Fitting One Petabyte On A DVD?

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This company is claiming that its new two-light beam system will allow for up to one petabyte of data to be stored on a single DVD. :eek:

In Nature Communications today, we, along with Richard Evans from CSIRO, show how we developed a new technique to enable the data capacity of a single DVD to increase from 4.7 gigabytes up to one petabyte (1,000 terabytes). This is equivalent of 10.6 years of compressed high-definition video or 50,000 full high-definition movies.
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This is using DVD technology and not Blue Ray? Or is it just something the size of a cd/dvd/bd ?
 
Every time a company claims something similar to this nothing happens, I believe someone was able to fit more than 100GB now with tripple layer bluray? or some other disc, but something like this will just be swallowed up by Seagate or Western Digital and never see the lite of day. What the biggest tape backup? 3TB? They probably have something to say about stuff like this too. Call me a conspiracist but we see huge claims like this every year and it hasn't gotten very far.
 
Man, that technique seems to simple it's fucking brilliant.
 
striker444 said:
Every time a company claims something similar to this nothing happens, I believe someone was able to fit more than 100GB now with tripple layer bluray? or some other disc, but something like this will just be swallowed up by Seagate or Western Digital and never see the lite of day. What the biggest tape backup? 3TB? They probably have something to say about stuff like this too. Call me a conspiracist but we see huge claims like this every year and it hasn't gotten very far.
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Blu-Ray is 25GB per layer, with the official spec supporting up to 10 layers. I'm not sure what capacities are actually available though.
 
But exactly what are the seek and read times on this type of optical media? I mean for Blu Ray they are dirt slow .. but when your talking a petabyte of information .. they must be abysmal.

Exciting though and an incredible breakthrough none the less.
 
would hate to put a scratch on that disc, or have data fading and corruption like other dvd's
 
Great method!

A few possible downsides.
How long does it take to read and write a disk?
At 100MB/s it would take 114 days to write, assuming you dont verify lol.
At 1GB/s, its still over 11 days.

How reliable is the media and for how long, they surely cant use actual DVD disks?
What is the minimum guarantee of stability over time?
How reliable is the writing process?
What kind of encoding error/correction scheme is viable for the length of expected errors.
(for the same size scratch or flaw in the media, the amount of data under it will be increased 100,000 times!)

The last points bring up a few more issues.
The machine will have to be guaranteed to run for a long time so must be very stable and not prone to power issues.
More processing power and memory space will be needed to run the error detection/correction for very long lengths.
 
Dreaz said:
Man, that technique seems to simple it's fucking brilliant.
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Too much "brilliant" news pops up all the time these days and resolves into nothing a year or two down the road. In my opinion it's probably got to do with researcher attempting to get lots of grant money or just some site looking for hits for ad impressions.
 
sure and who is writing 1000tb?

if you wrote 1tb its still only 1000 seconds.

the average person would write 100mb-200gb on average and then the next big group 200gb-3tb and after that = the guy backing up his stuff before he is hauled off to pirate bay prison.
 
Very neat, I'm curious about the physics of the two laser beams, why would a purple beam cancel out a red one? Does the purple beam actually interact with the foil layer? Does it prevent it from becoming dimpled? What happens if you shine a purple beam on an existing dimple does it flatten it back out? If so then this is useless as you might get small dimples but not any density that would be useful for storage. Then comes the idea of reading the dimple too, you still are limited to the wavelength of your laser for reading them.

BTW, I just realized I have no idea if the 1s are actually referred to as dimples :D
 
PornoSatan said:
^

In other words, I'll believe it when I see it.
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This, coming from someone name "PornoSatan", I can imagine you are, erm, itching, to get this type of storage :D


But, lets be honest, one of the big names in portable storage will assasinate anyone relating to this idea... And, then the concept will die off... Like all the rest.
 
I am pretty sure that as with most such "breakthroughs" the outside limit initially discussed (Petabyte on a CD sized disk) is far greater than the practical limit which is probably more like 100TB, which is probably far greater than the actual amount we will see in practice if this ever goes live, probably 10TB. Still ridiculous by todays standards, but not nearly a Petabyte.

As to reading it... I assume they can use the two laser method to minimize the area being read to the intended area. Otherwise this is obviously entirely pointless, and since they said they can read it, clearly they can do this.
 
By the time this comes out, we'll probably be using some variant of the 3D optical transparent storage devices. Petabytes in a single square inch or smaller.

Cool stuff, nonetheless. I bet all the engineers that worked on HD-DVD just smacked themselves on the forehead "why the hell didn't I think of that!"
 
PornoSatan said:
Too much "brilliant" news pops up all the time these days and resolves into nothing a year or two down the road. In my opinion it's probably got to do with researcher attempting to get lots of grant money or just some site looking for hits for ad impressions.
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A lot of times, how this works with research groups, in particular the university research groups these guys are part of, is that they have to justify their purely academic questions with real-world applications. So they probably had a theory that it was possible to create a dot of light smaller than Abbe's limit and, in order to get the funding to test the theory, they created a proposal that suggested storage of 1 petabyte on an optical disc is possible. It's not up to them to make it viable, only to prove it is possible.
 
striker444 said:
What the biggest tape backup? 3TB?
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LTO-6 is currently the highest capacity consumer tape at 2.5TB (uncompressed)
With compression you can get up to 2.5x as much on the tape. Was just released last fall.

