVD-R's are just getting competative, as in price per MB, compared to CD-R.
      Does that mean that they shouldn't have bothered to release the standard?
      Of course not. That way, no new technology would ever see the light of day.

      So if they do release this new diskformat, just wait a few years and it'll be at a price that the average consumer can afford.
      And by then something new will have arrived, that is expensive as hell but it 10x better...

  • MP3-solutions? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by zeth ( 452280 ) on Friday October 18, 2002 @08:57AM (#4477623) Homepage Journal
    If this technology will be cheap enough, is this not potentially useful for portable music?
    Imagine using these small drives as cartridges, such as the minidiscs. It would be great, and probably widley used. Just look at those old walkmans and such. They where great in their days.

    Wandering away...
    • There is already a minuature disk format especialy for music. The Sony MiniDisk [minidisc.org] format. This clips the hight and low frequencies to make the file size smaller, and with a slight lose in quality five or six albums can be fited onto a single disk. The one I have only alows real time transfer, but more recent models allow data transfer form a PC.

  • Is the price quoted realistic? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Midwedge ( 617806 ) <midwedge @ y a h oo.com> on Friday October 18, 2002 @09:00AM (#4477634)
    Wayne Fletcher at Philips's Southampton lab says SFFO will be ready for sale in two years. Chris Buma, who heads Philips's optical division at Eindhoven in the Netherlands, says discs can be made for "a few cents". The drives will initially cost around £70 but this is expected to fall.

    I wonder how this price compares to costs to produce a DVD.
    • The price of producing a DVD and of fabricating a DVD-R are two entirely different animals. Producing the DVD entails the movie itself, plus technicians to master it to DVD, paying people for any extras etc. The costs of making each DVD beyond this is cheap, but there are significant upfront costs.

      Manufacturing a DVD-R is cheap (I don't know how cheap, but I bought a stack of DVD-R for around 76 cents a piece) because its a cookie cutter operation. Once you have the process down you can make more inexpensively.

      Making these discs is more like fabricating the DVD-R than producing the DVD. Don't expect the price of DVD on this media to drop significantly.
      • Yeah I guess I wasn't clear, I meant the cost of a blank DVD, without any content.

        But this made me think about the Manufactors cost of diffrent media.

        Like which is cheaper, a Cassette tape or a CD.
        VHS Tape or DVD.

        It seems to me that it would be a lot cheaper to make a cd/dvd blank than anykind of tape technology seeing as there are all kinds of moving parts vs a disk with coatings...

        Of course demand makes CD/DVD with content more expencive to the consumer than the tape counterparts.

        Just something to ponder on a Friday morning :)

  • Value of information (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Dexter77 ( 442723 ) on Friday October 18, 2002 @09:01AM (#4477643)
    Have you noticed that if you calculate the value of those movies or especially MP3s on the disc (~16$/album, ~20$/movie) the value of a disc is more than the same weight disc made out of gold.

    Btw. if RIAA catches you walking around with pocket full of these discs, and those discs contain more albums than an average music store. Can they charge you similarly as if you had robbed all albums from one of their stores?
    • Unless something changed, I wasn't aware that the RIAA itself had record stores...

      Sure, Virgin has it's super-massive get-everything-you-want-here-except-toothpaste mega-stores, but I wouldn't say it's an RIAA-owned operation.

      Plus, what if you happen to be a multi-millionaire, and you purchased all the music you ripped and burned to your pocket full of MP3s?

      Ok, so that isn't friggin likely...

    • No. (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )
      Robbing a store would be breaking & entering and grand theft, going around with a bunch of cds is "only" mass copyright infringement. Also intent would be a factor, if you rob an entire cd store, the intent is presumably to sell those for profit. If "everybody" can walk around with a music store in their pocket, you can claim it's just for personal use.

      Kjella

    • This Just In (Score:4, Funny)

      by Snork Asaurus ( 595692 ) on Friday October 18, 2002 @01:15PM (#4479819) Journal
      As a result of intensive lobbying by the RIAA and MPAA an emergency bill was passed in Congress today. The bill, known as the Fervently Undoing Computing Capabilities of all Users act (F.U.C.C. U.), requires that each copy of the disk, code-named HWN (Hillary's Worst Nightmare), contain special embedded DRM software developed by Microsoft (motto: bend over, we got your DRM right here!) that includes the user's entire DNA sequence and will only be useable on special drives and computers that adhere to the PC (19)84 specification and run the forthcoming MS Palladium (rommed edition) operating system.

