10 TB Optical disc in the future?

[j_garcia]

As always, 10 years out, but could mean something that we might see sooner in lower capacity:

http://tech.yahoo.com/news/nm/20090520/tc_nm/us_dvds_storage_1

"Five-dimensional" discs with a capacity 10,000 times greater than current DVDs could be on the market within 10 years, researchers reported on Wednesday.

A team from Swinburne University of Technology in Australia said that by harnessing nanoparticles and a "polarization" dimension to existing technology, storage can be massively boosted without changing the size of a current disc.

The researchers, who have signed a deal with Samsung Electronics, said the technique had allowed them to store 1.6 terabytes of data on a disc with the potential to one day store up to 10 terabytes.

 

[GlocksRock]

That's just insane, but it seems as though that may only be relevant for PCs as the future for entertainment seems to be going the way of the downloadable or streaming content, unfortunately.

 

[j_garcia]

That's just insane, but it seems as though that may only be relevant for PCs as the future for entertainment seems to be going the way of the downloadable or streaming content, unfortunately.

Yep, I agree. That's why they are including all the digital copies now. They want to see how many people use them and get us used to having them digitally stored like that. Especially with storage at the prices they are now. 1TB is about $100 right now (I paid $89 the other day), and 2TB isn't that much more.

If it is 10yrs out, I highly doubt consumer level physical media will still be around by then.

 

[tbergman]

I guess I don't see this going anywhere, 10TB on one disc? What are you going to put on it? It would be like 200 times bigger than a dual layer blu-ray disc... Just imagine scratching up that disc, 10TB of media gone... But anyway, I'd have to agree with you guys, everything is moving toward streaming/downloading.

 

[mtrycrafts]

As always, 10 years out, but could mean something that we might see sooner in lower capacity:

http://tech.yahoo.com/news/nm/20090520/tc_nm/us_dvds_storage_1

Five Dimensional? WOW, in a universe with 3 plus time.

Or, maybe they really meant 5 layered or something else?

 

[res6jya6]

I guess I don't see this going anywhere, 10TB on one disc? What are you going to put on it? It would be like 200 times bigger than a dual layer blu-ray disc... Just imagine scratching up that disc, 10TB of media gone... But anyway, I'd have to agree with you guys, everything is moving toward streaming/downloading.

Then main problems with streaming/downloading lie within the limited capacities of bandwidth available to transfer the file. In the present, there is no issue with streaming and downloading, as the high speed internet available to us at the time is superb in it's ability to seamlessly transfer the data between the host and the client.

Back in 1982... a 100MB hard disk drive cost an exorbiant amount of dough... A one gigabyte hard disk drive cost nearly 40,000 USD... nobody would ever assume that we were going to need more space than that.

But as that technology developed, as did the files that were stored on them. Instead of standard text files, we were sharing pictures, videos, and eventually full length movies, photo albums, and even playing games.

To transfer these files, we started developing the physical network of the internet... from 28.8k dialup, to 33.6k, to 56.6k... then on to ISDN and eventually DSL... then cable... and fiber... opening up the ability to share the current slew of files available to us.

Then the files began to swell even more... High resolution video and audio files... video games with better graphics required higher limits of bandwidth...

Eventually, there is the chance that we will start seeing Virtual Reality and Holographic technologies emerging from the woodwork (Nintendo is apparently in talks with InPhase, the company behind holography) which would require higher brackets of storage space (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc). These discs are great for full-server backups and storing images of your Hard Disk in case it crashes (I remember being able Ghost my hard drive to a DVD... saves SO much time!).

So to make a 10TB Optical Disc doesn't seem too unwieldy at all... God knows how large a game utilizing true, visually-correct images would be... but the resolution required to reproduce that would be mind boggling!

It's the way technology progresses... I suppose - perhaps soon after the competition of high-capacity optical disks, there will be a boom in even HIGHER capacity broadband.

 

[GlocksRock]

I guess I don't see this going anywhere, 10TB on one disc? What are you going to put on it? It would be like 200 times bigger than a dual layer blu-ray disc... Just imagine scratching up that disc, 10TB of media gone... But anyway, I'd have to agree with you guys, everything is moving toward streaming/downloading.

Over time, it seems as though things take up more space like movies, they went from a ~9 gig dual layer disc, to a 50 gig blu ray disc. In 10 years, we could easily have 4k resolution which would require much more storage space. Not only with movies, software seems to take up more space, back in the day windows 3.1 didn't take up much hdd space, now look at how much Vista takes up. And who knows what other technology we will see in the future years, and how much space it will require.