Penny-size 180 Gigabits CDROMs

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.

Office 2009

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.

approximate capacity of a cd-sized disk:

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.

because...

...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.

penny size cd's will lead to 1 inevitable problem

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?