Next-gen optical disk can store over 14,000 4k movies
New technology developed by Chinese scientists delivers 4,000 times as much data density as a Blu-ray disc.
What a useless headline. God forbid they just give the actual capacity rather than some abstract, bullshit, flexible measure that means nothing to anyone.
I especially like it when they use airplanes to illustrate weight. “… the same as 15 Boeing 747 jumbo jets”. Airplanes are made to be as light as possible, they go to extreme lengths to save as much weight as they can. As such, a 747 is much lighter than most objects of similar size. People have no intuition of the weight of such large objects to begin with, but then they add to it by using something that is much lighter than you’d expect.
200TB
Woah, I can't wait to never afford that!
So like, 5-6 uncompressed 4k movies
It's larger than 6 olympic swimming pools and fits in my pants.
They have to make it as accessible a headline as possible, especially when most don't read past the headline anyway these days. The average person probably doesn't have much of an idea as to what 125TB looks like in real world use.
Most people aren't tech savvy, and industry acronyms chase them away.
On the other hand, a movie is something everyone can understand.
You can understand it but you can't interpret the value. How many movies is a CD? Or a DVD? Or a 1TB SSD? Or even Avatar in 3D (presumably not 1)? How many movies have even been released in total/last year?
The number awes non-tech savvy folk but it doesn't really inform them of anything. You could just as well write "more movies than you will ever need".
And besides that, I personally think that news should try to educate folk. I'm completely fine with a comparison in the article. But why in the headline?
Not really. A 4K movie means nothing to 99% of people. Is it 4GB? 40? 400? How many can my phone hold? Or my computer?
This only makes things more understandable if you use a point of reference that everyone you're talking to is familiar with. The fact that they had to then explain how big a 4K movie is in the article clearly shows that even they know that this doesn't help people. It's just a big flashy number.
Just for context, I'm a writer, I understand the point of using these abstract measures to give a frame of reference. But in this case, just giving the capacity in GB/TB would have been easier to understand. It just wouldn't have been as sensational of a headline.
It would seem attractive for me 20 years ago - as in funny and colorful. A little bit like Neal Stephenson's writing in Cryptonomicon.
The problem is that various kinds of storage are something completely mundane today, and that particular thing is not going to reach us anytime soon, and BR is not too common as well.
And the initial association with optical discs for me is about scratches. Maybe if those were distributed in protective cases like with floppies, they'd live longer.
1.4Pb (~175TB), the quoted number of movies is based on a 14GB movie which is very small (most BluRay disks hold somewhere between 25 and 50GB) and no discussion about write speed, so basically this is cool research that someone has done and is no closer to a commercial product that any of the dozens of other articles that have come out on this topic in the last 15 years
I rip enough physical media to tell you that post-compression 14GB is not far from average for a 4K movie. I guarantee that Netflix isn't storing those any bigger than that. Hard drives don't grow on trees, you know?
It's still good to know where the top end of optical storage is, even at an academic level, even if these end up not being widely used or being used for specific applications at smaller capacities. We'll see where or if they resurface next, but I'm pretty sure we're not gonna get femtosecond lasers built into our laptops anytime soon.
Yeah it's fine, especially with recent codecs like AV1 and you'd expect future codecs to improve further.
These aren't really trying to target a commercial product, at least not anyway. For now these are of interest to enterprises.
I could see them being archival backups for TV broadcast, quite a few are still using tapes for long term archive.
From the article:
What’s almost more remarkable is that the scientists say a single new blank disc can be manufactured using conventional DVD mass production techniques within six minutes.
If this was a response to write speeds they meant the speed at which data can be written to the disc, not the time ot takes to build the disc. Read/Write speeds are a standard measure used to tell whether something would be efficient to use. For example one could say storing an OS on a DVD and booting would be dumb because it would run extremely slow, where as the read speed for playing music or a movie off it wouldn't be an issue as it doesn't need higher performance for such.
That’s nearly 4 Call of Duty games
Maybe without the useless campaign mode.
I wonder what the longevity of one of these discs is? The article says they can be manufactured in regular DVD production facilities, so it probably depends on the material used (which I think can range).
If they could combine something close to this data capacity level with the M-DISC standard (which supposedly last for about 1,000 years once you take into account the organic ingredients) that would be fantastic.
