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Technology

1.5 TB DVD by 2010 318

Posted by CmdrTaco from the now-we're-getting-somewhere dept.
prostoalex writes "The consortium of three universities and four Japanese companies is investing $25M into a project, that is supposed to deliver a 1.5 TB (that's a terabyte and a half) Digital Versatile Disk by 2010. The Inquirer story quotes multiple layers being used for storage." More importantly, they claim that this will be backwards compatible to existing DVD technology.
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1.5 TB DVD by 2010 More

1.5 TB DVD by 2010

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  • Nice to see the correct name (Score:4, Informative)

    by Microsift ( 223381 ) on Tuesday December 24, 2002 @11:21AM (#4952373)
    Seems like everyone thinks the V in DVD stands for video.
    • Actually the DVD consortium has said that DVD doesn't stand for anything. You just call the discs DVDs.

      • Re:Nice to see the correct name (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Proc6 ( 518858 ) on Tuesday December 24, 2002 @11:33AM (#4952464)
        Fact Check:

        http://www.dvdforum.org/tech-dvdprimer.htm

        What does DVD mean?
        The keyword is "versatile." Digital Versatile discs provide superb video, audio and data storage and access -- all on one disc.

        • From another "official" FAQ:

          http://www.thedigitalbits.com/officialfaq.html#1 .1

          [1.1.1] What do the letters DVD stand for?
          All of the following have been proposed as the words behind the letters DVD.

          Delayed, very delayed (referring to the many late releases of DVD formats)
          Diversified, very diversified (referring to the proliferation of recordable formats and other spinoffs)
          Digital venereal disease (referring to piracy and copying of DVDs)
          Dead, very dead (from naysayers who predicted DVD would never take off)
          Digital video disc (the original meaning suggested by some of DVD's creators)
          Digital versatile disc (the meaning later suggested by some of DVD's creators)
          Nothing

          And the official answer is? "Nothing." The original acronym came from "digital video disc." Some members of the DVD Forum (see 6.1) tried to express that DVD goes far beyond video by retrofitting the painfully contorted phrase "digital versatile disc," but this has never been officially accepted by the DVD Forum as a whole. The consensus is now that DVD, as an international standard, is simply three letters. After all, who cares what VHS stands for? (Guess what, no one agrees on that one either.

        • How about from this page? http://www.flemingmultimedia.com/FAQDVD.html [flemingmultimedia.com]


          What does DVD stand for?

          Originally, DVD stood for Digital Video Disk. As the standard evolved to include additional capabilities, its meaning was changed to Digital Versatile Disc. This didn't translate well into every language, so now DVD doesn't stand for anything -- it's just DVD.


          I've found lots of other pages stating the same thing.

    • Re:Nice to see the correct name (Score:5, Funny)

      by aengblom ( 123492 ) on Tuesday December 24, 2002 @11:31AM (#4952453) Homepage
      Seems like everyone thinks the V in DVD stands for video.

      I think it stands for vapor now

  • Unfortunately (Score:5, Insightful)

    by efedora ( 180114 ) <efedora@yahoo.com> on Tuesday December 24, 2002 @11:23AM (#4952388) Homepage
    No one needs the space because by 2010 all digital material is covered by copyrights - which have been extended for 250 years.

    • Re:Unfortunately (Score:3, Insightful)

      by robbyjo ( 315601 )

      So you assume that all that big space are for DVD rips and MP3s? How about storing gene info? Backups? Anyone?

      • Genetic information? I thought that gene sequences and stuff were fairly small, as in a couple of CDs for a typical organism.

        A complete record of everything in your life so far - as will happen once phones all have full-motion video cameras, and are left on all the time - could easily fill a terabyte however.
      • How about storing gene info?

        I patented your genetic code, retrieved from a hair sample, last week. You can't afford to store your genetic code.

        Backups?

        Backups are illegal under the Ernest P. Worhl Copyright Act (EPWCA) of 2005.

        Anyone?

        People may not be duplicated under the Arnold Ziffle Anti-Cloning Act (AZACA) of 2007. Disney holds the copyright to most people anyway.

      • How about storing gene info?

        Space requirements for "gene info" are either modest or laughable (depending on your definition of "gene info"), by todays "enterprise" standards

        As an example: GenBank contains basically all published sequences, and the whole thing is only about 80GB (if memory serves), but the pure sequence in it would only take up slightly more than 5GB (assuming a binary format, ie two bits per base).

        Here's their stats [nih.gov] page.

    • No one needs the space because by 2010 all digital material is covered by copyrights - which have been extended for 250 years.

      That's why they're using multiple lawyers for storage!

  • And in other news... (Score:3, Funny)

    by inteller ( 599544 ) on Tuesday December 24, 2002 @11:23AM (#4952389)
    The same Japanese universities plan to store the entire Intarnet(tm) on one DoCoMo 6G 10Ghz cell phone using an old bubble gum wrapper and a used condom by the year 2020.

  • Of course... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by JanneM ( 7445 ) on Tuesday December 24, 2002 @11:25AM (#4952400) Homepage
    What's the chance of that hardware ever being available without DRM? Not all that useful if we cannot actually use it for backing up any data, moving the discs to any other device and so on.

  • In other news.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Em Emalb ( 452530 ) <ememalbNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday December 24, 2002 @11:27AM (#4952408) Homepage Journal
    snip snip

    "It will also be backwards compatible with standard DVDs, the reports said, with its storage ability equivalent to around 300 DVDs using the current format"

    This new technology will drive you to work, make love to your frigid wife, baby-sit the kids, wash the dog and the car. Yes, folks, the year 2010 will be a great one. All thanks to this DVD and $25mil.

  • More interestingly, the article states: (Score:5, Funny)

    by jhampson ( 580482 ) on Tuesday December 24, 2002 @11:27AM (#4952411)
    "* BY 2010, according to senior Intel architects, a CPU will have processing power equivalent to the brain of a bumble bee."
    Wow. Woweewow.
    Imagine a beowulf cluster of those.
    Oh. Wait. I have one of those in my back yard.
    • Top ten modal dialogs in Windows DS/2010:

      (10) WINVIEW: Error reading "cum lolitas.jpg". This problem has been automatically reported to Microsoft with a full profile of your computer.

      (9) Due to overwhelming user request, "Clippy and his Crew" are now an integral part of the operating system and can not be disabled.

      (8) Corruption in ADVERTIS.DLL. Windows halted.

      (7) You have been idle or unproductive for the last thirty seconds. Activating HIVE parallel processing...

      (6) HIVE .NET connection failed. Please unisntall any non-Microsoft software and try again.

      (5) Application terminated unexpectedly. Please do not blame this on Microsoft again.

      (4) Give me more honey!

      (3) Give me more, honey!

      (2) Wrong BigDVD key. Stinger engaged.

      (1) DRM violation detected. Replacing your yellow-and-black stripes with black-and-white ones, please wait...

      Top Linux 3.4 kernel boot message:

      iBee processor (986) detected.
      DRM extension detected, workaround enabled.
    • Wouldn't it be easier to just hook up a bee to a computer :-)

      Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these - or would that be a swarm ?

  • Backwards compatible? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by IGnatius T Foobar ( 4328 ) on Tuesday December 24, 2002 @11:27AM (#4952412) Homepage Journal
    Backwards compatible is no big deal -- your typical DVD player can read CD, VCD, etc. formats. The real question is whether consumers will be ready for yet another format change by 2010. Somehow I doubt it. If you go by the previous cycle, it took about 15 years before consumers were ready to buy DVD players.

    Also, we don't want to give Hollywood and the DVDCCA another shot at locking us out. The CSS cat is permanently out of the bag for the lifetime of the DVD format, but a new format would provide them an opportunity to come up with some sort of freedom-restricting technology.

    • Re:Backwards compatible? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by aengblom ( 123492 ) on Tuesday December 24, 2002 @11:34AM (#4952472) Homepage
      will be ready for yet another format change by 2010. Somehow I doubt it

      If HDTV is really coming, they may be
      • If HDTV is really coming, they may be

        Just for the record, not only is HDTV really coming, it's already here. I've owned an HDTV-- an absurdly expensive top-of-the-line Sony model I bought on a whim after coming into some extra cash; the burden of being a videophile-- since this summer. There's something on in HD 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. HBO and Showtime are running movies in HD via DirecTV, and all three major nets are broadcasting most of their prime-time schedule in HD. PBS is showing a lot of HD content, and the Discovery Channel set up a whole new channel just for HD programming. Even the WB is running shows like Smallville in HD; can't say I care for it, but it's fun to watch with the sound off. Hell, CBS is even running some of their soaps in HD. The playoffs are in HD, the Superbowl will be in HD next month, the Oscars will be in HD next spring.

        There's still a heck of a lot more SD than HD out there, but HD has definitely arrived.

    • 15 years to buy DVD players?

      In 1983 the first CD players were released in the USA.

      CD's have only been out ~ 20 years, DVD's half of that.
    • it took about 15 years before consumers were ready to buy DVD players.

      Actually, it took about 15 years for the industry to produce a replacement. I'm pretty sure that if there were $150 DVD players and all new releases were on DVD in 1990, consumers would have bought in just as quickly then.

      Also, we don't want to give Hollywood and the DVDCCA another shot at locking us out.

      That's a pretty silly policy - avoiding progress because of potential risks. Besides, who's to say that Congress won't have finally hammered out some decent fair-use legislation by then?

  • TB GB MB Is Obsolete (Score:4, Funny)

    by robbyjo ( 315601 ) on Tuesday December 24, 2002 @11:28AM (#4952417) Homepage

    The trend unit is "how many equivalents of library of congress" does it hold?

    • LoC's, in their turn, were obsoleted by the "Human Genomes"
    • It might hold a lot of data, but how fast will it be on read/write? I want to know what its MPAA speed rating will be! (It's what, 32x = 1 MPAA?)
    • I'll take a serioud crack at your question.

      If are considering text only, then the Library of Congress is aproximately 100 Terabytes. We can call this unit measurement 1 LCT (Library of Congress Text)

      If we add images that are in these books, as well as their map collection, then we are up past a Petabyte (1000 Terabytes). We can call this unit 1 LC (Library of Congress - ALL).

      Question: The trend unit is "how many equivalents of library of congress" does it hold?

      Answer: Each of these new discs has a storage capactiy of 0.015 LCT, or 0.0015 LC.

      Planet P Blog [planetp.cc] - Liberty with Technology.
      • Jesus man, you said that with enough authority to almost sound like you knew what you were talking about.

        The LoC is approximately 100 Terabytes. I would love to the see the goatse that approximation came from ... perhaps share a little of your scratch paper with the rest of the world?

        Here is a little math of my own :
        1 page 8x11 is roughly 50 typed lines, 80 characters per line. That is a little large for most books, but gives us something to work with. That is 4,000 characters per page on the high end, and assumes that a page is mostly typed and not white space.

        Two hundred pages is about the average, pulled right from goatse.cx but close enough for government work. 200x4,000 = 800,000 characters in a full book. Lets stretch it just a little and say there are lots of fat books, make the average 1 million characters (bytes) per book.

        A million books, at a million characters (text only) per book is 10^12 bytes, or a full Terabyte. In ASCII form, one terabyte could hold the text of one million books, assuming 200 pages of single spaced (no white space) pages. For reference, Neuromancer by William Gibson as text (including the copyright notice at the bottom) is stored in an ASCII file 472,253 bytes in size. So might we say that half a million bytes is closer in size to average we are up to 2 million books stored in text only form on a 1TB disk.

        How many books are in the Library of Congress? Dunno. Are there two million? Probably. Extrapolate that to your 100TB estimate and we are presuming two hundred million books in the LoC, each about the size of Neuromancer. Every man in America would have had to write two full 200 page novels, get them published to some degree, and then into the LoC to have that many. I am guessing that the LoC has closer to 3 million books in their archives.

        3 million books at 500,000 characters apiece and Voila! this new disk could hold all of them (ASCII format.) Thus the new unit of measurement is born : the LoC = one of these disks = 1.5TB

        It still wouldn't hold all of my porn, though.
    • The trend unit is "how many equivalents of library of congress" does it hold?

      Didn't Neal Stephenson use "Boeing 747 full of encyclopaedias"?

  • Slashdot can teach us many things (Score:5, Funny)

    by addps4cat ( 216499 ) on Tuesday December 24, 2002 @11:30AM (#4952434) Homepage

    1.5 TB (that's a terabyte and a half)


    Thanks captain obvious!

  • So much data -- a little OT (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sisukapalli1 ( 471175 ) on Tuesday December 24, 2002 @11:30AM (#4952438)
    The amount of data on a single disk made me think what the uses could be, and the primary thing I could come up with is hi-res multimedia. There was an article in one of the popular magazines about the next 10 years advancements, and one of them was about digital projections that fool the eye -- one would not be able to distinguish between real images and digital images.

