Monday, October 11th 2010
TDK Develops New Optical Disc That Holds 1 Terabyte of Data
Late last week, TDK demonstrated its technological prowess by displaying the prototype of a new optical disc that can hold 1 TB of data. The unnamed disc type holds data on both its sides, each with 16 recording layers, each layer holding 32 GB of data. Physically, the disc has the same diameter as today's CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs at 12 cm, but is said to have double the thickness of a Blu-ray disc. It uses the same materials used in making Blu-ray discs, and also uses the same numerical aperture value of 0.85, which indicates that a player of this new medium should be able to read Blu-ray discs, too.
Many of Blu-ray's technologies (such as its video format) can also be ported to this new medium. As for propagation of the standard, TDK says that its creation is intended to be a highly proliferated standard, accessible to all classes of users from home entertainment to enterprise archival. The company, however, believes that manufacturers (of media, disc drives, and players) will have to play a bigger role in its commercialization. "Its commercialization depends on disc manufacturers," TDK said. Earlier this year, the Blu-ray disc association approved standardization of BDXL, an evolved Blu-ray disc that can hold 128 GB of data, an eighth of what this new disc can hold.
Source:
TechON
Many of Blu-ray's technologies (such as its video format) can also be ported to this new medium. As for propagation of the standard, TDK says that its creation is intended to be a highly proliferated standard, accessible to all classes of users from home entertainment to enterprise archival. The company, however, believes that manufacturers (of media, disc drives, and players) will have to play a bigger role in its commercialization. "Its commercialization depends on disc manufacturers," TDK said. Earlier this year, the Blu-ray disc association approved standardization of BDXL, an evolved Blu-ray disc that can hold 128 GB of data, an eighth of what this new disc can hold.
32 Comments on TDK Develops New Optical Disc That Holds 1 Terabyte of Data
I can only see potential use only in the console world where such mediums are still the basic data medium. And partially movies, but who really buys them on optical mediums? They are either too restricted or too expensive...
BUT maybe it will give blu ray some competition and not be 8 times more expensive.
But the solid state drive is more reliable, rugged, fast and low power.
PS: That needle cost me more than 46inch lcd TV.
And - looking at picture - is this thing really transparent?
I can see many uses for this - just not for me though.
Hell, my friends business used to back up to zip drive and after a while that became a clusterf**k.
The good things is if this is a manufacturing advancement, or a data encoding enhancement, the tech can be adapted to Blu-rays instead of trying to replace it (or I may be reading the article wrong). A 32 GB and 64 GB (single and dual layer respectively) blu-ray could be nice. The extra space means better or more audio tracks for movies/series. Or simply a few more episodes per disk for TV series and anime, further reducing cost to make. That means either better quality stuff for us, or cheaper stuff when it comes to those series.
This is nothing compared to a holographic disc (6 TB discs), but those muthas are expensive to make. If they keep this up, then may make HVD's obsolete before we even get commercial versions of them.
Optical media is dead for anything buy movies and consoles, this is a pointless product.
It seems to me that discarding of optical media technology would/could be disastrous in the long run.
That is, if the price is right.
I cannot wait to hear you again after your HDDs broke down and you've lost hundreds of gigs...
LTO-4 standard can store 1600GB in 2:1 ratio (uncompressed 800GB) and LTO-5 will have twice as much. The transfer speed is around 120MB/s including on the fly compression.
And each cost about 25Euro.
I really see no point in this tech.
Edit:
Also consider this 10euro a piece for 50GB BD-R would cost you 300Euro for 1.5TB of data I can add 3rd drive to my setup for that:)
Depending solely on electronic media would be a catastrophic fail in the event of a massive EMP. That is especially important to consider when taking into account that the sun is said to be building up to a solar maximum in the near future, which will have the possibility of producing a solar flare powerful enough to damage much of earth's electronics.
In our world archiving is important, whether history, or personal items such as movies, etc, and IMO, the less volatile the media is to electromagnetism, the better. Discs with this level of storage hardly seems to be intended to be carried around with you daily, but rather for long-term large-scale storage.
I'm glad that it seems that the written surface seems to be internal, thus reducing that the written surface peals off or warps from corrosion over time, like on DVDs, etc.:toast: