In case anyone is wondering what they mean by "5D": they mean it's a 3D array of marks, each of which has both size and orientation. The 3D array is three 2D layers. According to this definition, a DVD or Blu-Ray disc is "4D" because it can have multiple layers each of which stores 1-dimensional data (pit versus no pit). And a book is at least "7D" because it contains a 3D arrangement of marks, and marks can vary in…
I think Dimension in the data sense of the word, not Dimension in the spatial sense of the word. Multi-dimension data is a thing, and it goes a lot higher than 4, 5, or 7.
New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray
91–100 of 137 posts
Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray
#92The other day I was talking with a friend about the high cost and perceived fragility of tape drives for long term personal archival while bemoaning the loss of higher density optical storage technology. It's not easy to backup or shuffle around terabytes of personal video, audio and pictures. Hard drives aren't exactly the right media for safe deposit boxes. In the 90's I had an Iomega Ditto 250MB drive that held 12…
Some have theorized that this is what's behind Amazon Glacier, and that they want to keep it to themselves: https://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bd... I also crave for such cheap storage, perfect for archival/backups, especially when combined with modern snapshotting. HVDs never really materialized, despite being promising, and actually on the market at some point, IIRC: https://en.wikipedia.org/…
Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is for archival purposes. Seek times don’t matter for that use case.
Seek times always matter even if they're not the top priority. And especially if we're talking about a storage medium that takes in a whopping 500 TB.
Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
I bet you actually have "unlimited" storage.
Can you name something that is not "unlimited"? I don't have a limit, I never hit the cap. By that logic nothing is unlimited (texts, calls, data, etc), but realistically it doesn't matter because I don't use it much. I don't care to test it, I use it sparingly and never had a issue with limits.
Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think Dimension in the data sense of the word, not Dimension in the spatial sense of the word. Multi-dimension data is a thing, and it goes a lot higher than 4, 5, or 7.
Which reduces to one single dimension anyway, on a storage medium: my bytes are stored from offset 0 to offset N.
Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Optical discs aren't torn apart when the reader malfunctions?
https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/my-cd-shattered-insi... I've had a CD-ROM back in the day shatter on me like this. I'm pretty sure its a common enough story that everyone 'knows' it could happen... but was rare enough that not everyone personally came across it... but I never got to the bottom of it (why it happened, or what conditions led to it). It only ever happened to me once after all. It sounds like x56…
Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't care about seek times if we can have media with orders of magnitude more storage capacity and life expectancy. (of course if you can also have good seek times, it would be icing on the cake)
What kind of data are you trying to store? How much of it? I can’t imagine my life being more than 100 GB and probably much smaller, probably under 20GB.
My personal data is probably less than 1TB at this point, but a way to store it long term would be nice.
Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think Dimension in the data sense of the word, not Dimension in the spatial sense of the word. Multi-dimension data is a thing, and it goes a lot higher than 4, 5, or 7.
Which reduces to one single dimension anyway, on a storage medium: my bytes are stored from offset 0 to offset N.
Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that much of the demand for cheap, shelf-stable backup media has gone away over the last decade or two. Most backup jobs either go to cloud or to disk, not tape. And because of that, tape drives are more expensive than ever, which takes away much of the benefit of the cheap media. LTO, for example, is relegated to archival use-cases nowadays, such as video production. You'd think that would make sense,…
Tape drive backwards compatibility is an issue for sure but optical drives have had decent backwards compatibility so far. DVD drives can read CD's. BR drives can read CD, DVD and BR. I think backwards compatibility is more feasible for optical as the larger pits on older media can still be read by narrower wavelengths. They'll just look like giant craters flashing by instead of nice neat pits.
The big problem with optical storage is the same that tape struggles with - it's primary market shrank.
This was a bit of a self-inflicted wound. CDs and DVDs were basically ubiquitous, drives came down in price dramatically, and the storage densities and pricing was competitive with competing technologies. BD is where that all started breaking down. BD had a format war with HD-DVD, and both formats relied upon new and then-expensive technologies such as blue lasers and quad-layer stacking. PC manufacturers (notably Apple) balked at the cost of either format. Microsoft backed HD-DVD, but wisely decided not to bleed money by not sticking an HD-DVD drive in the Xbox 360. This created an odd situation where the Xbox 360 sold better as a game console, but Blu-Ray outsold HD-DVD because Sony had let the PlayStation division bleed out for a couple of years.
Of course, Microsoft still wanted the 360 to be able to play HD movies, and their response was to partner with Netflix to make streaming a reliable (arguably better) substitute for movies on optical media. In other words, Sony killed HD-DVD, so Microsoft killed the whole home video market by pushing digital distribution for everything.
If you're wondering, there are successor formats to Blu-Ray. Interestingly enough, the whole quad-layer stacking thing was rebranded as BD-XL and UHD-BD (which the PS4 doesn't even support), and there's also a proper successor format for data storage called Archival Disc. Except the latter is basically an LTO competitor - you can't buy bare AD drives and discs and use them like Blu-Rays. The technology only exists in archival systems like Sony's ODA system (Gen 2 and Gen 3; Gen 1 used Blu-Rays), which has discs stacked in cartridges that have to be loaded into special, very expensive readers and media libraries.
Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray
#100In case anyone is wondering what they mean by "5D": they mean it's a 3D array of marks, each of which has both size and orientation. The 3D array is three 2D layers. According to this definition, a DVD or Blu-Ray disc is "4D" because it can have multiple layers each of which stores 1-dimensional data (pit versus no pit). And a book is at least "7D" because it contains a 3D arrangement of marks, and marks can vary in…
I think Dimension in the data sense of the word, not Dimension in the spatial sense of the word. Multi-dimension data is a thing, and it goes a lot higher than 4, 5, or 7.