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An Australian researcher has worked out how to store 1000TB on a CD
- Someone 12y agoA big problem with spinning disks is that storage grows inversely with the area of the dots, while reading and writing speed grow inversely with the diameter of the dots. If you store 100 times as much data, all else being equal, time to write a full disk will be ten times as large. Ways around that are increasing rotation speed (been there, done that. There is little to gain here without making the disk a lot stronger = heavier, if that is really possible at all) and using multiple heads (harder to do, but may eventually be the better solution, certainly if one can completely do away with head movements)
- Retric 12y agoA 50GB Blueray disk can be written in 12 Minutes with a home burner but a few seconds in mass production. Scaling that up this would be (1,000,000 / 50) = 20,000 times the space but take sqrt(20,000) * 12min = 28 hours to write at home. However, assuming you can R/W at the same rate that's 10GB / second speed which might be tough for a home PC to pull off anytime soon. PS: I suspect if this where ever out into production they would change the form factor to enable even faster R/W speeds and a significantly reduced capacity.
- delecti 12y agoBandwidth increasing proportional with the square root of the storage growth is a pretty great trend. If anything that sounds like a plus.
- tgb 12y agoLooks like it gives 2.9 gigabits per second for a 5cm disk radius at 5000 rpm. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=5000rpm+*+(2*pi*5cm)%2F(9nm)+in+1%2Fs http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=5000rpm+*+(2*pi*5cm)%2F...
- ridgeguy 12y agoStronger ≠ heavier. The parameter of interest is specific strength, which is the material's (ultimate tensile strength/density). I forget what the plastic in DVDs is, but it could probably be reinforced with carbon fibers (chopped, nanotubes, etc.) to give a useful increase in rotation speed.
- Someone 12y agoYou are right and I am not an structural engineer, but I understand that pure strength isn't the only limiting factor for disk; they start wobbling before they tear apart (http://superuser.com/questions/554717/will-there-ever-be-faster-cd-and-dvd-discs-and-writers http://superuser.com/questions/554717/will-there-ever-be-fas...). That, I think, is more a matter of thickness than of pure tensile strength. Barring the construction of hollow disks, that means heavier ones. Also, now I think a bit more about it: in a 50-speed CD player or a 16-speed DVD player, the edge of the disk moves at about half the speed of sound. Doubling rotation speed would push it over the sound barrier. I guess it would take quite a bit of research to make a CD/DVD/BlueRay player that will work fine at those speeds (a way around that is to make the disk smaller. That would be an option for a disk with the storage density discussed here, but it wouldn't win you more than a factor of four or so, at most)
- JoeAltmaier 12y agoHow about, give up spinning it. Steer the laser, perhaps using phased diffraction patterns, and scan the disk with weightless light?
- droessmj 12y agoBrilliant solution to a known natural limitation.
- Fando 12y agoAwesome tech. I wonder how data will be written and read from such a disk? How long will it take? The transfer of 1000TB will be an interesting problem indeed. At current theoretical blu ray writing speed of 12x or 400Mbps [1] the time to read/write such a disk would be: 1000 terabytes = 8,000,000,000 megabits 8,000,000,000 / 400 = 20,000,000 seconds (7.6053 months) [1] http://www.blu-ray.com/faq/#bluray_speed http://www.blu-ray.com/faq/#bluray_speed
- rasz_pl 12y agoCould probably be written all at once using immersion lithography. You could threat them as big read only memory 'crystals'. Buy a set of 100 containing entire YT archive etc
- EGreg 12y agoOK A) I think in this case the patents are justified :) AND B) Are CDs gonna make a comeback? Can we have cool mini-CDs?
- duaneb 12y agoThe 1000TB figure was actually for a DVD. That said, I certainly hope so :)
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- sp332 12y agoI'm pretty sure "DVD" isn't any more accurate a term for this tech. The bits are way smaller than the pits on a CD or DVD. Also, the laser used for writing is purple, while for DVDs it's red, and CDs use infrared.
