New Optical Disk That Holds 140GB

NoCashValue writes "There is an article on Wired News about a new optical disk that can hold up to 140GB of data on a disk the size of a CD ROM." Still pretty vaporouus, but they claim a demo is forthcoming at Comdex.

Re:Smaller overall would be better...

Just because they could make the media smaller and still hold a relatively obscene amount of data does not mean they can necessarily make the reader correspondingly smaller...

Even if you have a really small CD I doubt you could make a reader the size of a Palm (at least for any reasonable sum of money).

Not Cheap

The website for Constellation 3D states [c-3d.net] that the cost will be not much more than a CD or DVD. Unfortunately, that is probably the manufacturing price:

The FMD/C technology is presently protected by over 70 Japanese, European, and US patents, approved and/or pending, dozens of priority establishing disclosures, and the exceptional know-how of an unprecedented group of physicists cooperating across the world.

To me, this means over 70 different royalties that consumers will have to pay when purchasing the media and readers. Suppose we'll have to pay higher pre-sale taxes on the readers for the government to distribute to copyright holders (since we can copy so much more copyrighted material)?

Another old story?

This 140 GB disc wouldn't by any chance be the
same technology described in this story [slashdot.org]?

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THe Horse's Mouth

The site for Constellation 3D, the company producing the FMD drives, is http://www.c-3d.net/ [c-3d.net].

Data transfer technologies

Let's take it on good faith that this is not vaporware and will actually ship within the next 5 years--a fairly reasonable timeframe I think. That means that finally removable storage density has caught up with hard drives, and that it doesn't take 10-100 disks anymore to backup a modern HD.

This brings us to another important topic, data transfer rates. Most decent removable drives connect to IDE, SCSI, USB and parallel port. Forget the last two, they offer only convenience but no performance. Even with IDE and SCSI all current removable drives peak at way below their top rates. Let's assume a very optimistic 10MB/s (which is closer to HD transfer rates than removable drives) and do the math for a 140GB disk:

140GB * 1024MB/GB = 143,360MB
143,360MB / 10MB/s = 14,336s
14,336s / 3600s/h = ~3.98h

So it would take me about four hours to fill that disk with data. In a couple of years my main HD will be about that size, and it will take me 4h to do a full backup. For backups that might be somewhat tolerable, but these disks will be hawked as super floppies. Pop it in, drag that HDTV movie onto it, wait a couple of hours, remove it and run to your friend's house to play it. What's wrong with that scenario?

What I'm saying is that we're approaching storage densities where our current data transfer busses simply can't reasonably cope anymore. We really need gigabit level transfer rates, and media that can cope with that kind of read/write speed. I simply can't see sequential technology like HD and CD-ROM keeping up. We need either new materials that can write MUCH faster or new parallel access technologies that read/write multiple tracks at once. And the transfer technology that goes with that--maybe gigabit ethernet, 1.6Gb 1394 or who knows what.

Vaporware Alert!

Okay people, here's the standard procedure for dealing with a story about vaporware:

Be impressed with the technological feat.

Ignore it for the next six months (or in Daikatana's case, three years)

When the subject gets out of the vaporware stage, become amazed again; even more so than before since it actually exists.

So...

What will it be called anyway? OAS-ROM (Obscene Amounts of Storage Read Only Memory)?

Or maybe MS-ROM, because this'll probably be the only thing big enough to hold a full installation of Windows 2010.
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Romanian Scientists and a 10-TeraByte Optical Disc

An article HERE [geek.com]Infoworld [infoworld.com] details a 10-Terabyte Optical Disc. The inventor of the disc says that it may become commercially available in a year (it was stated in oct).

An important part of this disc is that it is very stable -- instability occurs only after 5,000 years.

A little more info..

Theres a reasonable Byte article on these things here [byte.com]. These things sounds like DVD killers, assuming they're practical. They hold more, they're just as speedy, and they could be made at a good price.

But.. they're 5 inches across still. When are we going to get something smaller? Why not stick 30Gb on a 2 inch disc? That'd be a killer for portables.