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

[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 . . .)