News - Boffins build basis for 9TB DVDs

[Funkstar]

I wonder what kind of lifespan these disks will have?

That would be a compelling argument to use this if they can get, say, 20 years out of it. Much better than the organic dies of DVD-R and BDR. Old CD-Rs, the ones with the dark green recording surface and the gold top will probably outlast many modern DVD-Rs simply because they used horrible chemical compounds that you wouldn't be allowed to make these days. Completely man made and far less likely to rot.

A place I used to work had thousands of football matches recorded in an archive the size of a normal living room. This was all on DigiBeta tapes (derived from Betamax) and they were running out of room fast. It was decided that most of it they could enode most of it to MPEG-2 and stick it on DVDs (they weren't DVD-Video disks, just a MPEG-2 file on the disk), this would cut the required space down to less than 25%. You could jut the space down even further by putting the disks in slimline cases, saving another third over that.

Granted in this case they were loosing quality by moving to a lossy compression system, but the benefits far out weighed the negatives.

[Nick]

Gah, where's my holocube? My wonderful bit of perspex that I just drop into a reader and it stores hundreds of TB of data, like in the movies? For that matter, where's the flying cars and trains bolted onto the side of buildings? Everyone wearing outrageous and highly impractical clothing... I've seen the original Star Trek and I feel cheated...