Aussies develop multi-terabyte optical storage
A TEAM of boffins at the Swinburne University of Technology in the Queendom of Down Under have tested a new type of “five-dimensional” optical storage medium that they estimated might hold up to 2,000 times more data than a conventional DVD.
That's 10TB per DVD disc, in case you're counting.
The tinkering trio resorted to gold nanorods to coat the surface of an optical disc. Nanomaterials, it seems, are photoreactive and adjust their shape according to different colours of the visible spectrum, which were illuminated by lasers in this case. The team then followed up by applying multiple polarizations to the same physical disc space, effectively writing the data at different angles in the same place.
This means that data - usually written in a typical three dimensional (x, y, z) fashion - acquired two more dimensions. So far this has already resulted in an optical disc sample capable of storing 1.6TB of data, but as development continues, researchers Min Gu, Peter Zijlstra and James Won expect storage capacity to reach a whopping 10TB.
None of these techniques are actually new, just the fact that they were all applied at the same time. This brings about at least one major problem that the technology has to contend with, that is, recording speed. Current prototypes record about as fast as a glyph-carver in ancient Egypt, the researchers have implied.
Another problem such high-capacity media are going to have to confront is tied up with several related terms like robustness, reliability and longevity. At least initially, most people will want to have such large capacity physical media offer some assurance that they won't self-destruct within merely five or fifteen years as most presently available CD and DVD discs are all too prone to do.
But we guess the scientists are working on first things first, thinking about how to do this before working out how to make people believe it's worth entrusting lots of valuable data to it.
The research, in the meantime, has been hoovered up by the storage giant Samsung, which now seems destined to manufacture the media that records every bit of stored data on the planet. The company says that this technology should be ready within the next five to ten years, but it's also possible you might see it at the next Adult Entertainment Expo, which is like a time-space wormhole for storage of the future. µ
L'Inq
Nature Magazine
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Even if the torrent sites get closed down, there's a good chance people can carry on by distributing these things. Just put everything you have on a disc, put it in a cd case of a popular band, and if the cops are around, be like,"I don't like this band any more, why don't you try it out. Hand it over to your friend, and he suddenly has a whole bunch of stuff to look over. And if a regular size dvd can store, say, 1TiB(yes, I know they said 10TB, but I'm going to lowball it), then a little minidisc-type thing(sorry, didn't mean to jolt you like that ;) ) could store 5-10GB in an extremely small form factor.
Fun times ahead.
We allready have MicroSD cards storing 8Gb, and it's a far better storage medium than optical - no scratches, throw it about, etc... With 16 and 32Gb MicroSDs on the way, and even bigger standard sized SDs, who needs opticals?
Long live solid-state :-)
SSD's last about as long bread in a duck pond so we need better.
There are many SSD's which have MTBF's better than most HDD's. With SSD's you can do RAID0 without having to worry about data loss.
This is a good thing, finally the optical media is starting to catch up with harddrive technology.
Now lets just hope that it will become avalible before 5 to 10 years have passed. because if it takes that long im a fraid that by then SSD's might run laps around this one for both capacity and writing speed.
No matter how much information can be packed on an optical disk, there is still the matter of fragility relative to solid state storage, plus the rather awkward disc size. 5-1/4" is just not pocket-sized. Plus it needs to be rotated, hence moving parts.
I think a better avenue is T-RAM's thyristor-based RAM, or the memristor, when it reaches commercial stage.
Solid-state storage will be the future, not optical-based or even magnetic-rotating storage.
for the last few years Ive been doing backup on dvd-r. It is still the cheapest way to backup data (maybe tape backup is better but the tape drive at 5k$ make it less attractive...)
at something like 0,10 or less per gb with high quality disc I can say everything work fine: no lost/corrupt of data on the TB that were written.
however dvd-dl are still x10 the price and don't even think about blue ray disc. Plus i must say read speed is rather crappy on optical disk.
on the near futur optical disc WILL disapear... HD are juste becoming way too cheap, along with flash. I dont think we'll ever see those 5D disc...
HD will be at like 50TB or more were these will be affordable really...