There's no point making it last 1000 years since there won't be any working drives by then. You usually need to move data to a newer format every 15-30 years. Look how hard it is to recover data from 8" floppy disks or old tape formats now.
Tape storage 100% is still a thing and is valued for a lot of truly critical data.
Also, WAY too much critical infrastructure still depends on floppy drives because... there is not a good reason to upgrade the hardware when they need data on the order of hundreds of kilobytes every couple of months.
Storage with purpose will be preserved. Maybe not in a computer sold in best buy but very much in "computing" as a whole.
I can't think of any situation where THIS disc is useful. But optical drives themselves are 100% going to remain a thing because they provide write once data storage (and OS installation) which is incredibly useful in secure environments.
This 1000 years thing is how (at least on paper) the main components of the medium can chemically stay intact and bonded together. You want this as stable as possible since more stability means more resistance to outside forces like moisture and such. Most discs suffering from disc rot today had a number between 5 years (baaaaad) and 200 years (still not great) and are decaying now.
So don't take things like this too literally.
How much is that in football stadiums?
Call me when you can buy a spindle with 100 for $50
Lol.. my though exactly.
I can't comprehend it. Please elaborate it in numbers of an average-sized white truffle.
New optical-disks able to hold a shit ton more storage sounds cool, until you realize you probably ain't gonna be seeing widespread adoption of it among the general public due to cloud storage and things like that, so if it ever does become publicly available it'll cost way too much.
Cloud storage gets very expensive when you need to backup tens or hundreds of terabytes. You need very fast internet and you still need a local backup too. A second NAS and a tape drive will probably be cheaper than this new optical drive though.
That's what the article said.
Yeah, that's going to be the thing. LTO tapes/drives would be dirt cheap if the demand was anywhere near where DVDs were at their peak
Cloud storage is just someone else's computer. That someone else is who the target market for something like this is. Server farms need a lot of storage, and that takes up space. Optical storage of that capacity is great for data you need to read often, which is the vast majority of data on servers.
And also probably need to use a new reader to play the disc. It's probably gonna be expensive.
...That's a lot of porn.
The DVD.
It finally hit the corner straight on.
Mildly infuriating photo of the disc being inserted upside down.
Double sided disks look like this
Which this probably is if they want to pack as much data as possible in one unit.
You seem like you've handled quite a few double-sided disks in your day.
These would be great for backups if they're cheap enough.
How great would it be to include a Case Logic binder in a safety deposit box.
It would also be cool to see a comeback of those old optical disc overlay file systems that let you treat the file system on read-only media as if it was mutable.
It would certainly be a fun challenge to design a modern file system on top of append only media.
With that said, I'm very concerned about cost. It's hard to imagine this seeing mass adoption.
I'm imagining the RPMs on these babies trying things trying to load Gigs worth of data at a time. I like to think it will start glowing from the heat generated.
You're just sitting on your couch, trying to watch a movie, when your blu ray player suddenly begins to sound like a leaf blower, until a glowing hot disk of destruction shoots through the tray at fourty thousand rpm, ripping through your walls, decapitating your neighbor and taking down some sattelites in orbit
I really wasn't interested in this product until reading this comment.
Sounds like a plan.
Had you purchased a Samsung this never would have happened!!
I hope they actually end up calling it the Very Big Disc (tm)
But how many hamster tails is that because I maybe have like 20. With maybe a few more here and there.
That's enough to store a high detail photo of every single man and woman posing naked in every possible position and combination of positions. And it lasts 10 years like parts of some CDs and DVDs did? Wow! Incredible!
Those you'd like to see naked are usually not single
But if you could just get a good DVD 😜 with the right people in it. LOL.
40x and faster drives are back!
I think its still usless imo.
200TB, I can literally put this in a single S3 bucket.
Physical media in my opinion is outdated.
You can give it to Amazon, so physical media is useless? Seriously?
I do see flaws with this much data density on an optical disc, mainly physical damage, but physical media will always have it's place.
Unless you physical control your media, you don't own your data.
Why store data on media when you can pay the price of a sizable mortgage payment for someone else to store it for you?
You do know its much safer and much more highly available to store it in a cloud rather than a piece of plastic, right? In a cloud you get it raided on multiple sites, etc… obv. Depends on how much you pay. Dont forget that CDs in their best of best conditions had a lifetime of merely 10 years. Dont know how much this new media holds with such density…
And you do own the data, read the contracts.