
An Australian researcher has worked out how to store 1000TB on a CD - notdarkyet
http://www.sciencealert.com.au/news/20140309-26116.html
======
krrrh
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 watch in your lifetime the
entertainment industry is going to pine for the days when torrents eve the big
problem.

The same goes for rogue librarians, or Google Books employees dumping entire
libraries onto discs and leaking them out.

~~~
Someone1234
> more films than you could possibly watch in your lifetime

I was curious if this statement was true...

So assuming, 4.4 GB her HD film & 2 hrs long each, you can fit roughly 232
films per TB or 232,000 films total (for 1000 TB), that's 464,000 hours of HD
content or 53 years (!) back to back.

So, yes, that statement is true. Now the next logical question: Has the human
race produced 464,000 hours of video content?

Let's assume there are around 100 cable channels showing content in HD video
24/7 (with no overlap, there are more but a lot of duplication). That's 2,400
hours of content a day, 876,000 hours a year or 101 years back-to-back worth
of watchable content shown each year.

But realistically that will be at least 70% duplication (particularly looking
at it over several years). So even if we just look at 24/7 news and shopping
channels which always produce original content, you're still talking about
easily 200,000+ hours/year.

~~~
userbinator
> Has the human race produced 464,000 hours of video content?

Far more than that... YouTube alone claims "100 hours of video are uploaded to
YouTube every minute":

[https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html](https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html)

...which comes out to 144kh/day. In other words, one of these discs would be
enough to store ~3 days worth of contributions to YouTube. So a box of these
discs, let's say 1000 of them - which isn't all that big (e.g.
[http://www.amazon.co.uk/Neo-Aluminium-
Storage-1000-sleeves/d...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Neo-Aluminium-
Storage-1000-sleeves/dp/B0010IIJ9U) ), could hold an archive of every single
video that has ever been uploaded to YouTube.

I am now reminded of this:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_UmWdcTrrc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_UmWdcTrrc)

Edit: got beaten to mentioning YouTube, but there's many other video sharing
sites on the Internet, and of course there are probably countless hours of one
of the types of video the Internet is well known for: porn.

~~~
boyaka
The majority of that is junk anyways. But I suppose some people obsessed with
archiving everything wouldn't filter anything. If I were to grab "everything"
from YouTube I would at least limit it to subscriptions and only subscribe to
channels that don't upload bogus junk.

~~~
andrewflnr
Then the valuable commodity would become directories of worthwhile content.
You would have people doing deep dives into the crap to find the locations of
a few good pieces to share with their buddies or trade.

~~~
nightcracker
With the internet and Video On Demand that's already the case.

------
benjaminva
The idea to break the diffraction limit by using the this doughnut-shaped
excitation spot comes from the STED microscopy
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STED_microscopy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STED_microscopy))
developed by Stefan Hell (Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in
Goettingen, Germany). He actually showed that an additional intensity-
dependent term can be added to Abbe's diffraction limit allowing sub 100um
resolution with light. I think this idea is awesome and it sure won't be the
last invention made possible by this trick.

~~~
penguat
I'm sure this or a similar technique is already in use in commercial
photolithography.

------
mjackson
> 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.

~~~
cgio
Given Australia salary scales, this may be a typo, 180,000 would sound normal.

~~~
vacri
Nope, it's $18k, but it's not a wage. It is low (Australia doesn't have the
money that US universities are awash in), but it's for things like
international travel to conferences and the like.

[http://www.swinburne.edu.au/media-
centre/news/2014/08/victor...](http://www.swinburne.edu.au/media-
centre/news/2014/08/victoria-fellowship-award-for-swinburne-researcher.html)

~~~
a_bonobo
True, its a pure travel scholarship, with all likelihood the student won't
even get to touch the money. It will all handled by the university's finance
department (it was in my case). And $18k is huge for an Australian travel
grant, they're usually just $2k to $5k, some examples:

$1.8k in Perth
[http://www.postgraduate.uwa.edu.au/students/funding/travel](http://www.postgraduate.uwa.edu.au/students/funding/travel)
$1k to $2.5k at Uni South Australia [http://www.unisa.edu.au/student-
life/global-opportunities/tr...](http://www.unisa.edu.au/student-life/global-
opportunities/travel-grants/) $2k to $3k at Ian Potter foundation
[http://www.ianpotter.org.au/travel](http://www.ianpotter.org.au/travel)

etc.

------
jpmattia
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...](http://www.swinburne.edu.au/engineering/cmp/profile.php?member=zgan)

Edit: Paper that this PR refers to is here:
[http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/130619/ncomms3061/full/nco...](http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/130619/ncomms3061/full/ncomms3061.html)

~~~
wil421
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.

~~~
bitJericho
I think CDs would make a comeback if you're talking about being able to hold
an entire series of movies all in 4K and in 3D and not break a sweat.

Digital downloads is all the rage right now, but people will still want to
archive their downloads.

