p2pnet - rss feed: Blu-ray disc stores 400 gigs — on one side
p2pnet news | Products:- This’ll give the RIAA and MPAA something to think about.
Pioneer, the Japanese drive maker, has developed the first laboratory prototype of a Blu-ray Disc able to store 400 gigs on one side, says Free Republic, quoting a press statement which goes on >>>
For multilayer optical discs, it has been difficult to obtain clear signals from each recording layer in a stable manner due to crosstalk from adjacent layers and transmission loss. Utilizing the optical disc production technology that it has developed in the DVD field, Pioneer solved these problems by, among other things, using a disc structure that can reduce crosstalk from adjacent layers, resulting in a 16-layer optical disc that can playback high-quality signals from every layer.
As for the read-out system, 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. Since the optical specifications of the objective lens, such as NA (Numerical Aperture)*2, are the same as those for the existing BD discs, it is possible to maintain compatibility between the new 16-layer optical disc and the BD discs.
The 16-layer optical disc technology, capable of storing much more data than the conventional discs on one disc, will greatly reduce the number of discs to be used and therefore contribute to the conservation of resources.
But maybe the entertainment cartels won’t have to worry after all. At least, not yet.
“The success of the prototype will probably be exploited mainly for publicity purposes,” says Heise Online, adding:
“It is doubtful, given the current state of the art, that such a 16-layer Blu-ray Disc would ever go into production.
“Present-day Blu-ray Discs can store 50 gigabytes on two layers. The return from the production effort falls dramatically with each additional storage layer, so economically justifiable mass production still seems far off.”
Adds the post >>>
For a practical drive, higher transfer rates would be desirable. If a 400-gigabyte disc were written to at the normal Blu-ray transfer rate – 4.5 megabytes per second – it would take 25 hours for the burner to fill it. Because of speed restrictions, it’s expected that the Blu-ray Disc will in the future be limited to being read or written at a maximum of 12X. This makes it more likely that the technology developed by Pioneer will be used in coming generations of new optical storage media, rather than in a Blu-ray device.
The previous record holder, TDK, “only managed to squeeze 200 gigabytes on to 6 to 8 storage layers,” Heise observes.
Pioneer says it’ll present the details at the International Symposium on Optical Memory and Optical Data Storage 2008 (ISOM/ODS2008) in Hawaii from July 13.
.
.Stumble It!
Free Republic - Pioneer Succeeds in Developing World’s First 16-Layer Optical Disc, July 7, 2008
Heise Online - Pioneer makes a 400-gigabyte Blu-ray Disc
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It’s really easy!Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile - http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details. Download here.
July 8th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Plastic discs are so 20th century, even with this kind of capacity.
July 9th, 2008 at 10:59 am
I have a 1TB harddrive, so why would I want a slow reading, slow writing, poor capacity, optical disc? I predict in 5 years that optical discs will be mostly obsolete.
July 9th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
“I predict in 5 years that optical discs will be mostly obsolete.”
I predict that this will not be the case unless flash memories can show up at the cost of 10-15cent/ 20/50 gb range. This is doubful but one never know.
July 9th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
“I have a 1TB harddrive, so why would I want a slow reading, slow writing, poor capacity, optical disc? I predict in 5 years that optical discs will be mostly obsolete.”
Because when that 1TB hard drive fails, which *ALL* hard drives do at some point, you’re going to lose everything on it.
I recently bought a 160GB Western Digital drive, installed it, partitioned it into 100Gb and 60GB partitions and started using it. It worked great, so I started downloading large files to it. I had about 50GB of files on the 100GB partition and about 30GB of files that I was just storing on the 60GB one. After about 2-3 weeks, I had a brief power failure. It was only a few seconds, but it was long enough to shut my system off. When I turned it back on, Scandisk checked drive C:, which took an average amount of time (40GB), then it started scanning drive D:. This took about 20 minutes. It seemed to skip right over E:. After it finished booting, C: was fine, but D: had bee completely erased. The only thing left was a single, empty directory. E: had some of its contents scrambled, maybe 10GB worth, the rest seemed fine. So, a momentary loss of power resulted in my losing 60GB worth of files. The drive was fine, it just lost the contents.
You’re probable sitting there saying “That would never happen to me, I have a UPS!” Good for you! How well will that UPS work if you accidentally knock out the power cord? Or pull the wrong cord out of the outlet? Or hit the main power switch by accident?
Of course not every drive will do this (my Maxtor has never lost data because of a power failure), but it’s a possibility. Not to mention viruses, trojan horses, badly designed software (A demo of PowerDVD wiped out my entire “My Documents” direcory simply because I told it not to retain the settings).
I’ve always backed my files up to CD or DVD, but having 160GB of space to play with made me lazy. Now, I don’t leave anything unburned for long, unless I’m sure I can easily re-download it again.
July 9th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
“Because when that 1TB hard drive fails, which *ALL* hard drives do at some point, you’re going to lose everything on it.”
And optical discs are immune to failure? Of course it is prudent to backup critical data. But an optical disc isn’t anymore reliable than a harddrive. A single scratch can cause read failures, data loss, etc. I always backup my critical data (documents etc), on a backup harddrive, and some things online. I would never put my faith in a single optical disc. To me, that would be foolhardy.
For me, the chief problem with optical discs is read / write speed, and general inconvenience. 5 years may have been slightly optimistic, still, with the speed that technology is advancing by, it’s entirely beyond the realms of possibility.
July 9th, 2008 at 6:17 pm
correction: “it’s NOT entirely beyond the realms of possibility.