      "There will be some small loss of space on the disc itself as a result", said congressman Payme Goode, "but the disc will still have abundant free space, a good 1.44 Meg, available for the end-user's data".

      Any purchaser of the disc will require a license. In order to apply for the license, the applicant must first submit to a thorough background check and will be profiled and fingerprinted by the authorities. Once granted a license to use this dangerous technology, the licensee will be required to carry the license at all times or face a penalty of 50 years in prison with no parole.

      "We think that this is a very fair and equitable act", Hilary Rosen was quoted as saying, "It nicely balances the rights of the individual user against the recording and motion picture industries' rights to ensure that all digital technology is hobbled to the point of being useless".

  • Isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dr. Spork ( 142693 ) on Friday October 18, 2002 @09:03AM (#4477652)
    This thing belongs inside a digital video camera. I mean, all that work on jitter resistance must have some point....
    • Have you ever held a spinning bicycle wheel by the spokes and then tried to tilt it? With the inertia that disk would have at 20,000 rmp, tilt the camera too much and it might fly out of your hands or break your wrist if it's strapped to your hand.
    • That would suprise me.

      It is very hard to use optical discs for mobile storage, especially in consumer electronics like videocameras. They need to be highly shock-resistive.

      For optical storage to work, the write head must be very stable. Unfortunately, the head of an optical storage device is order of magnitudes heavier than that of a harddisk, which makes it very hard to keep it stable. Even with this somewhat lighter head they mention in the article.

      Remember the old portable cd-players, how they skipped very easily. New players read ahead now in buffers to avoid skipping. But obviously the same technology can not be used for writing.

      The only thing in videocameras to replace tape, will be Flash memory. The next generation will have capacities up to 8 GB.

      • It is very hard to use optical discs for mobile storage, especially in consumer electronics like videocameras. They need to be highly shock-resistive. For optical storage to work, the write head must be very stable. Unfortunately, the head of an optical storage device is order of magnitudes heavier than that of a harddisk, which makes it very hard to keep it stable. Even with this somewhat lighter head they mention in the article.

        There have been camcorders that record on mini DVDs for quite a while now.. Here's just one [epinions.com].

        The only thing in videocameras to replace tape, will be Flash memory. The next generation will have capacities up to 8 GB.

        Unless those 8Gig Flash memories come down below $5-$10 apiece, I don't see it replacing MiniDV or MiniDVD any time soon. I have a shelf full of videos of the kids, each one of those tapes is like 30Gigs (I'm not sure of the exact number, but 60 min at MiniDV bitrates is a lot). Those tapes were $10-15 when I first bought them, nowadays, they're less than $5.

        Right now, 1 Gig of Compact Flash is upwards of $250. I'm not holding my breath..
      • It is very hard to use optical discs for mobile storage,
        Hitachi is already doing this [hitachidigitalmedia.com] and Sony has a range of CDR cameras.
        For optical storage to work, the write head must be very stable.
        From the article:

        The three-centimetre disc will be the same thickness as a DVD, but the phase-change material that records the data will be a mere 0.1 millimetres thick, compared to 0.6 millimetres for DVDs. Philips says this should mean there is less risk of beam distortion if the disc tilts when the portable device gets jogged. Portable DVD players will not play smoothly if jogged.

        This jog-resistance is helped by making the glass and polymer lens that focuses the laser only 1.3 millimetres wide, just one-third the size of the lens in a DVD recorder. This means the optics need be only one-tenth the mass of their counterpart in a DVD, light enough for an electromagnet to keep them steady.

        Flash memory won't catch in videorecorders - not that it's not possible, but there are hundreds of applications that are less cost sensitive. Flash won't scale as good as DVD's when it gets cheaper since there's still the cost of the chip fab to consider...

        With new hardware formats like the VAIO Picturebook's DVD's have become the single most limiting factor for those that want a little more (I've even cut that feature from what I need on a notebook) so there will be a lot of devices waiting for this kind of storage (even though it's a total overkill for plain mp3).

    • I think if Philips can resolve the issue of shock resistance and make a re-writeable disc in this new format that stores at least 3 GB, there's a better application: high-end digital still cameras.

      With professional digital still cameras already going past ten megapixels in resolution, even a 1 GB IBM Microdrive in a Compact Flash Type II slot ain't going to cut it especially if you store the digital still in uncompressed .TIF format. This new drive could be perfect for professional digital still cameras, that's to be sure.

