DVD-compatible optical disk hits 100 Gbytes

EE Times ^ | May 24, 2002 | Mike Clendenin

[StriperSniper]

The RIAA and the MPAA are demanding that Congress pass legislation banning this kind of technology,

What are they afraid it might capture their souls, oh wait, all you need is a AppleII with 64K.

[Dimensio]

What are they afraid it might capture their souls,

Oxymoron.

[beckett]

This just in. The RIAA and the MPAA are demanding that Congress pass legislation banning this kind of technology, citing piracy concerns.

Back in the mid-80s, the RIAA actually attempted to outlaw digital music altogether, making it illegal to put music into digitized form, a little fact seldom reported in these post-Napster times, but true.

[ctdonath2]

Just for some context:

One hour of a movie, at full 35mm film resolution (not "digital cinema") theater quality with no compression, takes 1 terabyte of storage.

With lossless compression, a full 2-3 hour movie takes 1TB.
With mild lossy compression (you won't notice the difference), a whole theater-quality movie could fit on 2-3 of these 100GB discs.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Looks like the market may be ready then.

So much technology is arriving ahead of people's perceived need for it.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Here is a likely example:

________________________________________________________________________________________

FMD: coulda been a contenda
We should also mention here a technology often written up alongside all of the above, namely FMD or fluorescent multilayer disc, from New York-based Constellation 3D.

Instead of the reflective coating found in existing discs, FMD uses fluorescent dyes to coat multiple layers of substrate within each disc. Current DVDs use only two layers on a single-sided disc because the reflective coating causes too much interference for data to be read back. But fluorescent dyes, which don't cause a noise problem, record data by emitting fluorescent light in varying patterns to represent 1s and 0s. FMD increases capacity simply because it uses more of the media in a disc of the same size.

Constellation was promising a DVD-sized disc that could hold 140GB of data using red lasers, or more than a terabyte using blue lasers. Last July, the company seemed to be on the verge of a breakthrough when it signed a licensing deal with Warner Advanced Media Operations (WAMO), an AOL subsidiary and one of the world's largest manufacturers of DVDs.

Last July, the company seemed to be on the verge of a breakthrough.

But since then, Constellation 3D has fallen victim to the economic downturn and perhaps to its own failure to meet the manufacturing goals established with WAMO. It's hard to tell exactly what went wrong; none of the company's executives nor its partners will return calls for comment. The employees that haven't been actually laid off are reportedly working without pay and have vacated their offices. The company is still traded on the Nasdaq SmallCap market, but has fallen to less than 30 cents per share from a high of more than $60.

The company is awaiting a life-sustaining infusion of cash from a mysterious Swiss company called TIC Target Investing Consulting, which was supposed to have provided a $15 million investment in March but has so far failed to do so despite repeated assurances of its good intentions.

If Constellation 3D goes under, which seems likely, then its patents may well resurface with another player, but for the time being, this promising technology, once considered a potential DVD killer by Byte magazine and other major trade titles, appears to be down for the count.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

The above is from the link at post #4.

[Momaw Nadon]

What comes after a Yottabyte?

[ken in texas]

Indigestion and heartburn.

[Gumlegs]

Lukasbyte?

[Alan Chapman]

"A petabyte here, a zettabyte there -- pretty soon you're talking some real storage ..." ;^)

It's not uncommon for big companies to have terabytes of storage. I used to work for one. Our tape library held 24 terabytes. Our nightly backups (differential backups) were running between 300-500 gigabytes and our weekend backups (full backups) were running 1.2-1.5 terabytes. I don't know who has the largest storage but I'd bet it's Lucasfilm. I don't know if anyone has petabyte storage.

[Alan Chapman]

What comes after a Yottabyte?

No idea.

[mikrofon]

I'm very familiar with tape backups here -- the venerable 4mm drives at the engineering firm store mere hundreds of gigabytes of data in total during the weekly full backups. Still, it's hard to conceive of having to back up petabytes (much less terabytes) of data on a regular basis!

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Try Los Alamos National Labs!

[Hillarys Gate Cult]

What comes after a Yottabyte?

Yattabyte?

[The Chid]

What comes after a Yottabyte?

After Yotta- you get

Heckuva-, then you get

Helluva-.