Mad Scientists Cram 1 TB of data onto a single DVD

[Racoon]

Not sure what it all means, but sounds like storage will get better and easier :D

 

 

Article/Blog source

 

 

Sure, we've seen 1TB discs before, but instead of complicating things with holograms and the like, a research team at the University of Central Florida has taken a different tact and developed some advances in laser technology that could actually make disc drives cheaper and more portable

 

-- along with the obvious benefits of 1TB of storage and speedier read/write times. Unfortunately, we left our PhDs at home today, so we really haven't the foggiest idea how this all works, but the gist of the idea seems to be the fancy dual laser wavelengths being used, allowing for sharper imaging and recording. These lasers can interact with 3D materials -- such as the multiple layers on a disc, or even a storage "cube" -- without interference from the solid material, providing for more durable and more dense storage.

 

To switch between reading and writing is only a matter of applying more power, and the simplicity of the method means that cheaper lasers could possibly be used in the system -- a far cry from the current blue laser manufacturing problems being experienced by Blu-ray and HD DVD formats. We're not exactly sure if the drive will be able to store 1TB to existing DVD discs, or if a new media will need to be produced -- we're guessing the latter -- but while we're sure commercialization of this technology is a ways off, it's nice to see what a few nerds in a college science lab can pull off while waiting around for multi-billion dollar corporations to get a 50GB drive out the door.

[Buffy]

Blu-ray is more of the "thinner" tracks idea, and the DVDs you buy today already incorporate multiple layers. Getting to 1TB is only about one order of magnitude more than the high-end commercial technology so should not be too hard, but they'll still change formats on us in the next 3-5 years. Abandon all hope of keeping those Gold DVDs forever....

 

8-Track, :D

Buffy

[alexander]

lol, i should just use the 3d printer at school and make a prototype 3d blueray dvd, where the information will be written on top, sides, underneeth and in multiple layers.... terabyte is all that much closer... now all i need is a dvd reader that reads in 3d..

[Jay-qu]

I dont think Blu-ray will really make much of a splash in the market, not like DVD did, it really just depends on how fast the next gen disc comes out and with things like this to look forward to :phones: get every episode of stargate, ever, in HD on 1 disc

[VS Prasad]

Dual layer DVD is suffucient for most of the present applications.

 

Cramming more data increases susceptibility to loss of data due

to unforeseen circumstances.

[Boerseun]

Dual layer DVD is suffucient for most of the present applications.

I seem to remember a certain Mr. Gates proclaiming that 512k or RAM 'is enough for anybody'. :)

 

The Department of Risque Forecasting

[Buffy]

Dual layer DVD is suffucient for most of the present applications.

No its not! I want a single disk to back up the average 200GB I have on my machine. We're still back at having a pile of floppy disks taller than I am that was true when I was a kid.

 

Not only are Risque Predictions wrong in the future, they're probably even wrong today!

 

Never satisfied,

Buffy

[ErlyRisa]

I would be more intersted in what nanotech has to offer....

 

imagine going camping and the only thing you took with you was this Triquarter thingy (PDA) and a little 'storage cube' ... the cube has power (h2) and little nanobots.

 

You need a tent... your triquater takes environmental readings and designs 2 possible tents for you and your hiking partner... you choose the blue one... you drop the nanocube, and transfer (bluetooth?) the info over to the cube...

 

-yep you guessed it the nanobots start working away building your tent... in 20mins it ready with sleeping bag and steak dinner!

 

---question is , what else could it be used for?

[CraigD]

... imagine going camping and the only thing you took with you was this Triquarter thingy (PDA)

Oh, the trekkie outrage! :) It’s spelled tricorder, as in “recorder or three things” – audio, video, and, ahem, everything else. As the RACprops article explains, more thought went into producing an excuse to have a pretty girl in shot than the meaning of the name.

 

Notice that they have little, removable “data disks”. Like much of the 1960s tech ideas of Star Trek, the tricorder doesn’t appear to use any sort of wireless networking – apperantly you gotta take the little disks out of it and feed them to the big computer.

… and a little 'storage cube'

There is a present day technology like this, though it’s yet, AFAIK, to appear in its “cube form” in any commercially available product: holographic memory. It’s one of the “complicating things with holograms and the like” mentioned in the engadget article. It’s theoretical maximum storage density using the same 405 nm laser used by Blue-ray is about 15 TB for a 1 x 1 x 1 cm cube, before error correction, and in principle has no or very few moving parts.