- mark-r 12y agoBy the time this is ready for production, flash or disk will have already caught up. I've seen it time and time again - the old tech continues to improve exponentially while the new tech takes forever to turn into something practical.
- peter303 12y agoThe CD is twenty feet wide!
- jtchang 12y agoThat is pretty awesome. The solution seem so simple in retrospect. Just mask out the larger 500nm light you don't want to hit the surface. Certainly even 1TB CDs would be insanely awesome. It would open up a whole realm of mass storage. I'm just feeling how easy backups will be :)
- frandroid 12y ago> A young Victorian researcher Steampunk storage FTW.
- DigitalJack 12y agoThis (interference) is how the feature size of semiconductors has gotten so small.
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- hristov 12y agoThat will warm the hearts of the Ubuntu Unity team. Can you imagine the amount of bloat they can put on a single installation disk now?
- codereflection 12y agoTitle says CD, but it's actually a DVD. Still extremely impressive.
- ctdonath 12y agoIt's not a DVD. Point is it's a 5.25" thin polymer disc of some hole-based storage media. "CD" and "DVD" are used just to make muggles get the idea.
- codereflection 12y agoLink? Every article I can find says they used a DVD.
- dangrossman 12y agoLink: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/130619/ncomms3061/full/ncomms3061.html?message-global=remove http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/130619/ncomms3061/full/nco... The researchers never used any discs. The 1000TB figure was for a surface area equivalent to a CD or DVD; they're the same physical size, and these descriptions give the reader an idea of what a 9nm feature size means in practical terms. What they actually developed was a novel resin and a method for etching 9nm dots in it using a specific optical laser setup. If it were to be commercialized, it'd be a new type of disc, and CD/DVD lasers would not be able to read it.
- jpmattia 12y agoI see where they mention writing the data, but does anyone see how/if they are reading the data? From his other pubs [1], it looks like a two-photon process is involved as part of writing in deep-subdiffraction limit for lithography. Will be fun to try and reverse that. [1] http://www.swinburne.edu.au/engineering/cmp/profile.php?member=zgan http://www.swinburne.edu.au/engineering/cmp/profile.php?memb... Edit: Paper that this PR refers to is here: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/130619/ncomms3061/full/ncomms3061.html http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/130619/ncomms3061/full/nco...
- wil421 12y agoThe real breakthrough would be a way for regular CD/DVD drives to at least be able to read the new format. But I doubt that this will be practical for consumers. Most consumers dont really need a CD drive anymore, companies like Apple arent even including them in laptops any longer.
- bitJericho 12y agoI think CDs would make a comeback if you're talking about being able to hold an entire series of movies all in 4K and in 3D and not break a sweat. Digital downloads is all the rage right now, but people will still want to archive their downloads.
- lukifer 12y ago> people will still want to archive their downloads I don't know how true this is. Even the tech-savvy folks I know rely primarily on Netflix/Spotify/etc, and in the rare instances they buy something, they trust iTunes/Amazon/etc to hold it for them. (I continue to think that is nuts.)
- bitJericho 12y agoI dunno, I think people allow Amazon to hold their movies for them because there's no other choice. Amazon doesn't give you avi files :(
- golemotron 12y agoThe print collection of the Library of Congress is estimated at 10TB. 990TB would be left on the DVD. Amazing.
- toomuchtodo 12y agoFuturama called it: http://bookriotcom.c.presscdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/fiction-non-fiction.png http://bookriotcom.c.presscdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09...
- jacob019 12y agoCan't wait to back up my 12TB RAID on a single disc.
- benjaminva 12y agoThe idea to break the diffraction limit by using the this doughnut-shaped excitation spot comes from the STED microscopy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STED_microscopy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STED_microscopy) developed by Stefan Hell (Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Goettingen, Germany). He actually showed that an additional intensity-dependent term can be added to Abbe's diffraction limit allowing sub 100um resolution with light. I think this idea is awesome and it sure won't be the last invention made possible by this trick.
