News - How to fit 1,000TB of data onto a 12cm optical disc

[HEXUS]

Scientists use a light wave interference technique to create a much finer laser.

Read more.

[jnutt]

Wow

[Scribe]

There must be some kind of technical challenge to component calibration and disc material quality as this approach is kind-of common sense to most with an interest in physics, so I wonder why we've not seen prototypes already...

[Odeas]

Lets just hope write speeds massively increase too! It'd take years to write a full disc at current speeds

[Dooms]

Ew Physical media!

Awesome idea and great for backups however I would rather have a fast & affordable 1000TB HDD... screw it, I would be happy with cheap 4TB drives.

[kingpotnoodle]

All very well having such a tiny laser but the manufacturing tolerances for the disks and drives would be exact, they would have to spin with high accuracy and the laser would need to be focussed on a tiny target... and how stable is a disk with such tiny pits, 1 small scratch could wipe out TBs of data. The error correction would have to be very, very good.

[crossy]

Ew Physical media! Awesome idea and great for backups however I would rather have a fast & affordable 1000TB HDD... screw it, I would be happy with cheap 4TB drives.

Backups is what I'd want it for - so no real need for a Petabyte (at the moment!) I'd be happy with 100TB or even 10TB for that matter (if the disks weren't a dumb price).

And what I'd like to see is some external device (even 10GbE NAS-like) that had a couple of normal HDD's in it and one of these drives. Then backups etc could be sent to the devices's HDDs and then those could be written to optical disk for off site storage. Reason for the "caching" on local disks being that write to optical will probably be pretty slow and I'd want to power down my clients.

I like the idea of dedicated backup media for offsite (though normal HDD's seem awful fragile to me) and tapes strike me as a bit "1980's" these days.

Any idea whether Microsoft or Sony are involved - perhaps for the next-next-gen consoles - i.e. the one's after XBone and PS4? rofl

[AGTDenton]

What, only for big data centres I want them too. Especially when 8K arrives, it will be a perfect medium to store film on.

[Hardware_Elite]

I love optical drives and technologies, even though I'm a (PC) gamer. Hopefully they will make a comeback and everyone will see how funny digital distribution really is.

[Jingee]

Looks like 4K has found it's optical method of distribution.

[Funkstar]

I kind of assumed this would be the case for the HD disks (BluRay and HD-DVD) but they managed to use very durable coatings, however I would say these disks would definitely need to be in sealed caddies, like the ones PD disks came in.

100TB sounds purely theoretical to me. Just like they have been speaking about 100GB and even 120GB BluRay disks for years, but nothing has ever materialised. But even 10TB or even 1TB disks would be a hell of a jump from current optical media. Would make them viable once again for backup purposes.

[AGTDenton]

Just like they have been speaking about 100GB and even 120GB BluRay disks for years, but nothing has ever materialised.

I spotted these not so long ago

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Panasonic-Bl.../dp/B0040NP1TI

[DrClone]

I would like a 10TB hard drive extremely cheap and I believe that's enough! That's 10,000GB! My computer only have 320GB.

[DanceswithUnix]

I kind of assumed this would be the case for the HD disks (BluRay and HD-DVD) but they managed to use very durable coatings, however I would say these disks would definitely need to be in sealed caddies, like the ones PD disks came in.

100TB sounds purely theoretical to me. Just like they have been speaking about 100GB and even 120GB BluRay disks for years, but nothing has ever materialised. But even 10TB or even 1TB disks would be a hell of a jump from current optical media. Would make them viable once again for backup purposes.

A caddy?

Sealed 5-1/4 inch form factor drive would be fine. I'm sure by the time I have filled one media, I could have saved up for another drive.

If they could scale them down to 3.5" housing, it would make an interesting raid array

[Funkstar]

I spotted these not so long ago

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Panasonic-Bl.../dp/B0040NP1TI

What I actually meant was the 250GB ten layer disks that never saw the light of day

http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/12/r...blu-ray-discs/

[Funkstar]

A caddy?

Sealed 5-1/4 inch form factor drive would be fine. I'm sure by the time I have filled one media, I could have saved up for another drive.

If they could scale them down to 3.5" housing, it would make an interesting raid array

Well doesn't have to be a complete sealed drive, just a sealed disk, like a state of the are floppy disk... remember them?