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Why This New CD Could Change Storage

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Kenrou

Kenrou

Member
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Joined
Aug 14, 2014
"The compact disk was a popular storage medium for the late 20th century, then it disappeared, seemingly left only for the history books. But not so fast. Researchers have figured out a way to fit a whopping 200,000 GB (1.6 Petabits) onto a new type of disk."

Skip to 8m5s for the tech info

 
It's amazing how it was improved. At the same time, I doubt that the CD's durability is much better than it used to be, which is one of the main reasons that barely anyone was using it for long-term backups.
 
Wonder if that's user capacity or disk capacity? There a LOT of overhead on CDs. You don't want a speck of dust costing you GB of data!

For fun I tried to look up the overhead on CDs. By my calculation, for audio CDs there are 43% useful bits vs written bits, and for data CDs with more ECC that's even lower at 37%. I'm only counting the loss from modulation and error correction here, not any metadata.
 
Woomack said:
It's amazing how it was improved. At the same time, I doubt that the CD's durability is much better than it used to be, which is one of the main reasons that barely anyone was using it for long-term backups.
Click to expand...
For long term static storage, nothing wrong with it other than capacity. For the sake of argument, let's call it 20 GBP for 100Gb, vs a 1TB HDD for the same price.

Can't beat that.
 
Kenrou said:
Skip to 8m5s for the tech info
Click to expand...
Yeah.........I retired optical-based storage quite a while ago. Not bringing it back, lol. I don't have a huge stash of music and movies... a simple HDD (with a backup) is sufficient.

I didn't watch the vid, do they mention speeds? Is it any faster? because optical is SLOW last I used it.
 
Flamethrower1972 said:
Now how much would something like that going to cost??? And how much will each disc cost???:unsure:
Click to expand...
EarthDog said:
I didn't watch the vid, do they mention speeds? Is it any faster? because optical is SLOW last I used it.
Click to expand...
Well, that's the funny thing, they don't have (commercial) readers for it yet and the industrial ones they're using cost 50k a pop, guy said that it's going to take a couple more tech leaps for this to become an everyday usable thing... I don't imagine it will be a lot more expensive than the regular ones were back in the day, and would become progressively cheaper as years go by :unsure:
 
Kenrou said:
Well, that's the funny thing, they don't have (commercial) readers for it yet and the industrial ones they're using cost 50k a pop, guy said that it's going to take a couple more tech leaps for this to become an everyday usable thing... I don't imagine it will be a lot more expensive than the regular ones were back in the day, and would become progressively cheaper as years go by :unsure:
Click to expand...
Yeah.....I'm good. It doesn't feel like this is for the consumer at this time, and in a decade when prices might be reasonable, I wonder what flash storage or platter pricing looks like comparatively......or whatever else we'll be on, lol.
 
Yeah, I'm wondering what happened to crystal based storage, remember hearing about it since the 90s at least...
 
Kenrou said:
guy said that it's going to take a couple more tech leaps for this to become an everyday usable thing...
Click to expand...
What is the user problem that'll be solved with this? That's the bigger problem. Who needs that much storage? Maybe some day in the future when our phones can record full 3D spatial holographic videos maybe? If you have big data, maybe, but it will be a long way off for regular people.
 
mackerel said:
What is the user problem that'll be solved with this? That's the bigger problem. Who needs that much storage? Maybe some day in the future when our phones can record full 3D spatial holographic videos maybe? If you have big data, maybe, but it will be a long way off for regular people.
Click to expand...
Cost. Up front they said it would be cheaper than the $4k for 100TB. (I may have the numbers wrong here but the point remains.) Large amounts of storage, low cost. Also, storing my media on my server with movies getting to be 20-30GB with Dolby Atmos and 4k. 8k is coming and who knows when 16k resolution will be a thing. I mean, I'm only now building up for 4k movies. 8k and beyond could really take some space.

Also, lets not forget the old adage.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.

— Andrew S. Tanenbaum

It clearly isn't ready for prime time but it's a start. Also, it may get eclipsed by some other tech prior to going live. It'll be interesting to see.
 
I would assume that the interest would be much more for companies than for the average consumer, I mean, my entire library (games/music/movies/backups) is about 6tb, most people won't get anywhere near that. Will get bigger over time, ofc, but still...

On the user side, maybe alleviate bandwidth usage, we could go back to physical game distribution, considering that there are several 100gb+ and more on the way? Blu-ray caps out at what, 4 layers, 128gb?
 
don256us said:
Cost. Up front they said it would be cheaper than the $4k for 100TB. (I may have the numbers wrong here but the point remains.) Large amounts of storage, low cost.
Click to expand...
I get that a large business or really data heavy ones might have some use for it, but my question was more about the personal user. If you had that at home, what would you do with it? I have around 40TB usable capacity combined on NAS, and that's a lifetime of data for me. I'd consider myself heavier a user than average too, since I take a lot of photos and video.

I just think it is very distant future before more than a handful of individual users might need this sort of capacity.
 
I have ~73 TB of storage, 53TB of media and the rest as personal things, pictures, video, etc. I’d prefer something that is re-writable or can be written to multiple times. Currently that’s managing several 6TB HDDs and is a PITA. Over time, the media is growing, and while nowhere near the PB range, certainly more simple to have a single (probably few for redundancy) copy of small media for cold storage.
 
Last edited:
Kenrou said:
Well, that's the funny thing, they don't have (commercial) readers for it yet and the industrial ones they're using cost 50k a pop, guy said that it's going to take a couple more tech leaps for this to become an everyday usable thing... I don't imagine it will be a lot more expensive than the regular ones were back in the day, and would become progressively cheaper as years go by :unsure:
Click to expand...
50K?????? That is insane!!!!!!:shock::rofl:
 
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