... the cube has power (h2) and little nanobots.

 

You need a tent... your triquater takes environmental readings and designs 2 possible tents for you and your hiking partner... you choose the blue one... you drop the nanocube, and transfer (bluetooth?) the info over to the cube...

 

-yep you guessed it the nanobots start working away building your tent... in 20mins it ready with sleeping bag and steak dinner!

There are several technical problems with this description.

 

First, is the well known question of whether general-purpose assembler nanomachines much different than the “wet” kind we’re currently built of are possible. Despite commercial interest and their popularity in science fiction, this is far from a settled question.

 

Second, even if possible, nanobots are likely to be slow. Perhaps the fastest known thing close to a 10^-9 m (nanometer, or um) scale that moves through a liquid is a roughly 1000 um sperm cell, capable of speeds approaching .2 mm/sec (source: Speed of a Sperm Cell). While good for moving data in an animals reproductive system, even in a tiny storage devices of, say 1 mm, this means seek and reply latency times around 10 sec – an long time for a computer storage device. As a general rule, the smaller a self-mobile device, the lower its speed, to a true nanobot, about 100 to 1000 times smaller than a sperm cell – would tend to be even slower. This latency is in addition to the time it takes the machine to mechanically pick up and drop off its data.

 

Third, is power. As a general rule, the efficiency with which a machine can transport matter increases with the size of the machine. Taking those of the human body as an example, cell-sized machines take about 300 MJ to assemble 1 kg. A 100% efficient hydrogen fuel cell produces about 260 MJ/kg of hydrogen. The current target for Hydrogen storage is about 1 kg of usable hydrogen per 20 kg of system mass. So to build a 2 kg tent and a kg of dinner for 2 would require at least 3 kg of hydrogen fuel, which with current technology would require about 60 kg of machinery. It would be easier just to carry your tent and steaks the old-fashioned way.

 

In short, carrying enough data to make anything you want out of local available matter (typical SF stories usually involve the assemblers gobbling up dirt, brush, or whatever else is handy, to make structures consisting mostly of carbon) is likely not to be a problem. The main problems appear to be whether fast nanomachine assemblers are possible, and if they are, supplying them with enough power to do the job.

 

Personally, I don’t think having arbitrarily large amounts of energy on hand will be an unsolvable problem, as I anticipate that the practical engineering problems of large-scale making, storing, and use of antimatter fuel will be solved in the reasonably near future. The nanomachine question, on the other hand, is IMHO still very undecided.

[ErlyRisa]

That's good to hear.... whep.... I was building a bunker for me and my family, you have helped me throw away the shovel.

 

for now I guess the conversion of Light to inat matter or a nanobot is thankfully restricted by our knowledge. (or is it? quantum qubit anyone?)

 

-how about the cube being more of a 'central qubit processor'. the molecules that make up the cube can manupilate the aoms that are in dricet contact with it...communicating indefinetly along a çhain of atoms', while at the same time with the ability of 'modifying' atos to align to others -creating molecules in the right place at the right time, for example to build a a tent.

[CraigD]

-how about the cube being more of a 'central qubit processor'. the molecules that make up the cube can manupilate the aoms that are in dricet contact with it...communicating indefinetly along a çhain of atoms', while at the same time with the ability of 'modifying' atos to align to others -creating molecules in the right place at the right time, for example to build a a tent.

This is the exact opposite of what quantum computers are intended to do.

 

For a quantum computer to work, its qubits must be kept in a state of quantum coherence. Such a state absolutely requires that the qubits not interact with anything measurable – which the molecules in a tent certainly are – for the entire time it is computing. If such a state can be maintained, the quantum computer can perform a potentially infinite number of computations in a finite about of time, making it well-suited for such things as factoring numbers too large for conventional computers.

 

As a simple data storage and retrieval device, however, the requirement not to interact with the external world works strongly against a quantum computer.

 

A massively parallel computer – one with many data streams to allow stored data to be transferred to an external device, such as a hypothetical single-atom matter assembler – could be well suited to this application. However, massively parallel and a quantum computation are very different concepts.

[ErlyRisa]

your making me feel all warm and fuzzy all over....

 

--I have now moved out of the bunker.

 

thankyou for knocking some sense and perspective onto the scientific achievements of humanity.

 

--how about if the quantum bits computer was 'shelled' in nanobots, and are manufactured by the cube, whie the nanobots start building and replicating.... eg star gate episodes those silicon spider things.

 

(slight reference to star trekk too)