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An Australian researcher has worked out how to store 1000TB on a CD

sciencealert.com.au

21–30 of 139 posts

Re: An Australian researcher has worked out how to store 1000TB on a CD

#21
> With the $18,000 fellowship, Gan will collaborate with industry and researchers around the world to work on new breakthroughs for data storage devices, and also see how his existing research can be used on a larger scale to rapidly improve the capacity of optics-based information technologies.

$18K seems like a drop in the bucket for powering this kind of research. Dr. Gan needs someone to introduce him to Kickstarter.

Re: An Australian researcher has worked out how to store 1000TB on a CD

#25

Seems a little past it's prime. Why would you want this when you have the internet?

Bandwidth.

What if I could hand you the totality of Netflix, iTunes, etc.? Not wait for it to download, but transfer large chunks of the Internet in seconds? and no longer have to hope that, say, Netflix won't lose vast sections of their library for contractual reasons (as it has done of late)?

Backups: permanent archiving of everything you have all on one disc.

It makes vast swaths of data yours, in your hand, under your control, in a ridiculously compact & cheap media. No more hoping that you can get X in time, or that it will be there some time hence.

I've seen profound transformations in computing when cheap fast storage increased by an order of magnitude of orders of magnitude. This will bring that about again, to similarly disruptive and amazing results.

Re: An Australian researcher has worked out how to store 1000TB on a CD

#26
post #18

If this is real and can be commercialized it could lead to some pretty devastating fallout for the entertainment industry. You've got to know that there are a few obsessive archivists out there with pretty comprehensive collections of films spread across rooms of RAID arrays. When they can start backing those collections up for friends onto a single disc, ie a single disc that has more films than you could possibly w…

Books are small enough that this has pretty much already happened (search for "library genesis").

Re: An Australian researcher has worked out how to store 1000TB on a CD

#27

I see where they mention writing the data, but does anyone see how/if they are reading the data? From his other pubs [1], it looks like a two-photon process is involved as part of writing in deep-subdiffraction limit for lithography. Will be fun to try and reverse that. [1] http://www.swinburne.edu.au/engineering/cmp/profile.php?memb... Edit: Paper that this PR refers to is here: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/130…

The real breakthrough would be a way for regular CD/DVD drives to at least be able to read the new format. But I doubt that this will be practical for consumers. Most consumers dont really need a CD drive anymore, companies like Apple arent even including them in laptops any longer.

Re: An Australian researcher has worked out how to store 1000TB on a CD

#28

Title says CD, but it's actually a DVD. Still extremely impressive.

It's not a DVD. Point is it's a 5.25" thin polymer disc of some hole-based storage media. "CD" and "DVD" are used just to make muggles get the idea.

Re: An Australian researcher has worked out how to store 1000TB on a CD

#29

Seems a little past it's prime. Why would you want this when you have the internet?

If you mail a single disk (nevermind a box full of discs) to your friend, and it arrives in 3 days, you have achieved about 31.6 Gbps. If you mail a USPS flat rate box with 100 discs, you have achieved 3160 Gbps.

You cannot buy a three thousand Gbps internet connection.

Re: An Australian researcher has worked out how to store 1000TB on a CD

#30
post #4
post #3

OK A) I think in this case the patents are justified :) AND B) Are CDs gonna make a comeback? Can we have cool mini-CDs?

The 1000TB figure was actually for a DVD. That said, I certainly hope so :)

I'm pretty sure "DVD" isn't any more accurate a term for this tech. The bits are way smaller than the pits on a CD or DVD. Also, the laser used for writing is purple, while for DVDs it's red, and CDs use infrared.
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