    But, this also makes me wonder... Our ability to process information has stayed the same (e.g., it still takes me awful lot of time to read a small book -- let alone the LOTR), but the amount of data is just exploding.

    May be there would be some new technology that leads us into faster/better processing of the tonnes of information?

    S
    • May be there would be some new technology that leads us into faster/better processing of the tonnes of information?

      Yes, it's called a 'computer'. Seriously, not trying to be a troll or anything, but that's precisely what the field of computer science has been working on for decades now. The machine I'm typing this from really is nothing more than a glorified calculator, multiplied by several orders of magnitude.

      The basic idea behind a computing device is to speed up data processing - and to handle amounts so vast the human mind can't deal with it all. Remember, before electronics, a 'computer' was actually a reference to a human being.

  • Nice quote from the article... (Score:3, Funny)

    by MonTemplar ( 174120 ) on Tuesday December 24, 2002 @11:30AM (#4952439) Homepage Journal
    • * BY 2010, according to senior Intel architects, a CPU will have processing power equivalent to the brain of a bumble bee.


    Hmm... so what that make my Pentium III equivalent to? A cockroach? :)

  • So DeCSS will still work?
  • This is just what Big Brother needs. Cheap mass storage to collect info from you will be a breeze now. Electronic sniffing noses, spy cams, facial recognition software, the Total Information Awareness project will all join together to track every thing about you, and store it on disc.

    1000 hours of film footage of you, plus every transaction you have made with credit card, through paper work, and what have you, will all be put on one of these bad boys, and tin foil is not going to help.

  • I wonder how much one of these things will cost? Considering I could probably buy one and not fill it up for like 10 years, I'm curious as to how this technology will be viable, at least in the home user market. It'll be great for big IT department backups, though.
    • mirc [mirc.co.uk]
      kernel.org [kernel.org]
      kazaa lite [kazaalite.com]
      sourceforge [sourceforge.net]
      edonkey [edonkey2000.com]
      video capture [192.216.185.10]

      have fun filling up that hard drive...

      oh, and you'll probably need on of these [mwave.com] soon

    • i never even filled my 20gb drive. and i had 3 operating systems and an impressive collection of pr0n and mp3s on it. unless you do digital video editing, you probably won't ever need anything larger than 40gb. at least until the next version of windows and office comes out.
      • Then why is my 200 GB of storage almost full?
      • i never even filled my 20gb drive. and i had 3 operating systems and an impressive collection of pr0n and mp3s on it. unless you do digital video editing, you probably won't ever need anything larger than 40gb. at least until the next version of windows and office comes out.

        I've come pretty close [snerk.org] to filling my 80GB Western Digital that resides in my server, and the 20GB and 40GB that make up my workstation are getting pretty close to filled based on;

        • Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault
        • MechWarrior 4: Vengeance
        • Max Payne
        • Need For Speed III
        • Oni
        • Soldier Of Fortune Platinum
        • Soldier Of Fortune II: Double Helix
        • Return To Castle Wolfenstein
        • WarCraft III
        • WarCraft II
        • Star Trek: Armada 2

        With more coming (Comanche 4, Silent Hill 2, Hitman 2: Silent Assault, etc) as soon as I upgrade my video card. That's not to mention the fact that I've got;

        • Windows XP
          • Microsoft Office 2000
          • Corel Office 2002
        • Windows 2000
        • Gentoo 1.2
          • KDE 3.0.5a
          • OpenOffice 1.0.1
          • VMWare
          • Windows 98SE
          • Windows 2000
          • SuSE 8.0

        Gentoo 1.4

        FreeBSD 4.7

        installed presently. Video editing does eat up a lot of space, but there are probably dozens of reasons why a person would require large amounts of storage capacity. A friend of mine with 30GB worth of MP3s, another friend with several game CD images stored on his drive (he hates hunting for the CDs), a colleague who runs a recording studio and deals with raw, uncompressed digital audio, etc. etc.

        The 15GB drive in my laptop is getting a bit brimming right now, since I have to have three operating systems and a lot of data (network maps/plans, company information, images, price lists, development tools, etc.).