~~~
lukifer
> people will still want to archive their downloads

I don't know how true this is. Even the tech-savvy folks I know rely primarily
on Netflix/Spotify/etc, and in the rare instances they buy something, they
trust iTunes/Amazon/etc to hold it for them. (I continue to think that is
nuts.)

~~~
NoMoreNicksLeft
I'm using Plex to store our videos... sold our DVDs on craigslist a few months
ago. Within 3 weeks, had another copy of every disc we got rid of.

Eventually I want to get a FreeNAS machine up and running, and any important
files will be backed up to Google Drive (though, obviously not movies that can
simply be downloaded again if desired).

------
Someone
A big problem with spinning disks is that storage grows inversely with the
area of the dots, while reading and writing speed grow inversely with the
diameter of the dots.

If you store 100 times as much data, all else being equal, time to write a
full disk will be ten times as large.

Ways around that are increasing rotation speed (been there, done that. There
is little to gain here without making the disk a lot stronger = heavier, if
that is really possible at all) and using multiple heads (harder to do, but
may eventually be the better solution, certainly if one can completely do away
with head movements)

~~~
delecti
Bandwidth increasing proportional with the square root of the storage growth
is a pretty great trend. If anything that sounds like a plus.

~~~
tgb
Looks like it gives 2.9 gigabits per second for a 5cm disk radius at 5000 rpm.

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=5000rpm+*+(2*pi*5cm)%2F...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=5000rpm+*+\(2*pi*5cm\)%2F\(9nm\)+in+1%2Fs)

------
golemotron
The print collection of the Library of Congress is estimated at 10TB. 990TB
would be left on the DVD. Amazing.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Futurama called it:

[http://bookriotcom.c.presscdn.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/09...](http://bookriotcom.c.presscdn.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/09/fiction-non-fiction.png)

------
dghughes
Anyone remember the company from about 2000/2001 called Constellation 3D? I do
I lost my $3,000 investment when they went belly-up, doh!

They made a fluorescent multilayer DVD and a credit card shaped ClearCard the
DVD which I believe the goal was to store several hundred TB of data.

And this was about 14 years ago!

------
jtchang
That is pretty awesome. The solution seem so simple in retrospect. Just mask
out the larger 500nm light you don't want to hit the surface.

Certainly even 1TB CDs would be insanely awesome. It would open up a whole
realm of mass storage. I'm just feeling how easy backups will be :)

------
frandroid
> A young Victorian researcher

Steampunk storage FTW.

------
DigitalJack
This (interference) is how the feature size of semiconductors has gotten so
small.

------
EGreg
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?

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

~~~
sp332
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.

------
egamble
One hopes that the write speed of these disks will be proportionately faster
than DVD write speed. A DVD writing at 16X transfers about 22MB/s. At that
rate it would take 1.44 years to fill up this disk writing to it continuously.
Even at 1GB/s (roughly the write speed of an SSD) it would take almost 12 days
to fill up one of these disks.

------
shock
Could Amazon Glacier use some pre-consumer form of this technology?

~~~
perlgeek
I doubt it. There's a long, long way from the theoretical finding to the
practical device.

Writing and reading speed has been mentioned. Another point is that as the
dots become smaller, the mechanical parts need to be much more precise, moving
the device from consumer parts to really expensive parts and assembly.

------
lukifer
I would love a potential use case as a backup that is redundant dozens or
hundreds of times over. I'm not sure the exact mechanism by which DVDs start
to lose data over 10-20 years, but this tech might be a way to mitigate that
risk (as well as scratches and other physical damage).

------
Fando
Awesome tech. I wonder how data will be written and read from such a disk? How
long will it take? The transfer of 1000TB will be an interesting problem
indeed. At current theoretical blu ray writing speed of 12x or 400Mbps [1] the
time to read/write such a disk would be:

1000 terabytes = 8,000,000,000 megabits 8,000,000,000 / 400 = 20,000,000
seconds (7.6053 months)

[1] [http://www.blu-ray.com/faq/#bluray_speed](http://www.blu-
ray.com/faq/#bluray_speed)

~~~
rasz_pl
Could probably be written all at once using immersion lithography. You could
threat them as big read only memory 'crystals'. Buy a set of 100 containing
entire YT archive etc

------
craigds
> Every day, humans are producing more data than ever before - around 90% of
> the world’s data was generated in the past two years alone - and there will
> come a point when our data storage centres and the cloud can no longer keep
> up.

