Plexiglass-like DVD to Hold 1TB of Data

jcatcw writes "Lucas Mearian at ComputerWorld has a story about a company that plans to demonstrate a new DVD-format at the January CES conference. The .6mm thick disc stores 500GB of data by writing 5GB of data on each of 100 layers within a polymer material similar to Plexiglass. The Israel-based company, Mempile Inc., said its TeraDisc DVDs will offer 1TB of storage for consumers in the next few years, but it's also targeting corporate data archive needs with the new technology that write bits at the molecular level on the florescent-colored polymer. The company plans to sell its first product, a 700GB disc for $30."

Data Integrity Over Time?

[gbulmash]

They're not planning to hit 1TB until 2011. With all the companies in the storage race, I don't see this horizon representing any special accomplishment. It's a neat way of doing things, but so are some of the other contenders in the race.

What I wonder about is the archival quality of their material. How long before it oxidizes or otherwise brittles itself into uselessness? I remember when everyone was saying that CDs would last forever, unlike cassette tapes, and then we found out that CDs were not eternal. Their plastic might take forever to biodegrade, but their data integrity would degrade within 10-15 years. So, even if this turns out to be the winner in the race to a Terabyte disc, how long will it maintain data integrity for archival purposes?

- Greg

More Vaporware

[asphaltjesus]

The problem the company has is not technical. They could have the technical and mass production issues worked out and yet not a single disk will be made.

It didn't come from the companies mentioned in the wikipedia article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD [wikipedia.org] so they cannot possibly get OEM/IT/Entertainment industry adoption. Furthermore, "Not invented here" is the typical media conglomerate response to all of these innovations.

There's no real-world scenario where this thing sees the light of day. Something like it and most likely quite inferior and more expensive from the DVD cartel? Sure.

Re:Data Integrity Over Time?

[cbreaker]

That 10-15 years is only on burned media. But I'll tell you, I have plenty of CD-R's that I made in 1996 and they all work great, so maybe there's a huge variation between who made the discs?

Either way, tapes aren't that fantastic either. Currently, the best way to archive data for the long term is to keep it on live, spinning disks in RAID sets. As the disks fail, you replace them, and you have your data perpetually available; and it's online, too.

riiight.

[apodyopsis]

Its not a format war, its a new format. But it *will* be a format war if any of the large firms thinks there is any money in it.

Remember "DataPlay"? A small format optical disk (with an elaborate and complicated DRM system btw) in the early 2000s - they had a new and innovative format. They even got the record companies on their side until the big players (in this case Philips) looked at them, saw they had a business model and crushed them to develop small-form factor optical (SFFO). Of course, SFFO vanished as soon as cheap flash memory was available (low power, no moving part) but the point remains. A single isolated firm will be destroyed by a large multinational as soon as they prove they have a business case. And I bet my metaphorical hat that any array of patents will not affect that outcome in any way.

More information on Dataplay/SFFO available on net, here one's link:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2930-tiny-optical-disc-could-store-five-movies.html [newscientist.com]

Besides, I've seen a number of multi terrabyte, multi layered optical systems paraded over the last few years - I label this vapor ware until I see it on the shelves. And even then I would not trust my data to it until its been proven in the corporate world.

More Layers == Slower

[KonoWatakushi]

Unless they have found a way to record 100 layers at once, it will take nearly forever to record a disc with this new format. For the same reason, the proposed 3+ layer HD DVD and Blu-ray discs are also not very interesting. More than likely, these efforts are merely for marketing purposes: to show that HD DVD can match Blu-ray, and that Blu-ray has a bright future. Unfortunately, these are both specious arguments, and it is best to judge them on their initial implementations.

One of the few alternative approaches that looks very promising uses co-linear holography on an optical disc. The advantage is that it can record multiple bits in the same area (volume actually) at the same time, so it scales much better with both density and speed. It may be a ways off yet, but one thing is for certain: an optical disc can only spin so fast, and recording bits one at a time simply doesn't scale well.

Blu-ray is the best we can hope for it the near future. From a data storage perspective, it is far superior to HD DVD, and will remain so until they are both obsolete.

Re:Dammit

[Anonymous Coward]

Deja Vu!

It was 1999 when an Israel based company [publicly traded Constellation 3D Inc. (C3D)] announced FMD-ROM [Google It [google.com]]. It was a .6mm multi-layered CD (100 layers by hand, possibly more when manufacturing was fine tuned) with GB/s throughput and 100+ GB capacity with promises of scaling up to 1 TB per disk once blue lasers became economical.

That company vanished when "the money man" skipped town in early 2001. As much as I've drooled over this concept for nearly a decade I'm very skeptical that they'll come through this time.

Scam?

[RenHoek]

This reminds me so much of the Fluorescent Multilayer Disc (FMD) that was announced in 2000, which turned out to be a scam [wikipedia.org].

Re:Use Parchive, it's the tool for the job.

[AmiMoJo]

Someone needs to build automatic PAR archive creation into a DVD burning program. Burn some files to a disk, and it automatically fills the remaining space with PAR files.