AfterDawn: News

Future DVDs could hold 1TB of data

Future DVDs could hold about one hundred times the capacity that current discs can hold. That would mean about 472 hours of film on one disc the size of a current DVD disc. You could fit every single Simpsons episode ever made onto one disc using this technology. Lecturer Dr Peter Torok revealed the technique called Multiplexed Optical Data Storage (Mods) at the Asia-Pacific Data Storage Conference 2004 in Taiwan. Current DVDs have up to two layers and can hold up to 8.5GB. Work is already advancing on the next generation of storage.

Technologies including HD-DVD which can hold 30GB of data and Blu-Ray discs that offer about 50GB of data are currently battling to become the next standard. The technique developed by the Imperial College team could offer much more on a disc. Researchers believe they can create a disc that has four layers, each holding a massive 250GB of data (equivalent of 118 hours of video). The Mods technique is laser-based like existing DVD and CD technology. A disc is made up of tiny grooves filled with pits that reflect the laser as a series of ones and zeroes.



Current discs carry one bit of data per pit. But the researchers say that by using angled ridges in the pits, they can alter the way light behaves. The end result is a way of encoding and detecting up to 10 times more information from one pit.

Source:
BBC News

Written by: James Delahunty @ 28 Sep 2004 17:27

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• 13 comments

• geestar20

  just imagine how long it would take to analyse/encode and burn the data on a 1TB disc. JESUS CHRIST!!!
  
  A whole freak'n week.
  
  Next thing you know they'll have 100x burners at double the cost.

  28.9.2004 22:06 #1

• Dela

  Well technology is progressing extremely fast :-) I mean a few years down the line it seems broadband standard could be significantly risen. There's services now claiming they'll soon offer 30MB+ connections using fibre optic lines etc..
  
  It's the same with CD burning etc, new burning methods/discs will appear woith amazingly high speed burning eventually. These discs in question (1TB DVD) provbably wouldnt be around for a LONG time anyway!

  28.9.2004 23:04 #2

• A_Klingon

  Still it's nice to dream, even if a genuine 1 TB disc is 100 years away. It sure would save a lot of shelf/storage space though !
  
  Fer instance, I have on DVD-R all the episodes of the complete 7 Seasons of "Star Trek: The Next Generation", and 5 of the 7 Season's-worth of "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine". (A work-in-progress, along with Voyager, the last two season's of which will be released this December).
  
  My trusty hand-held calculator (is anyone out there old enough to recall how magical and Hi-Tech Space-Age Modern hand-held calculators and digital LED wrist-watches were?) tells me that I have 251-hour's worth of trek. That's a total of 151 DVDs averaging about 100 mins each. (2 episodes per disc, uncompressed).
  
  With plain white-paper sleeves, that clocks-in at about 8-1/2 pounds. (3.86 KG).
  
  And that is still only about half of what the proposed disc-time (above) suggests.
  
  Can you imagine a 100-disc changer holding *all* 1-TB discs????
  
  Holee-S--- ! Four-Thousand And Seventy hour's-worth of present-day-quality dvd video !!!!!! Makes ya drool, don't it ?
  
  As member geestar20 above suggests, it would take an *awfully* long time to fully burn just one complete disc (I don't know of any generally-available 1 TB HDDs). And I suppose the disc would have to be handled with rubber gloves and a pair of salad-tongs or something. The slightest speck of dust could probably wipe out 10 hour's of video, maybe.
  
  Let's just hope they will have appropriately-powerful error-correction capability, and will be burnable in several separate sessions (to be finalized when all sessions are complete).
  
  (Nah...... this is all science-fiction-stuff). We ain't never gonna see no 1 TB disc anytime soon!)
  
  Still ............. it's fun to dream. :-)

  29.9.2004 02:01 #3

• geestar20

  I think we are getting ahead of our selfs, lets take baby steps first, lets try 100gb disc first.
  
  http://yahoo.pcworld.com/yahoo/article/0,aid,100284,00.asp

  29.9.2004 06:10 #4

• SGSeries2

  Well, I'd just like to see discs with losslessly compressed video, like huffyuv, first instead of mpeg formats used today (and seemingly tomorrow). Perhaps once we get that much data on a disc, someone'll say, "Hey, we've got all these special features on there and still have plenty of room, why don't we just encode the video losslessly and give the audience the utmost in picture quality available too?" THAT is what'll never happen, let alone actually having lossless quality video before special features. (And you don't need a terabyte for lossless video compression either.)