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Let's put it this way.
      When recordable CDs came out, I backed up my entire floppy-based game collection to one.
      Games have been using multiple CDs for a while now, I expect them to use multiple DVDs a few years from now. And you know it won't really be 1.5TB... They said DVDs could hold 34 gigs, then they said 17, then they said 9, and sadly what most people have are 4 gig DVDs...

  • DVD technology? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by tandr ( 108948 )
    More importantly, they claim that this will be backwards compatible to existing DVD technology

    But wait a sec... with which DVD it will be compatible? DVD-R ? DVD-RAM? DVD-RW? DVD+RW? There are more then enough DVD-xxx technologies already, and if rate of creating new ones will be the same, I think in 7 years they will have at least 3-5 new more to choose from!

  • What happened to Constellation 3D? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by agallagh42 ( 301559 ) on Tuesday December 24, 2002 @11:38AM (#4952506) Homepage
    There was a company called Constellation 3D [c-3d.net] that was supposed to have something called a Fluorescent Multilayer Disc (FMD) with capacity in the Terabyte range.

    You'll notice that their website no longer exists. It did stink of vapourware from the beginning, but I had a glimmer of hope that it would become something. Here [semiconductorfabtech.com] is the most recent press release I could find on the subject, but it's from early 2001.

    They said they'd have their terabyte discs out "within a year or two". Oh well, I guess I'll have to wait until 2010 now...

  • 2010? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Rew190 ( 138940 ) on Tuesday December 24, 2002 @11:40AM (#4952518)
    Not until 2010? 7 years is a long time. Shouldn't that amount of space be pretty much commonplace by that point anyhow? Sure, it sounds like a lot now, but somehow I don't think that number will be at all impressive in 7 years.

    I imagine that if one of these gets scratched you're gonna lose a whole lotta data unless it has some sweet error correction going for it.

  • LOTR 3 in 1 (Score:3, Funny)

    by Scrameustache ( 459504 ) on Tuesday December 24, 2002 @11:43AM (#4952538) Homepage Journal
    So the LOTR extended footage 3-in-1 complete story on one DVD is due out in 2010 then? Damn...7 more years to wait!

  • LOTR Full Set (Score:3, Funny)

    by Aggrazel ( 13616 ) <aggrazel@gmail.com> on Tuesday December 24, 2002 @11:43AM (#4952544) Journal
    WOW! 1.5 TB!

    That ought to be just enough to hold the LotR collectors edition with all 3 special editions, all 3 regular editions, and 56.2 hours of special footage detailing every aspect of every actors life, and every thought that went through Peter Jackson's head in the last 12 years (not to mention, Sean Astin's 6 hours of bitching about how his hobbit sized underwear kept riding up while filming) all on ONE DVD! In both Widescreen and Fullscreen formats!

    Awesome!
    • Due to the success of LOTR, by 2010 they'll probably have shot the second trilogy. :^)

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday December 24, 2002 @11:44AM (#4952553)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:but... but... but... (Score:2, Informative)

      by WetCat ( 558132 )
      PB - Peta Bytes.

      (no relation to PETA which is animal rights group).
    • tera -> peta -> exa -> zetta -> yotta
    • As removable media becomes larger and larger the need for a hard drive becomes less and less.

      So you have your entire CD collection on your HD, why not have it all on one DVD? As long as the thing is rewritable what's the difference? Realistically, unless HDs improve at a drastic rate (which they probably will) I really don't see much of a reason to keep them. I'd much rather have a computer the runs off of removable drives (remember back when you had the OS on a 5.25 inch disk?) rather than a hard drive anyway. Want to dual boot? Just image another DVD with a different operating system. Want to store your entire CD collection in a lossless format? Just put it on a disk and keep on adding as you get more music.
      Not to mention it would make migrating to a new PC so much easier.

      Really, I've got 200 GB of HD space in my house (mostly full), but I'd trade it all for some GOOD, RELIABLE rewritable disks like I just described.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • I don't WANT more on DVDs. I want bigger HARD DRIVES.

      Where are you going to back up all this data? That's what these big ass DVDs are for.

      Thing is, I don't want to have hundreds of stupid little plastic discs in their stupid little plastic boxes lining shelves in my place.

      Again, if you have 1.5 TB DVD's you aren't going to have hundreds of little plastic discs laying everywhere. That's what you have now.
      • Where are you going to back up all this data? That's what these big ass DVDs are for.

