50 TB on a Single DVD

scoobyonline200

scoobyonline200

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scoobyonline2000
Here's the article from PC WORLD, in the "Future Tech" feature:

[Page 32]

IF Blue-Rays' 50 plus gigabytes of storage isn't enough for you, here's a storage technology to watch. Several researchers at harvard Medical School have prodcued a prototype of a protein coating they beleive will eventually store upto 50 terabytes on a DVD-size disc. By modifying a lightsensative protein found in microbes that live in salt marshes, the team created a medium resilient enough to store data for years. NEC, which has been codeveloping the technology, hopes to have a USB thumb drive a year from now, and a DVD-size disc a year after that. But experience tells me tech like this usually belongs in the "five years away" bucket.

This to me is some very cool news, so much room on one dvd!! imagine what sort of things each disc can be used for. And I guess you'll eventually be able to use these for gaming right??? as well as movies and so forth. Has anyone else heard anything more on this???
 
I'm just happy with 4 gigs. But with 50 TB's!!!....thats like trying to fill up an empty ocean with pennies. I know a few things that I can use 50 TB's for, but even then 4 gigs still do. But still, thats pretty cool though.
 
That'd be a waste of time, money, and agrivation. That will cost a fortune and if I got to buy one now if they were out, I don't think I'd fill it up until I die.
 
I can't ever see the need for 50 terabytes on a single disc at the moment, but then 10 years ago I don't imagine people would have seen a need for 50 gigabytes of storage on a home PC either. Now most midrange PCs have 200+GBs of storage. I certainly couldn't use 50 terabytes at the moment but who knows, with the growth of high definition media we could see the need for hundreds of gigabytes for a TV series in the not so distant future. The speed of the burner would have to be huge to actually write 50 terabytes at one time, though, unless the disc was re-writable and players were made to acknowledge this. A 16x DVD burner (not taking into account that the burn speed changes across the face of the disc) would take roughly a month to burn 50 terabytes.
 
amp88
I can't ever see the need for 50 terabytes on a single disc at the moment, but then 10 years ago I don't imagine people would have seen a need for 50 gigabytes of storage on a home PC either.*snip*
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Exactly what I was going to say. :)👍
 
There are lots of storage formats out in development at the moment, My money is on Holographic storgae winning the next disk war.

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People are also releasing new HDD drives that actually oil themselves through nano tubes and this then allows then to be speeded up and thus letting them store more data.

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The wild and wacky frontier of hard drive technology is always full of surprising new ways to keep those drive capacities growing, and this new patent for leaking nanotube-housed lubricant onto disc platters is no exception. Apparently, a heated hard disc is capable of cramming more data into closer quarters, but the method hasn't been implemented in current drives since the heat evaporates the lubricant that allows the recording head to travel smoothly over the disc, causing a fatal disc crash. Seagate's new patent addresses the issue by storing lubricant in a special material made from millions of carbon nanotubes and embedded in the drive housing. As the disc spins, lubricant is slowly leaked out, and the disc can be kept safe for its whole lifetime. The upshot of all this is that Seagate can use the heat-assisted recording to cram several terabits per square inch into a drive -- 10 times as much data into the disc than is currently possible. We guess there'll be a bit of a wait for this to make it to market, but we greatly look forward to an educational video on the subject all the same.
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There is not enough porn for this technology...

50 TBs on one disc... Two Words - In Sane... But if the life span will be usable, I foresee less sold tape backups in the future...
 
Flerbizky
50 TBs on one disc... Two Words - In Sane... But if the life span will be usable, I foresee less sold tape backups in the future...
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Do you remember when Gigabyte drives came out? Many thought it was overkill and we would never be able to fill it. Now you can get a few gigs to fit in your pocket.

Humans have a tendancy to move into whatever amount of space they have access to. So if there is a way to have reasonably priced access to 50 Terabytes, then people will find a way to use it. Perhaps they'll only fill up 40 TB, but you get my point.
 
I have about half of my 80GB OS and programs on one HDD and my 120GB is filled up to about 113GB. I'm getting another 320GB HDD though :D
 
PLmatt91
I have about half of my 80GB OS and programs on one HDD and my 120GB is filled up to about 113GB. I'm getting another 320GB HDD though :D
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Thank you for making my point. :D
 
PLmatt91
I have about half of my 80GB OS and programs on one HDD and my 120GB is filled up to about 113GB. I'm getting another 320GB HDD though :D
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Take a look at the "Biggest Hard Drive" thread and you'll see that a lot of us here at GTP take things too far. At the moment though, I don't think any one member of the public could even get close to 50 terabytes of data in their home.

50 terabytes is almost 11,400 4.5GB DVDs
or almost 1.2 million 45MB WAV files
or over 13 million 4MB MP3s

or...

You could record 5820 hours (242 days) of HDTV at 20 megabits per second.
 
Hmm... light sensative protein? Better not puke on your discs.
 
Man, you could run a server farm off of one of these discs...

