Optical technique promises terabyte disks, page 1

posted on Sep, 28 2004 @ 02:53 AM

link

By 2010 new discoveries made by researchers at the Imperial college in london could allow up to 472 hours of video to be stored on on a single DVD. To put this into perspectve that wuld allow you to record every episode of the simpsons ever made including the holiday specials on a single disc and still have room left over for the entire run of seinfeld.

www.newscientist.com
A novel method of optical data storage could soon be used to hold a terabyte of data on a disk the size of a normal DVD, say researchers at Imperial College London, UK.

Information is encoded on a normal DVD in the form of microscopic indents on the surface of the disk. The presence or absence of an indent corresponds to a binary piece of information - a �1� or a �0�. Indents are detected by beaming light onto a disk with a laser and measuring the amount of light that bounces back.

Using tracks embedded at several depths within a disk, it is possible to store more data on the highest capacity disks. Multilayer DVDs hold about 16 gigabytes of data, which equals about 8 hours of high quality video.

But the researchers realised that the polarity of light might also be used to encode information. They developed a type of disk that incorporates angled ridges within the pits in order to subtly alter the polarity of the light that gets reflected. This can be used to store 10 times� more data than is currently possible, they say.

Please visit the link provided for the complete story.

As data storage becomes more and more effecient the amount of information that can be confortably carried by a single person becomes greater and greater, How long untll the entire library of congress can be stored in a single disc?

[edit on 28-9-2004 by John bull 1]

ufo3

posted on Sep, 28 2004 @ 07:51 AM

link

Thats amazing but did u know terabyte hard drives already exist although they are pretty bulky.

IAF101

posted on Sep, 28 2004 @ 08:05 AM

link

Wait till 2010 !!who wants to wait so long ?? by then they would have a 10TB drive.

Amorymeltzer

posted on Sep, 28 2004 @ 04:10 PM

link

yeah, really. im all for it, but what do you really need a TB for? movie quality isnt even near good enough to justify that. its really only good for archives, library of congress type things, or a huge collection of, i dunno, every tv show that has the letter 'e' in the title.

markjaxson

posted on Sep, 28 2004 @ 06:04 PM

link

We wouldnt need hard drives with this!

Just use Re-Write Optical Terabite Disks.

Wonder how much these babies would cost though!?

cpr12r

posted on Sep, 28 2004 @ 06:13 PM

link

They'd probaly cost the same as dvds when they came out then go down from there.

Amorymeltzer

posted on Sep, 28 2004 @ 06:47 PM

link

Originally posted by markjaxson
We wouldnt need hard drives with this!

Just use Re-Write Optical Terabite Disks.

yeah... but why? the hard drive is faster.

when you do 'complicated' things like defraging you get all messed up. what'll happen is you'll start to build a hard drive around the disks, so it can run, correct itself. the end product? a hard drive thats really really slow and needs a drive to read. kinda stupid IMO, but one of those 'hey, why not' things, for fun, anyway.

markjaxson

posted on Sep, 28 2004 @ 07:01 PM

link

By 2010 they will have extremely fast cd drives anyway(i hope)

Or maybe even memory card sized hard drives where you could just take it out of your pc and take it anywhere you want.

LordGoofus

posted on Sep, 28 2004 @ 08:37 PM

link

It's funny. My cd collection hit 300 and I decided I'd start using hard drives because it was getting ridiculous trying to keep track of all the cd's...so I figured 160Gb should do the trick for my most commonly used applications / watched movies etc.... a month later and I'm out of disk space. Personally I could see a BIG advantage in 1Tb disks....but I wonder what their reliability is like? Higher data density means more chance of killing a disk with even the slightest of scratches. I think they need to start making covers of sorts to put over / build around disks to protect them from scratches.