        No, that's what tapes are for. Writable optical random-access media happen to do well for short-term backups (they don't have the shelf-life for long-term) but it's not really what they're *for*.

        • No, that's what tapes are for. Writable optical random-access media happen to do well for short-term backups (they don't have the shelf-life for long-term)

          1) Big tape drives are slow and very expensive. Most home users don't do tape backups.

          2) Tapes are absolutely not good long-term storage. They use magnetic recording and the signals will fade. Granted, in it's current incarnation CD-RW won't hold up in the long term either, but at least the technology has some potential. Magnetic media will never be an acceptable long term solution.
    • I don't WANT more on DVDs. I want bigger HARD DRIVES.

      Don't worry too much about it. Hard Drive capacity seems to be doubling approximately every 12 months, while the price seems to be holding constant.

      If that holds true, then when the new 1.5TB MegaDVDs are released, you should be able to pick up a 10TB hard drive for around $100 retail. (Calculation: 2^7=128, 128*80GB=10TB. $80GB HD today costs about $100).

      A bit below the 50,000TB you want, but you will only need to wait another 12 years for that. Perhaps sooner, since all these doubling trends seem to be accelerating.

      Of course, some of us don't want TB class DVDs or HDs... we want terabytes of solid-state memory. Holographic storage crystals would fit the bill nicely.

      I.V.

    • I'd rather have one DVD to hold all my data ( actually two, redundancy ya know) than one HDD with movable parts.
  • this could be cool, it would allow uncompressed 1080p video and uncompressed sound too. hopefully there will be players and TV sets capable of taking advantage of this by that time.

  • Yes, but will it be recordable? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jridley ( 9305 ) on Tuesday December 24, 2002 @11:47AM (#4952585)
    I'm sure a lot of people see this and say "Finally, I'll be able to back up in a reasonable way!" but it needs to be recordable.

    Even current DVDs are only recordable in one layer. You can't record directly to multiple layers, you have to master two layers separately and then wafer them together in the manufacturing process.

    While a > 1TB disc is a cool idea, if it's only usable on commercially duplicated, mass-distributed data, it's of very, very limited use.

  • oh, thanks a lot (Score:5, Funny)

    by Twirlip of the Mists ( 615030 ) <twirlipofthemists@yahoo.com> on Tuesday December 24, 2002 @12:01PM (#4952685)
    supposed to deliver a 1.5 TB (that's a terabyte and a half)

    This reminds me of a quote from an old Sports Night episode. They were talking about Mt. Everest, I think.

    Guy #1: "Twenty-nine thousand feet. Can you imagine how high that is?"

    Guy #2: "It's 29,000 feet."

    Guy #1: "Yeah, but you've got to put it in perspective. Compare it to something you can visualize."

    Guy #2: (beat) "It's 29,000 rulers."

    Thanks for the clarification, guys.

  • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Bah! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Strange Ranger ( 454494 ) on Tuesday December 24, 2002 @12:24PM (#4952867)

    Can't fool me. If they were serious they'd have said 1.44 TB.
  • It would take that whole disk just to hold the M$ Window$ Installation files.

  • I don't think backward compatibility to current DVD technology is going to count for a lot in 2010 because nobody will be using current DVD technology (for data) by then. Backwards compatibility with Blu-ray, or its successor, or whatever comes along and supplants both five years from now, is what will really matter. Compatibility with a by-then obsolete standard will actually turn out to be a handicap in 2010, and they probably know that, but here in 2002 maybe it helps them get funding.

  • prostoalex writes:
    "...that is supposed to deliver a 1.5 TB (that's a terabyte and a half)..."

    Is this for all the people who think that 1.5 means "one and a third"?

  • Think of the scratch damage! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by dnoyeb ( 547705 ) on Tuesday December 24, 2002 @01:26PM (#4953295) Homepage Journal
    1 scratch and you can wipe a whole movie! whoopee!

    Essentially less fault tolerant, and less ability to make backup copies.

    Who wants that?

  • At current growth rates, I suspect that harddisks will be surpassing that capacity quickly at around that time. So, we'll probably still have disks that are much bigger than DVDs. And that means that 1.5TB DVDs will probably not bee too different from the way DVDs are today: a slighty too small and fairly slow medium for storing data for a few years (since they are not guaranteed to last much longer).

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