- penguat 12y agoI'm sure this or a similar technique is already in use in commercial photolithography.
- krrrh 12y agoIf this is real and can be commercialized it could lead to some pretty devastating fallout for the entertainment industry. You've got to know that there are a few obsessive archivists out there with pretty comprehensive collections of films spread across rooms of RAID arrays. When they can start backing those collections up for friends onto a single disc, ie a single disc that has more films than you could possibly watch in your lifetime the entertainment industry is going to pine for the days when torrents eve the big problem. The same goes for rogue librarians, or Google Books employees dumping entire libraries onto discs and leaking them out.
- waqf 12y agoBooks are small enough that this has pretty much already happened (search for "library genesis").
- toomuchtodo 12y agoThank you for that.
- woodymcpecks 12y agoSeems a little past it's prime. Why would you want this when you have the internet?
- gfodor 12y agosometimes the lack of imagination on Hacker News is a sight to behold
- nnnnni 12y agoThat's because it's often really "startup news" =-(
- eru 12y agoIt used to be Startup News.
- uncoder0 12y agoHuh, didn't know that was the original name. I personally prefer the Hacker New moniker. I imagine 'Startup News' was just a working title for the project as it was only kept for ~7 months.
- eru 12y agoI reckon there was only so much you can read about startups on the web before it gets boring. (I certainly had that impression at the end of that phase.)
- ctdonath 12y agoBandwidth. What if I could hand you the totality of Netflix, iTunes, etc.? Not wait for it to download, but transfer large chunks of the Internet in seconds? and no longer have to hope that, say, Netflix won't lose vast sections of their library for contractual reasons (as it has done of late)? Backups: permanent archiving of everything you have all on one disc. It makes vast swaths of data yours, in your hand, under your control, in a ridiculously compact & cheap media. No more hoping that you can get X in time, or that it will be there some time hence. I've seen profound transformations in computing when cheap fast storage increased by an order of magnitude of orders of magnitude. This will bring that about again, to similarly disruptive and amazing results.
- mjackson 12y ago> With the $18,000 fellowship, Gan will collaborate with industry and researchers around the world to work on new breakthroughs for data storage devices, and also see how his existing research can be used on a larger scale to rapidly improve the capacity of optics-based information technologies. $18K seems like a drop in the bucket for powering this kind of research. Dr. Gan needs someone to introduce him to Kickstarter.
- cgio 12y agoGiven Australia salary scales, this may be a typo, 180,000 would sound normal.
- vacri 12y agoNope, it's $18k, but it's not a wage. It is low (Australia doesn't have the money that US universities are awash in), but it's for things like international travel to conferences and the like. http://www.swinburne.edu.au/media-centre/news/2014/08/victoria-fellowship-award-for-swinburne-researcher.html http://www.swinburne.edu.au/media-centre/news/2014/08/victor...
- a_bonobo 12y agoTrue, its a pure travel scholarship, with all likelihood the student won't even get to touch the money. It will all handled by the university's finance department (it was in my case). And $18k is huge for an Australian travel grant, they're usually just $2k to $5k, some examples: $1.8k in Perth http://www.postgraduate.uwa.edu.au/students/funding/travel http://www.postgraduate.uwa.edu.au/students/funding/travel $1k to $2.5k at Uni South Australia http://www.unisa.edu.au/student-life/global-opportunities/travel-grants/ http://www.unisa.edu.au/student-life/global-opportunities/tr... $2k to $3k at Ian Potter foundation http://www.ianpotter.org.au/travel http://www.ianpotter.org.au/travel etc.
- miahi 12y agoI guess this is because the technology only solves one of the problems (getting a very narrow writing beam/point) and not the others, like: making the disk so stable that it doesn't wobble for more than a few nanometers during rotation; keeping the laser beam focused on the disk; figuring what kind of rotational and seek speeds (=read/write speeds) you can handle with these limitations; making everything small and ready for market.