(granted it wouldn't be a server farm anymore, but you get my point)
 
Something else I've just been wondering about is seek time is with this kind of disc. Rotational delay should be low if it's running as quick or quicker than current DVD drives, but the seek time could be pretty big with so much data so densely packed. I read a while ago that HD-DVD was considered too slow at the moment to be used for games (it might have been a statement from someone at Microsoft, but I'm not sure) and HD-DVD is nowhere near as dense as this is/could be.

@G.T: I would think GTP would fit quite a bit more than 20 times on 50TB. I don't know if Jordan has ever mentioned how big GTP is, but I wouldn't think it would be on the scale of hundreds of gigabytes, probably less than 10 gigabytes (though I could be monstrously wrong about that).
 
Right now the servers that I use at work hold a terabyte and they fill up about once every two months. We go through and claer off 200 Gigs or so and then two months later they're full.

I'll bet we could fill a 50 terabyte DVD.

That being said, a DVD with that much space on it better have a WAY better transfer speed than the current stuff we're dealing with... cause 50x isn't going to cut it.
 
danoff
Right now the servers that I use at work hold a terabyte and they fill up about once every two months. We go through and claer off 200 Gigs or so and then two months later they're full.

I'll bet we could fill a 50 terabyte DVD.

That being said, a DVD with that much space on it better have a WAY better transfer speed than the current stuff we're dealing with... cause 50x isn't going to cut it.
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If you're only actually creating about 100 gigabytes per month it'd take you 502 months (roughly 42 years) to fill up 50 terabytes (starting with a server full of data).

edit: @Duck: Where's my money then? ;) Jordan puts GTP including all its parts at 10-12GB.
 
amp88
If you're only actually creating about 100 gigabytes per month it'd take you 502 months (roughly 42 years) to fill up 50 terabytes (starting with a server full of data).

edit: @Duck: Where's my money then? ;) Jordan puts GTP including all its parts at 10-12GB.
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We already have a terabyte out of the way, plus we have another terabyte in storage. That's 2 down, before we've even gotten started. Now the 100 gigs/month is while we're conserving, I'd bet we'd fill up 200 gb/month if we didn't give it any extra thought.

That means we'd fill up a terabyte in 5 months, which is 48 TB in 20 years. So it would take a while, but it could be done. Definitely something that my company could use (since it plans to be around in 20 years)... and I didn't even add in internet porn.

Note: I'm just talking about the team of 10 folks I work with, there are many more servers, teams, and people employed here many of whom do more disk intensive work... disk space and CPU time is at a premium. My point is, 50TB is not out of the realm of consideration for commerical applications right this minute. Hell I just bought half a TB for my home computer.
 
danoff
We already have a terabyte out of the way, plus we have another terabyte in storage. That's 2 down, before we've even gotten started. Now the 100 gigs/month is while we're conserving, I'd bet we'd fill up 200 gb/month if we didn't give it any extra thought.

That means we'd fill up a terabyte in 5 months, which is 48 TB in 20 years. So it would take a while, but it could be done. Definitely something that my company could use (since it plans to be around in 20 years)... and I didn't even add in internet porn.
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No doubt it could be done, but not in a reasonable timeframe. Anyone could use 50 terabytes given enough time, but IMO no-one in the foreseeable future could ever need anything approaching 50 terabytes for their home computer. Some large companies probably wouldn't need that much either, depending on what they're storing. If it's a financial institution they'll be storing largely text and numbers and at only 1 byte a character you'd need 54975581388800 characters to fill 50 terabytes. Give each account 1 million characters (bytes), which is definitely erring on the side of caution, and you can have 54975581 accounts. Even if the company is involved in graphic design or advertising they're not going to be producing data quickly enough to fill 50 terabytes in a short (i.e. months) time. I don't know what company you work for, but 100-200GB a month is obviously quite a bit to be producing and it'd take you twenty years to fill 50TB if you were using space like it was going out of fashion.

edit:

danoff
Note: I'm just talking about the team of 10 folks I work with, there are many more servers, teams, and people employed here many of whom do more disk intensive work... disk space and CPU time is at a premium. My point is, 50TB is not out of the realm of consideration for commerical applications right this minute. Hell I just bought half a TB for my home computer.
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Yeah, but even if you have 10 teams that are the same size as yours it'll still take 2 years to fill one disc. I mean, space isn't at a premium if if takes two years to use one disc is it? I've got over a terabyte of storage in this PC, but I could never use 50.
 
You would still have the problem of storing data safely in one place for a long period of time - only now you have much more in one place to lose.
 
The Disc's could be cheaper then HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, but the drives may cost more.
 
50TB..That's..a lot. I'll try to put it in prespective:

The Library of Congress is said to hold something like 10TB of data.

Don't quote me on that.
 
amp88
Yeah, but even if you have 10 teams that are the same size as yours it'll still take 2 years to fill one disc. I mean, space isn't at a premium if if takes two years to use one disc is it? I've got over a terabyte of storage in this PC, but I could never use 50.
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Agreed that space would no longer be at a premium if we had access to 50TB of storage (unless of course we also had super fast CPUs and could start pumping out way more data... 128 bit precision anyone?). But as it is right now, we're up against the wall.

Still, the usefulness of 50TB is limited if they don't come up with a more efficient way of transferring the data on and off.
 

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