472hrs of film on one disc

[stef24]

somewhat related to the very popular thread about the dutch guy, but less spectacular:

local newspaper report: Multiplexed Optical Data Storage (MODS) is a technology developed by Imperial College London that can fit one terrabyte on a disc. 5-10 yrs before it hits the market

link at Imperial (http://www.imperial.ac.uk/p5595.htm)

[virus]

Doom9 reported that yesterday and I must admit I'm really impressed.

Imagine something like 1920x1080 @ 50 fps with lossless compression... at 4 bits/pixel (which should be easily reachable on a YV12 source with such a huge amount of redundancy) it would require ~174 GB/hour. That means 1000/174 = 5h 45m of video, without any sort of artifacts (except the ones already present in the source of course...) and with very limited cost for the hardware decoders, since lossless-only algorithms are usually pretty simple compared to the best lossy ones.

It's even more impressing if you think that their technology is pretty new... right now they need 4 layers (2/side) to achieve 1000 GB. Probably in a few years they will be able to store, say, 2000 GB per layer or something similar :eek:

[stephanV]

The 1TB disk would be double sided and dual layer, but even a single sided, single layer, MODS disk could hold the Lord of the Rings trilogy 13 times over, or all 238 episodes of Friends. (See Notes to Eds for more comparisons).

Yoohooo - all episodes of "Friends" on one disk, thats really what this world needs. :o

[Sirber]

Any specs? How do they do this?

[Joe Fenton]

The article gives a brief mention of how it works. Normal CDs and DVDs work by recording data in a binary stream: pits on the disc are read back as 1s and 0s. With this new system, the pits vary in depth and angle of the bottom of the pit to record hundreds of states instead of just two states. So think of it like an analog disc.

[Soulhunter]

Imagine a "MiniDisc" would use this technology !!!

Small enough for portable devices but still xxxGB capacity... :eek:


Bye

[Doobie]

Already, you could easily save every thing you've ever written in your entire life, on one small, cheap disk.

In a few years, you'll be able to video record every moment of your life, with decent video quality, and save it on a few disks. Imagine walking around with a very tiny camera mounted on your body. In 50 years, you could look back at any moment of your life and see what you were doing, just like watching TV.

[SeeMoreDigital]

Originally posted by Soulhunter
Imagine a "MiniDisc" would use this technology !!!Talking about MiniDisc. What sort of prices are you guys being charged for the new 1GB disc's?

PS: Is our man len0x able to provide more information regarding this latest innovation of disc technology?


Cheers

EDIT: Next stop... holographic and pozatronic (have I spelt that right?) memory storage :D

[Mug Funky]

positronic memory? i wouldn't want to be around when that particular disk fails... FOOM!

[edit]

1 TB disks would be very cool indeed, but i'm wondering how it will work from a sales point of view... though the cost might be about the same as a DVD, certainly they won't charge $30 for a disk with all the simpsonses on it.

one thing i'd like to see is a storage medium that is designed for longevity - currently CDRs often fail after a year (sometimes less), which is really not much better than diskettes.

1 terabyte discs would be extremely useful for archiving, but we'd have to be sure they'll last long enough to be really useful (multiple copies would help, but not completely solve the problem).

[Soulhunter]

Again, why 1TB discs ???

They could make them simply smaller than todays discs...

A small cartridged disc (GameBoy game size) with only 50GB storage or so !!!


Bye

[SeeMoreDigital]

Originally posted by Soulhunter
Again, why 1TB discs ???

They could make them simply smaller than todays discs...

A small cartridged disc (GameBoy game size) with only 50GB storage or so !!! Yes, shrinking the disc's/technology down in size would be great for devices such as MP3 players, cell phones, portable memory stores or even camcorders!

Having 1TB disc's or even disk's is one thing. Accessing the data from it (at speed), may be another!


Cheers

[LordDethstar]

I've heard to many stories of new miracle storage systems that it is starting to get boring. Therefore I have started to ignore any new storage system until you can actually buy it at a not to expensive price.

[SoonUDie]

I can empathize, LordDethstar. Does anyone remember C3D? They invented FMD, flourescant multilayer disks, and announced them around 5 years ago. They were also supposed to scale up to 1TB, with an initial size of ~150GB to be released by a few years ago. Then they just simply disappeared.

[Soulhunter]

Probably "snap'ed-up" by the BlueRay companys... :D


Bye

[LigH]

Well - I just thought someone would think crazy about the proposed 8 inch BlueRay as written in the news from 8th Oct. 2004; but I'd prefer a 8 cm BlueRay instead; definitely. 8-inch drives have been used for 160/180 KB floppies ages ago. Does someone remember LP records (sure, DJs still scratch them on turntables nowadays), or LaserDiscs? Imagine a BlueRay with a similar diameter; handy, isn't it? :sly: :p

[Atamido]

Originally posted by SoonUDie
I can empathize, LordDethstar. Does anyone remember C3D? They invented FMD, flourescant multilayer disks, and announced them around 5 years ago. They were also supposed to scale up to 1TB, with an initial size of ~150GB to be released by a few years ago. Then they just simply disappeared. See this update (http://www.zzz.com.ru/index.php?area=issues&action=show_issue&issue_no=197&session_id=0) from ZZZ online about what happenned to them. (search for FMD) The company website that bought them out has stats on a demonstrated product on their website.
* 15 GB capacity (single side)
* 15 Mbit/sec average read speed 36Mbit/sec peak
* 4 layers
* 130 min estimated play time
* MPEG 2 MP&HL 1080i
* Dolby Digital AC-3 5.1 Basically looks like a DVD with 1.5x the capacity. Not only has this company castrated the potential market for this device, the demo is about as impressive as me speaking spanish.