  29.9.2004 07:14 #5

• Toiletman

  Matrix + SkyNet, here we come.
  
  I estimate it will be around 70 years before TB discs are actually widely used by the Average Joe. That time CD-Rs will be antiques, and DVD-Rs users would be like my grandmother turning on the TV.

  29.9.2004 13:17 #6

• geekster

  Breakthrough Nanotechnology Will Bring 100 Terabyte 3.5-inch Digital Data Storage Disks
  
  
  
  http://www.physorg.com/news785.html
  
  
  Every file you ever have on one disk !

  1.10.2004 18:55 #7

• zarlaan

  I think it's going to be much sooner then most people think before 1TB discs are the norm. Honestly, i'm willing to bet actually a more efficent means is used and disks will be a thing of the past.
  
  The more technology becomes developed and improved... the faster and better technology becomes. I'm willing to bet in about 15-20yrs we'll be storing 1 TB of data on some sort of durable, small and portable media.
  
  None the less, it's going to be very exciting to see whats in store over the next century.

  2.10.2004 00:40 #8

• A_Klingon

  Quote:Honestly, I'm willing to bet actually a more efficient means is used and disks will be a thing of the past.Perhaps, but at 1 TB per disc, I won't be complaining about 5" optical discs anytime soon!
  Quote:Nonetheless, it's going to be very interesting to see what's in store over the next century.(You mean, I won't have to use those .35c, 5", 700MB CD-Rs for my mpeg-1 VCDs anymore?) Cool!
  
  (But seriously....) I'll be dead sometime within the next century, so I can live quite comfortably with those "little" 1 TB discs, thank you kindly. :-)
  
  Geekster, thank you for that eye-popping link! ( http://www.physorg.com/news785.html )
  
  10 PETABYTES is just about unthinkable! (What does 10 Petbytes mean? 100 Terrabytes? 1000 (or 1024) Terrabytes?)
  
  
  
  Really, this has gotta be all Science-Fiction stuff. All on ONE disc? I doubt it.
  
  It would take you a lifetime just to fully burn one of these things. And would you want to entrust an entire lifetime's-worth of data/film/audio/video/whatever to a single, fragile 3-1/2" disc? Not me. Whew!

  2.10.2004 07:01 #9

• geestar20

  This is probably out of the mind thinking but,,,What if it is possibly to transfer data on 100 Terrabyte disc in a matter of seconds with a single photon flash.
  
  You guys are probably thinking [geestar20's retarded] but when you take a flash with a camera all that data is transfered to a film in less than a second and you have an image which can be recorded as data also, why cant this be done with a 100 Terrabyte disc?
  

  
  Only bad guys lie...So ask me no more qustions and I'll tell you no more lies.

  2.10.2004 07:23 #10

• SGSeries2

  geestar20 - probably because it doesn't really matter where the data actually begins when you take a snapshot of a photo, on film or electronically. Unfortunately, it is somewhat important on a disc, unless you just say, "It's in the middle somewhere, go find it." If you do find a way to do that, something like that I'd imagine would be very, very complex, since you'd have to "create" the image you want to put on it before being flashed. That might work if you're going to mass-produce something. What use would you need for it to spin? You wouldn't need a "disc" anymore. Just chuck it in there and "flash" it the same way to get the data out of it. "No moving parts!" Interesting indeed. Elswhere, you brought me to another interesting idea.
  
  Quantum computing: Who says you can't burn a terrabyte in one shot, and a terrabyte every shot? If that really is possible using "quantum storage" I would be amazed if I ever see such a thing. I like the holographic cd thing though. Maybe I'll see that in my lifetime...
  
  Also: I neglected to mention lossless audio, too, in my last post. oops. Maybe I'm still in awe about the difference you can hear out of dts vs dolby digital. I'm no audio-phile, but I'd like my soundtrack in full color, if you don't mind. ;)

  5.10.2004 16:55 #11

• koesta

  If I Had an optical drive that could hold over 1TB of memory on 1 disk, I would put in a disk, glue the door shut, and call it a "hard drive"...
  
  ...but thats just me...

  28.2.2006 11:29 #12

• james braselton (unverified)

  hi there i have about 100 blu-ray movies 300 blu-ray ps3 games about 300 xbox 360 games and 100 of nintendo wii and dsi games and oh yeh 100 ipad and ipod games as well soo i have 1,000 plus disk and nintendo 3DS meaning 100 3D games as well and 3D movies too

  20.7.2010 09:45 #13