  • not terribly impressed (Score:3, Insightful)

    by kipsate ( 314423 ) on Friday October 18, 2002 @09:05AM (#4477667)
    We already have this capacity: (re)writable DVDs. So the main compelling advantage must come from the size and maybe energy usage.

    It is small, but Flash memory is even smaller. Let's say the drive will be commercially available in 1 year (and then I think I'm being optimistic.) By that time flash storage will already start to come close to these capacities. For instance, the successor of the proprietary Sony Memorystick and XD card technologies by Fuji and Olympus can go up to 8 GB. Flash is technically superior to optical storage (no moving parts, less energy consumption) but optical storage is far cheaper. But most people would store their flash memory on their harddisks anyway.

    • It is small, but Flash memory is even smaller. Let's say the drive will be commercially available in 1 year (and then I think I'm being optimistic.)

      They quote a technician who says it will be available in not one, but two years. And then he is likely optimistic.

      And then it will only be available with 1 Gb discs at first.

  • Men In Black? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Psiren ( 6145 ) on Friday October 18, 2002 @09:05AM (#4477668)
    So Tommy Lee jones was right, that small disc he held *is* going to replace the CD someday... ;-)

  • Side benefit... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by silverhalide ( 584408 ) on Friday October 18, 2002 @09:05AM (#4477669)
    First thought when I saw this was "oh yay, another format to buy, with mediocre advantages, namely size". Mini-DVD, meet Mini-disc! Then the thought occured to me, you could theoretically increase your maximum transfer rate off this media by quite a bit over traditional-sized DVD/CD-ROMs, since the diameter is smaller and thus angular inertia is much lower. The disc will have a higher maximum speed and won't explode around 28,000 RPM. Don't feel like hacking out the math, but I'd imagine it'd be signficant. [slashdot.org]
    • I've actually been wondering if we are to expect faster CD-R drives that will go, for example, 60x for Mini-CD's, and 48x for standard CDs...
      • Hehe, can't wait until the drive confuses a mini for a standard, and you get CD parts shooting out of your drive. Finally, my nightmares of my CD-ROM shooting parts at me are coming true!
    • Without doing any serious math...

      This new 3cm disc can indeed have very high data transfer rates, but it will not rely on absurd spindle speed in order to happen. This is going to be a very low-velocity medium.

      While it certainly is physically possible to spin a smaller disc faster than a larger one of similar composition without it turning into shrapnel, there is absolutely no need to do so given the areal densities involved.

      I'll use a CD-ROM for comparison, because we're all familiar with them. And I'm going to make quick work of the math, because it's late. And I'm going to use inches, because it's a unit that I'm comfortable with, aside from giving me a good opportunity to upset the more worldly readers of this text. I'm also going to make horribe blind assumptions and assertions, pull numbers out of my ass, and do all kinds of other underhanded things. I haven't even read the fucking article, and I'll probably be modded down for my effort (Note to Mods: if you think I'm wrong, either reply yourself and show me why, or piss off). Here goes:

      Let's assume that our 5" CD has a hole in the midde 2" across that can't store information, for a total recordable area of 16.5 square inches. If this disc holds 700MB of usable data, it has an areal density of 42MB per square inch. And as long as I'm not showing my work, I figure this is good for a transfer rate of 19.5 megabytes per second at 28,000 RPM.

      Let's assume that the 1.18" disc has similarly-proportioned hole in the center, so that it also has 16% of its area consumed by mounting surfaces. This leaves us with 0.904 square inches of usable area, or 3.6GB per square inch.

      Which is to say that data transfer should happen about 85 times faster than a CD, on average, at a given angular velocity. This is also to say that it can produce data rates equal to those which causes CDs to disintegrate, at only 326 RPM.

      Multiply that by 10, and you get a nice, sane, 3260RPM device which will be kind on battery life and offer a transfer rate somewhere in the impossible realm of 16GB/second.

      And at a CD-shattering-but-probably-safe 28,000 RPM? 1.3 terabytes per second.

      How many Libaries of Congress is that per minute?

      I don't even want to bother with trying to figure out at what speed such a small disc would itself disintegrate at, given these numbers.

      Thus, I submit that the format, in the unlikely event that it ever sees the light of day, will operate at extremely low spindle speeds, have fairly high latency, and excellent sustained transfer rates.

