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

[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.