LTO-7 & LTO-8 are already planned at 6TB and 12TB
 
spugm1r3 said:
A lot of times, how this works with research groups, in particular the university research groups these guys are part of, is that they have to justify their purely academic questions with real-world applications. So they probably had a theory that it was possible to create a dot of light smaller than Abbe's limit and, in order to get the funding to test the theory, they created a proposal that suggested storage of 1 petabyte on an optical disc is possible. It's not up to them to make it viable, only to prove it is possible.
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Yeah that's the honest researcher way. The other way is essentially a money grab.
 
Steve said:
All of it. :D
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You wish... actually, I wish ;)





On a more serious note, I don't think we're ever going to see this, let alone use it on a regular basis. Remember the 4 layer Bluray? Remember the sticky tape data storage thingie? The data crystal that was about to become a reality? All promising new technologies that were never heard from again. Just like FED and SED display panels.
 
shoot...so many "other" tech that promised use 100GB...then 500GB...then 1TB....it's been over a decade for some....they just ended up as vaporware.

I'll believe it when I can buy it on amazon
 
I say we bring HD-DVD back. I still can't believe that failed, it having DVD in the title.
 
These kind of announcements have been made probably 50 times in the last decade, but we've yet to see any of them put to practical use. Call me when I can actually buy one, until then you might as well announce flying cars.
 
arentol said:
and since they said they can read it, clearly they can do this.
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Is this a joke? :eek:

Just because they SAY they can do something, doesn't mean they actually can. Oh, wait, it's on the internet...it must be true. Nevermind.
 
I like the conspiracy theories. Yes large corporations are going to assassinate someone to shut this down instead of buying the IP, patenting it, and destroying their competitors making massive profit margins. Yes that makes complete sense.

If a corporation sees a way to leap frog the competition (and reap fiscal rewards) they will certainly do it.

Thinking corporations do all these evil things (oil, EV vs ICE, bluray vs petadisc apparently) would take a lot of foresight, planning and effort to get away with. My gut feeling is conspiracy theorist give humanity way to much credit ;)
 
You naysayers crack me up. Every technology starts this way. Remember at one time there was a researcher who was talking about how you could sandwich an oxide layer between two transistors to store data and not lose it when the power was disconnected.

What ever happened to flash memory?
 
This reminds me of the technology that was announced back in the late 90's/early 2000's that was supposed to allow 640GB of data to be written on a standard CD-RW disc..It was even supposed to be possible to modify current CDRW drives to work for a $15 upgrade...
 
striker444 said:
Every time a company claims something similar to this nothing happens, I believe someone was able to fit more than 100GB now with tripple layer bluray? or some other disc, but something like this will just be swallowed up by Seagate or Western Digital and never see the lite of day. What the biggest tape backup? 3TB? They probably have something to say about stuff like this too. Call me a conspiracist but we see huge claims like this every year and it hasn't gotten very far.
Click to expand...
They exist and a lot of Blu-Ray burners are able to use these disks. There's suppose to be 125GB versions as well, but I haven't found any of those.

I plan to get some to do some backups of my own.
 
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It took at least 8 years from the time that Sony/Phillips started working on CD's to get them in peoples hands. I don't know when the first research actually started. I know Les Paul discussed optical playback of music, as well as DAPs as far back as the mid 50's, so presumably research on optical storage storage started long before Sony and Phillips got involved.
 
Nenu said:
Great method!

A few possible downsides.
How long does it take to read and write a disk?
At 100MB/s it would take 114 days to write, assuming you dont verify lol.
At 1GB/s, its still over 11 days.

How reliable is the media and for how long, they surely cant use actual DVD disks?
What is the minimum guarantee of stability over time?
How reliable is the writing process?
What kind of encoding error/correction scheme is viable for the length of expected errors.
(for the same size scratch or flaw in the media, the amount of data under it will be increased 100,000 times!)

The last points bring up a few more issues.
The machine will have to be guaranteed to run for a long time so must be very stable and not prone to power issues.
More processing power and memory space will be needed to run the error detection/correction for very long lengths.
Click to expand...

For 1 petabyte of storage, I would be ok with keeping a single disc in the disc drive and never-opening the disc drive to allow no dirt/scratched/foreign material in it...almost like using the closed disc drive as a semi clean-room. I mean, 1 petabyte is like what, 500,000 good-quality dvd-rips? If slow-speeds was an issue, I'd just copy the movie onto an SSD or mechanical HDD for playback. Ditto for games, images or whatever else you could fit onto a 1 petabyte disc. You wouldn't need the internet for piracy anymore :p.

You could just send the entire contents of the your local newsgroup/torrent/whatever method in a 10-disc collection :p:D
 
how fast will data access going to be like?

will this make the idea apple and others had about ending with optical drives?

will this ever become a reality?
 
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