  • "The first versions of the disc will store one gigabyte on each side, but the dual-layer coating already used for DVDs will double the capacity to four gigabytes in total."

    Hmm. x + x = 4x ? Err....

    I know I'm looking forward to this new tech. Same with the holographic storage, and the other 200 new media ideas/developments which we never end up seeing, or never par up as first announced anyway. *sigh* Please let this one come through? Please?

  • Polite requests to media developers: (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 18, 2002 @09:09AM (#4477691)
    1.
    Please make different sizes of media that use the same format, E.G. 3cm, 12cm, 30cm.

    Portable equipment can support just the smallest disc size.

    Consumer equipment can support the small and middle disc sizes.

    Industrial equipment can support the large discs, for things like medical applications where you need uncompressed HDTV, etc.

    2.
    Please encourage use of all sizes - I have loads of CD-singles that are on 12cm media, not the 3cm media. If only they were all on 3cm media, I could have a pocket-sized discman!

    3.
    Please consider the possibility of, for example, 12cm media, with a push-out 3cm disc in the centre, that contains the first track, (for audio applications, for example), so that you can buy an album, and play the single on your portable player.

  • Why only 4 GB? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by gpinzone ( 531794 )
    10 Hours of movies? In what compression format? Certainly not MPEG-2. This is slightly less than a single sided DVD. Why make it so small? If you double the radius the amount of area is increased by a factor of four.

  • Agent K (Score:5, Funny)

    by SupahVee ( 146778 ) <superv@@@mischievousgeeks...net> on Friday October 18, 2002 @09:14AM (#4477716) Journal
    "Here's a nifty little gadget, (holding up small, silver-dollar sized, CD) It's gonna replace CD's soon. Guess I'll have to buy the White ALbum again."
  • I'm still waiting for something which can replace floppy disks. Will this do it?

    Think about it. Nothing is really as useful and standard as the floppy. Easy use, always works, no special drivers, no monopoly.

    Will this drive form a new standard? I hope so, but I suspect it will do as Zip drives and the rest. If Phillips probably keeps the standard locked down like the Zip drives, then it will just be another useless Zip drive.

    Nice little thing, I hope it makes it :)

    -Rene

    • PC BIOS is the enemy of floppy replacement (Score:4, Interesting)

      by swb ( 14022 ) on Friday October 18, 2002 @09:47AM (#4477955)
      I'm still waiting for something which can replace floppy disks. Will this do it?

      Floppy disk replacement isn't a matter of medium choice, there are plenty: zip, superdisk, orb, flash, et al. The problem arises from the lack of flexibilty of PC BIOS in being able to substitute those other mediums, which are often ATA/IDE based for the floppy disk.

      A simple solution would be to create add an additional ATA connector that the BIOS would treat as the floppy drive, depending on what was connected to it. At boot time if I disk was present and bootable, the system would boot off it and present it as the A drive. Even better would be a modular BIOS that would allow BIOS-level drivers to be installed so that BIOS could boot off of other buses -- USB, 1394, and so on without an operating system-level driver.

      One thing I'd like to know from BIOS experts is why this couldn't be done (especially the third "floppy" ATA connector) and what legacy OSes (*cough*DOS*cough*) would think of a floppy disk with > 2.88MB of available storage? Do they have hard-coded storage variables that can't deal with a "floppy" with capacities larger than 24 bits?

      • A simple solution would be to create add an additional ATA connector that the BIOS would treat as the floppy drive, depending on what was connected to it. At boot time if I disk was present and bootable, the system would boot off it and present it as the A drive.

        IIRC, that's exactly what Mandrake did to get their bootable CD to work in at least one of their 7.x releases: it somehow would trick the BIOS into thinking the CD drive was the floppy drive. Wierd, but kind of a cool hack since it generally worked great. The only problem was that sometimes it wouldn't change things back when it was done...

        As for storage limits, I know that pre-FAT32 DOS and Windows have a partition size limit of 2GB, and I believe a physical drive size limit of 8.4GB. QNX 4.x has a partition size limit of 8.4GB, and I strongly suspect that the physical drive size limit is also 8.4GB.

        • El Torrito bootable CD has kind of always worked that way, hasn't it? You specify a floppy disk image when writing the CD and the BIOS loads that image as the A drive; further reading of the CD requires whatever software on the A drive to load drivers for the CD, it gets assigned another drive letter. / would be on the image and everything else would be mounted from the CD.

