Pioneer Ultraviolet Laser Promises 500GB Discs

No Fortune writes "Here's an article indicating that Pioneer is developing an ultraviolet laser for data storage. Since the wavelength of ultraviolet lasers is shorter than the wavelength of blue lasers, the beams are finer and they can pack more data into per square inch. This gives a data rate 20 times more than the blue laser Blue-ray disk."

warning: CD encountered a tiny dust mote

[Anonymous Coward]

error correcting 15.8 megabytes of obscured data!

Bit Rot?

[abrotman]

So now i can lose [slashdot.org] 500GB of data?

I'm moving to punchcards ...

I was wondering when this was going to happen

[drinkypoo]

How long is it going to take them to pack it into a consumer device? That's always been the real question. Maybe there's no point to blu-ray.

Now that I've paused to read the article...

The article only discusses write techniques. I'd like to hear if there are any peculiarities involved in reading it before I make guesses as to the delay before production. I'd also like to know if they only have a tube or if they have a diode already.

Protective cover or lots of redundant information

[3770]

These should really come in some type of protective casing. Like a floppy or something.

I have many CD's and they were pretty resilient to scratches. They played fine even if they had a pretty hefty scratch on them.

Then I bought DVD's and I brought them on over sea flights for entertainment. I was transporting them in one of those CD wallets and they just started getting unusable really fast. The smallest scratch and it would stop working.

I'm thinking that these disks can get a scratch that is smaller than can be seen with the naked eye and it'll still be a real problem for the disk.

So they should either have a protective cover like a floppy or they should have lots of redundant information physically far away from each other on the disk.

Re:Bit Rot?

[frovingslosh]

Someone already moderated you funny, but I think it's a real issue. Sure, use UV if it helps, but I would rather have them make the bits a little bigger and a lot more reliable than as small as they can get them and have them rot away. I could live with 100 gig of data on a disc if I could trust it a lot more than 500 gigs on one disc I can't trust.

Re:Editors please make up your mind!

[haruchai]

When you're referring to hard drives, it's disk. When referring to CDs or other removable media, it's disc except when referring to floppies in which case it's diskette. FYI, there isn't a "discette" - yet

Hope this clears it up for you.

Re:Bit Rot?

[dgatwood]

Maybe it's just me, but I'd rather them pack as many bits onto the disc as possible, then apply a reasonable error correction scheme to allow for significantly greater damage before data loss occurs.

Put another way, if you can fit 500G on a disc, you can fit 20 copies of a Blu-Ray disc, so when the first one dies, you have 19 spares. Admittedly, I'm not looking for something -quite- that extreme, but the potential for such high-density optical media in terms of improving reliability is tremendous if the vendors just had the guts to use it for that instead of saying "Ooh, we can fit all 17 seasons of The Simpsons on one disc".

Just my $0.02.

to preserve or not preserve

[spiffistan]

We're missing a big point in all this: We need better ways of preserving data, not better ways of storing more data.

--
does our rule benefit the earth? does it help the grass to grow, the sun to shine?

Re:Non-plastic disks?

[Richard Allen]

I don't know ... maybe corn? http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/05/002420 6&tid=198&tid=188&tid=126&tid=1 [slashdot.org]

Re:Oh yeah? Well mine uses Gamma Rays!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't we all just kill ourselves - the world will eventually end, why all the incremental generations of humans?

Re:Bit Rot?

[schtum]

Maybe it's just me, but I'd rather them pack as many bits onto the disc as possible, then apply a reasonable error correction scheme...

It's not just you. The grandparent suggested making each bit in the disc larger than normal. You suggest duplicating each bit several times. Put the duplicate bits in a row instead of randomly scattered (reducing seek time when they are needed) and your solutions are virtually identical.

Then again, scattering the bits would make the disc more robust, since one scratch would be less likely to wipe out a given bit and all of it's duplicates. So... yeah. Go patent that. =)

The Bigger the Data, the Harder the Fall

[RonBurk]

We used to use a Sony Mavica to take pictures on floppy disks. That made for a stack of floppies after a week or two of vacation, but not unmanageable. Then, technology gave us a Sony camera that could record on optical disc. Woohoo! Instead of a stack of floppies, one disc (or 2 at worst) could cover an entire vacation.

When we lost a floppy disk, we only lost 20 pictures at most. Alas, when we lost an optical disc, we lost an entire vacation's worth of pictures.

When media data storage rates double, reliability needs to double too!

Re:Bit Rot?

[Anonymous Coward]

if the vendors just had the guts to use it for that instead of saying "Ooh, we can fit all 17 seasons of The Simpsons on one disc".

The venders don't want to stick more stuff on each disk. They want to spread it out so they can sell you more disks. It's more likely that they'd plop the video on uncompressed and boast about incredible image quality.

Okay, now the problem is speed

[DongleFondle]

That's great that we can have 500 GB cheap optical disks and all, but aren't we reaching something of a bottleneck when it comes to disk access and writing? If it takes you an hour to write a 4.5 Gig dvd like it does me, then your looking at 4 days, 15 hours to write one of these babies. KEH'MON!

Re:Bit Rot?

[Paraplex]

I'd push for the case to be built into the disc, ala 3 1/4 inch floppies. Not the ugly original model, but a much more elegant solution. (round, slim) opening and closing cases and removing CDs is a complete waste of time. Most of my CDs end up stacked on a spool and alot end up rotting/scratched as a result. Redundancy is a 'nice' solution, but a good old fashioned built in protective case might make reduncancy er.. redundant...

Re:The Bigger the Data, the Harder the Fall

[unsupported]

Reliability? Just don't lose the shit.

-Un

What I can't understand is why HDD hold as much

[baker_tony]

How come a HDD with several platters still haven't reached 500GB yes (that I'm aware of), but a "DVD" recorded with light can!? I would've thought that the lazer would've been much wider than the magnetic tracks on a HDD platter.

Is it simply because a DVD is a lot wider than a HDD platter?