- trhway 12y agolaser heterodyne :)
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- jcrubino 12y agoHave those guys sign up for Y Combinator!!
- happycube 12y agoThis could be a DVD - it would be an easy enough thing to perform tests on, and they say they're using a red laser for the actual writing. If the dye can handle the very small writes, that is. (And I wouldn't trust Memorex for this ;) ) Error correction for these is going to be interesting, even a speck of dust could obscure many megabytes of data.
- egamble 12y agoOne hopes that the write speed of these disks will be proportionately faster than DVD write speed. A DVD writing at 16X transfers about 22MB/s. At that rate it would take 1.44 years to fill up this disk writing to it continuously. Even at 1GB/s (roughly the write speed of an SSD) it would take almost 12 days to fill up one of these disks.
- vlunkr 12y agoWow this seems huge If it's practical to implement everywhere. You could keep every picture/song/movie/document/game from your whole life on a disk, and hey, make a backup too.
- polskibus 12y agoExpect Amazon Glacier price to drop dramatically in a couple of years :)
- polskibus 12y agoWhy downvoted ? Allegedly, blue-ray recordable discs are used by Amazon for Glacier backup. Surely they will be the ones very interesting of further development of this technology.
- stronglikedan 12y agoWould this reduce the storage lifespan of the disc? Would this technique make it physically more brittle, if the current form factor is used?
- lukifer 12y agoI would love a potential use case as a backup that is redundant dozens or hundreds of times over. I'm not sure the exact mechanism by which DVDs start to lose data over 10-20 years, but this tech might be a way to mitigate that risk (as well as scratches and other physical damage).
- jorjordandan 12y agoHe has announced that for his next challenge, he will store 4k video on betamax tapes. Impressive.
- motoboi 12y agoThe Internet Archive would benefit very much from this! Does anyone remember the blueray based long term archive rack from facebook?
- dghughes 12y agoAnyone remember the company from about 2000/2001 called Constellation 3D? I do I lost my $3,000 investment when they went belly-up, doh! They made a fluorescent multilayer DVD and a credit card shaped ClearCard the DVD which I believe the goal was to store several hundred TB of data. And this was about 14 years ago!
- craigds 12y ago> Every day, humans are producing more data than ever before - around 90% of the world’s data was generated in the past two years alone - and there will come a point when our data storage centres and the cloud can no longer keep up. Is this true? Can anyone point to a some kind of study showing convergence of storage capacity and data production over time? I was under the impression that we've got far more storage than we'll need, at least in the near future.
- eru 12y agoPeople find use for empty space.
- vidarh 12y agoGiven that we can today fit tens of TB in a fistful of SD-cards (512GB per card), no I don't think it's true at all that we'd get to a point where our data storage can't hold up. Our ability to filter and identify gems outside of the most popular stuff is a far greater challenge.
- Vanayad 12y agoI know I've seen this like a year or more ago here or on slashdot... :/
- shock 12y agoCould Amazon Glacier use some pre-consumer form of this technology?
- perlgeek 12y agoI doubt it. There's a long, long way from the theoretical finding to the practical device. Writing and reading speed has been mentioned. Another point is that as the dots become smaller, the mechanical parts need to be much more precise, moving the device from consumer parts to really expensive parts and assembly.
- sfmelton 12y agoIt's hard to believe they are only giving this guy $18k.
- saeguaiga 12y agoOh great, another 1024-bit daisy-chained medium with a 20MB UeFI boot partition. We have watched this way too long and it was dragging us down...(cough) Oops, accidentally implemented as a medium-hash CAMFS in disused packaging-and-optronics 45nm fab. Please write test, mind 5W limit if retaining cyano/pyridene dye in media.
- elwell 12y agoThis is technically old news. Here's one from a year ago with the same picture: http://gizmodo.com/researchers-have-found-a-way-to-cram-1-000-terabytes-on-531549229 http://gizmodo.com/researchers-have-found-a-way-to-cram-1-00...