New optical disk substrate, new perpendicular-recording tape

[unixronin]

Japanese researchers have discovered that titanium pentoxide can be used as the foundation of a storage medium to create optical disks that could store 200 times as much data as a Blu-Ray disc, while costing about a hundred times less than the germanium-based alloys used to make the data layer on DVD and BD discs.  That's about 9TB on a single optical disc.

Though the article doesn't mention it, a 200:1 increase in data density would also facilitate the development of new optical micro-disks small enough to fit into pocket devices.  A 1" 1TB optical disk would be something not to be sneezed at.

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In related news, Hitachi Maxwell has just demonstrated a new tape medium that uses perpendicular recording to get a starting native capacity of 50TB per LTO-class tape.  That's almost four times the capacity of the planned endpoint of LTO tape technology, LTO-8 (at a planned 12.8TB).  For reference, LTO-5 just hit the market this year, with 1.6TB per tape.

Comments

[merlinpendragon]

I'm a bit confused. You said LTO-8 was planned to be 12.8GB - do you mean 12.8TB?

[unixronin]

Yes, I did. Fixed. Thanks for catching it.

[docstrange.livejournal.com]

*BOUNCE*

I love the continual development in data storage technologies.

Waiting for the entertainment industry to scream FOUL the second a R/W version is introduced. . .

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

"ZOMG!!! IT'LL KILL CINEMA JUST LIKE VHS ..."

...Oh, wait. "Didn't."

[lebo-superman.livejournal.com]

ROFLMAO!

Hey, 9 TB of storage for any portable device would just about eliminate the need to have permanent HD's. Burn your entire music collection to one disc, and your entire movie collection to a second, and have room left over for all the save-game files of your favorite PC-games!

[lebo-superman.livejournal.com]

On second thought, put a stack of these inside the HD case. You'd go from 2TB to 150TB in a single move & have all the storage you'd ever need for everything you'd ever do - inside a laptop computer or iPad (etc.) type device.

I wonder what the projected life of the data on them would be once written. Would this media outlive the computer that wrote the data to the disc? That would be sweet.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Well, there's issues with that idea. Assuming the titanium-pentoxide media is rewriteable, you've now got to fit a reading/writing laser inside your hard disk as well, and there's the obvious question "What's the write/rewrite speed?" If the result was a 150TB drive with the read/write performance of a DVD-RW drive, it would be unusable. Your entire system would be permanently I/O bound.

The other related question is, "How many times can the media be rewritten?"

It's VERY unlikely that this will ever be a suitable medium to replace rotating disk as mass storage. But that's OK, because there are technologies coming down the pipeline that have the potential to replace (and eliminate the distinction between) mass storage, main memory, and perhaps even CPU cache RAM altogether. Future computers may just have a single pool of multiple terabytes of non-volatile RAM, attached directly to the processor via HyperTransport and running at core speed.

[lebo-superman.livejournal.com]

"Future computers may just have a single pool of multiple terabytes of non-volatile RAM, attached directly to the processor via HyperTransport and running at core speed."

THAT's an idea I would love to see come to fruition.

[polaris93.livejournal.com]

And to think that just 17 years ago, when I got my first computer, a 386 IBM clone, I was enthralled by its 40 kilobytes of RAM and 40-megabyte hard drive. Or that when I was programming the IBM analog ballistic computers in FORTRAN-IV at the Point Mugu Missile Range in 1967, and the IBM 360s over at Port Hueneme using COBOL, we had no idea that someday I'd have right on my own desk something exceeding the computing speed and power, the memory, and the storage capacity of those mainframe computers by orders of magnitude -- with a price-tag orders of magnitude less than what those big jumbos cost.

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

Sometimes getting old doesn't suck.

[polaris93.livejournal.com]

You're certainly right about that when it comes to computers. :-) Something even better is that while everything else keeps getting more and more expensive, the price of electronics keeps descending, a trend that hasn't reversed since 1985. My old 386 set me back about $900. I got my current computer, which has a 1.3 gHz processer, half a gig of RAM, a 300 gigabyte hard drive, an onboard DVD-RW drive, and lots of USB ports, for $300 from Overstock.com. 10,000 times the hard drive storage, at least one hundred times the processing speed, 80,000 times the memory, and the sort of access that didn't even exist 25 years ago -- not to mention an Ethernet port, so I can have DSL access to the Internet instead of the snail's-pace access of dial-up -- my current computer compares to my first one the way that a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier compares to one of the tall ships that were all the US Navy had beyond the harbor in 1776. But whereas it took us over 185 years for us to go from sail to nuclear energy for the driver of our great naval ships and subs, it only took 17 years to go from the 386 computer to one like my current model. (Actually, it's more astonishing than that -- I actually had another computer before that 386: a fully dedicated Amstrad job that used 3.0" hard-shell floppies for storage, had no onboard storage of data, could only be run by loading a tiny little program from another hardshell floppy and then whatever data you wanted to add to that, and couldn't really connect to the Internet no way no how. I got that in 1986, the 386 in 1993. How times has flown . . .)