Is this true? Can anyone point to a some kind of study showing convergence of
storage capacity and data production over time? I was under the impression
that we've got far more storage than we'll need, at least in the near future.

~~~
vidarh
Given that we can today fit tens of TB in a fistful of SD-cards (512GB per
card), no I don't think it's true at all that we'd get to a point where our
data storage can't hold up. Our ability to filter and identify gems outside of
the most popular stuff is a far greater challenge.

------
stronglikedan
Would this reduce the storage lifespan of the disc? Would this technique make
it physically more brittle, if the current form factor is used?

------
happycube
This could be a DVD - it would be an easy enough thing to perform tests on,
and they say they're using a red laser for the actual writing. If the dye can
handle the very small writes, that is. (And I wouldn't trust Memorex for this
;) )

Error correction for these is going to be interesting, even a speck of dust
could obscure many megabytes of data.

------
elwell
This is technically old news. Here's one from a year ago _with the same
picture_ : [http://gizmodo.com/researchers-have-found-a-way-to-
cram-1-00...](http://gizmodo.com/researchers-have-found-a-way-to-
cram-1-000-terabytes-on-531549229)

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

~~~
ctdonath
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.

~~~
codereflection
Link? Every article I can find says they used a DVD.

~~~
dangrossman
Link:
[http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/130619/ncomms3061/full/nco...](http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/130619/ncomms3061/full/ncomms3061.html?message-
global=remove)

The researchers never used any discs. The 1000TB figure was for a surface area
equivalent to a CD or DVD; they're the same physical size, and these
descriptions give the reader an idea of what a 9nm feature size means in
practical terms.

What they actually developed was a novel resin and a method for etching 9nm
dots in it using a specific optical laser setup. If it were to be
commercialized, it'd be a new type of disc, and CD/DVD lasers would not be
able to read it.

------
jacob019
Can't wait to back up my 12TB RAID on a single disc.

------
motoboi
The Internet Archive would benefit very much from this! Does anyone remember
the blueray based long term archive rack from facebook?

------
polskibus
Expect Amazon Glacier price to drop dramatically in a couple of years :)

~~~
polskibus
Why downvoted ? Allegedly, blue-ray recordable discs are used by Amazon for
Glacier backup. Surely they will be the ones very interesting of further
development of this technology.

------
sfmelton
It's hard to believe they are only giving this guy $18k.

------
vlunkr
Wow this seems huge If it's practical to implement everywhere. You could keep
every picture/song/movie/document/game from your whole life on a disk, and
hey, make a backup too.

------
jorjordandan
He has announced that for his next challenge, he will store 4k video on
betamax tapes. Impressive.

------
Vanayad
I know I've seen this like a year or more ago here or on slashdot... :/

------
saeguaiga
Oh great, another 1024-bit daisy-chained medium with a 20MB UeFI boot
partition. We have watched this way too long and it was dragging us
down...(cough)

Oops, accidentally implemented as a medium-hash CAMFS in disused packaging-
and-optronics 45nm fab. Please write test, mind 5W limit if retaining
cyano/pyridene dye in media.

------
trhway
laser heterodyne :)

------
peter303
The CD is twenty feet wide!

------
droessmj
Brilliant solution to a known natural limitation.

------
jcrubino
Have those guys sign up for Y Combinator!!

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

~~~
ctdonath
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.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Netflix would put the entire catalog in your home, encrypted, and the only
data they would have to transfer would be for the control plane (billing,
recommendations, etc) and encryption keys to auth you.

Totally side-steps last mile monopolies as well. Don't want to work with us?
We'll drop an LTE chipset in as well for the admin stuff. Redbox In Your Home.

~~~
joshschreuder
That would remove their ability to take content away from consumers when
contracts expire though wouldn't it?

~~~
toomuchtodo
The encryption keys would be time limited (monthly basis, certain titles,
etc). If you don't top up monthly, you key expires, the underlying data is re-
encrypted with another key, etc.

~~~
joshschreuder
How do you re-encrypt a read only storage medium like a disk though?

~~~
fphhotchips
You could have a master-key (or set of master keys) on a read-write medium,
which you could encrypt/decrypt as many times as needed? You'd be vulnerable
to someone scraping the master key from memory, but no more than someone just
passing the video to a recording device.

------
hristov
That will warm the hearts of the Ubuntu Unity team. Can you imagine the amount
of bloat they can put on a single installation disk now?

