Pioneer promises 400GB optical discs

totalgenius

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Pioneer has developed a 16-layer read-only optical disc which it claims can store 400GB of data.

The per-layer capacity is 25GB, the same as that of a Blu-ray Disc, and the multilayer technology will also be applicable to multilayer recordable discs.

Multi-layered discs have been difficult to develop because 'crosstalk' from adjacent layers and transmission loss mean that getting a stable signal from the disc is often nearly impossible.

Pioneer achieved stability in the playback of recorded signals by employing a wide-range spherical aberration compensator and light-receiving element that can read out weak signals at a high signal-to-noise ratio in the optical pick-up mechanism.

The huge capacity of these discs means that the new technology will be best suited for applications such large volume data archiving, rather than consumer use.

Pioneer will present the details of this research at the International Symposium on Optical Memory and Optical Data Storage 2008 in Hawaii on 13 July.





By Ian Williams
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2220974/pioneer-400gb-optical-discs
 
The huge capacity of these discs means that the new technology will be best suited for applications such large volume data archiving, rather than consumer use.

.....or the next edition of Windows Bloatware :)
 
it still amazes m8 there still messing with discs , u would think that memory cards r the future
 
Cheaper to make I think mate.
 
Plastic and light is cheaper :)
 
Plastic and light is cheaper :)

are they as light as as an SSD drive? No moving parts, virtually impossible to damage, I like it.
I have read the new mac has a 36gb drive, how fast? bloody fast!
 
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SSD sounds amazing :)

But it cost far more tham a few layers of plastic :)
 
For distributable media, pressed optical storage is still the way to go. since this type of media can not run on a standard DVD player I doubt it will take off in the mainstream.
 
A few of you have mentioned solid-state technology; 400GBytes is rather large in terms of silicon area needed. Silicon can only go down to a certain feature size due to the the 'Heisenberg uncertainty principle' where it's no longer possible to tell where an electron is. That's probably a few years away yet but there are other problems with silicon that can be overcome with optical media in this case.

  • The power required and therefore heat dissipation required rises with speed of operation. Imagine 400GByte of RAM and the PSU needed.
  • Pressing the disks is cheap after initial tooling costs.
  • Silicon foundry NRCs are massive if there is a mistake or you need to make a change it will probably cost less using pressed media.
  • A silicon memory storage device of that size would need some fancy memory management otherwise it would just be a big Flash drive; more R&D cost and power.
  • Optical media is non-volatile. If you want SS non-volatile memory you need Flash or battery-backed RAM or similar.
  • Less metal content might make optical media more readily recyclable.
  • Not as succeptible to ESD.
I haven't went on about how RW-400GByte media might affect things yet :Biggrin2:.
 
I would possibly argue that optical storage may be on a roadmap to replace silicon and magnetic based storage in the future.
 
I would possibly argue that optical storage may be on a roadmap to replace silicon and magnetic based storage in the future.

but it still has moving parts hence increased latency

what we need is biodrives, that would be so cool..
 
I think this is toshibas latest storage effort

looks promising:Frog:
scribble.jpg
 
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