    • I was trying to remember the last time I used a floppy rather than a network connection or a CD-RW.

      A few months ago I installed linux on an old machine without a bootable CDROM drive.

  • PCMCIA Type III (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    That beast fits in a PCMCIA Type III slot :-))))) Where can I get it?

    That will be DVD+RW I guess......

  • Well, it looks like DataPlay [slashdot.org] is now officially dead.

    As for five 2-hour movies in 4 gigs, that sounds like it uses MPEG 4. Besides, most "2-hour movies" these days are really 90 minutes long. The rest of that two hours is for changing the audience.

  • No moving parts (Score:2, Interesting)

    by NineNine ( 235196 )
    I'm waiting for storage that can store a few gigs cheaply that has NO MOVING PARTS. MO's are nice, but as long as you've got moving parts, they're still the part of the computer most likely to fail (taking your data with it). I wish that storage companies would instead focus on say, flash card technology or something similar so that we wouldn't have to worry about drive failure.

    • Solid state memory (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Keep an eye on thinfilm.se, they have the memory cell technology (not suitable for main memory in a PC, but ideal for mass storage). "All" we need now is cheap submicron litography for roll to roll processing and we can kiss moving parts goodbye.

  • Compare & Contrast... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by clinko ( 232501 ) on Friday October 18, 2002 @09:30AM (#4477807) Journal
    Think about this:

    Almost every school/University I have gone to has zip disks. This was a great Idea at the time because CD Burners were so expensive.

    Now, CDRW's are cheaper than zip disks. Hell the burners costs almost as much as a small pack of zip disks. CDs are pennies.

    My point:

    DVD+/-Rs is a safe bet. Why would anyone want to move to a format like this 4gb optical disk. It's just another "Zip Drive" of the future.
  • It's "Philips" not "Philip's".

    Whoever wrote that needs to read this:

    http://www.angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif
  • I hope they make a normal DVD-sized one. It would be nicer to have a 50-gig disk that is a few inches across than a 4-gig disk that is 3 centimeters across. (I don't watch that many movies on my cell phone.
  • [...] 3cm rewritable optical disc [...] The drive is small too!

    No shit. You just said it was 3 cm. It's like saying: The house was 100 metres wide... and it's huge too!

    Oh, you don't know the metric system? Bah!

  • Interestingly enough, Philips got OUT of the music business right as MP3s were taking off...
    1998 Seagram buys Polygram from Matsushita rival Philips for US$10.4bn [ketupa.net]

  • Magneto Optical Disk ? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by JoshRoss ( 88988 )
    This has to be MO. One of the biggest disadvantages to MO is the COST.

    Last time I checked, the 5.2 GB 5.25in discs costs about $80.00usd. I can just imagine what this would cost.

    I do not think that you will see anything like this in a car stereo, just because a product like this will not hit critical mass in the marketplace.

    I'm thinking that 5gb compact flash, or something like it will hit the market first. It, CF, would be smaller, faster and more reliable.

    Another problem with small media is the speed. At 3cm this thing is going to be slow. Even on the outside tracks, *warning my math sucks*,
    (3/2)*pi*r*d/?, shit never mind... But even if it's going at 10,000 RPM it's going to be slow.

    Power consumption will suck. Look at the microdrive.. If you have a small disc spinning fast it drains batteries way too quickly. You would not be able to listen to an entire album without a recharge.

    One of the few reasons that you need a disc is because its inexpensive. Inexpensive enough for content producers to sell their wares in that format. There is no WAY that the RIAA would sell a disc with 1000 hours of music on it. for anything close to $100usd.

    And even if the content producers do not produce content on this format. The best hope for this media will be a backup solution, which comes back to speed and cost.

    The next video disc will have to have enough room for at least 1 HD movie. With better compression this might happen on this disc, but why not use a 9gb DVD? There is not a need for ultra portable video. And again, look at the cost. My guess is that there will be something like DVD2 or something that uses the same media but uses better compression to get more bang for your buck.

    For removable storage (floppy killer dev) it HAS to have to have a drive that plugs into a USB port. like key ring storage. Otherwise, it's useless for being universally excepted. And if you take the drive around with you with one disk in it all the time, why bother with a disc?

    I wish that I had more positive things to say.

  • Ahh crapp... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by nomel ( 244635 )
    Got some nano-dust on my cd...gotta clean it...

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