see mefi jrun. jrun mefi jrun.

August 25, 2004 10:46 AM

Introducing Holographic Versatile Disc, for all your trillion-byte needs. That's 1250 compact discs, on a disc which is similarly compact.
posted by Pretty_Generic (33 comments total)

When will it stop? Heh. Good post, though.
posted by Peter H at 11:00 AM on August 25, 2004

I'm not one of these people who throws out all his equipment every time there's an upgrade available. I've been biding my time through zips and syquests and countless "burnable" whatchamahoosis for the right time to cash in my 5.25" floppies. Finally!
posted by scarabic at 11:05 AM on August 25, 2004

What possible applications are there left that DVDs aren't already big enough for?

(Yeah, I know this is a bit "640k should be enough for anybody", but still... I'm drawing a blank here).
posted by reklaw at 11:08 AM on August 25, 2004

(Psst. It's called a terabyte.)
posted by neckro23 at 11:10 AM on August 25, 2004

What possible applications are there left that DVDs aren't already big enough for?

Office 2007.

But seriously. Try backing up a 200GB harddrive onto DVDs.
posted by eriko at 11:11 AM on August 25, 2004

Oh, god, that's hot. A terabyte?

Whoo. *fans self*

I have to take a cold shower now.
posted by chicobangs at 11:11 AM on August 25, 2004

reklaw: how about movies? DVDs SUCK as a filmed entertainment medium. You can't fit a considerable percentage of films on it, and the quality is getting unacceptable considering the amount of people with HD television. Horrible green-grainy darkness... yuk.
posted by Pretty_Generic at 11:20 AM on August 25, 2004

My friends laugh at me when I go nuts because I can't find a U2 CD... can you imagine what I would be like if I lost THIS one instead???
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 11:21 AM on August 25, 2004

Office 2007.

Eriko wins. World class.

Seriously though, that is very sexy technology.
posted by dmt at 11:31 AM on August 25, 2004

By the time I'll be able to afford it, it'll be obsolete. Progress sucks.
posted by jonmc at 11:34 AM on August 25, 2004

ok, so I back up 30 years of home movies on one disk. how long is this thing going to sit in a cardboard box in my attic and still play when pull it out years later?

Right now I'm worried stuff that I've burnt to CD-R 3 years ago won't age well...I wonder how robust these holographic polymers can be??

Off topic: can you buy CD's that are supposed to last longer than the typical cheapo CD-R's?
posted by jacobsee at 11:35 AM on August 25, 2004

What possible applications are there left that DVDs aren't already big enough for?

HD-Movies.
posted by Bonzai at 11:53 AM on August 25, 2004

What possible applications are there left that DVDs aren't already big enough for?

I'm sure they'll come up with something. Like how about a disk with every episode of Late Night with Conan O'Brien.
posted by bobo123 at 12:11 PM on August 25, 2004

Looks like I'm gonna have to buy the White Album again.
posted by Capn at 12:17 PM on August 25, 2004

My friends laugh at me when I go nuts because I can't find a U2 CD... can you imagine what I would be like if I lost THIS one instead?

How about the sinking feeling of dread that overcomes you when you scratch the disk? That's, like, ten CD's worth of music -- gone forever.

But on the plus side, you can keep three or four backups lying around.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 12:32 PM on August 25, 2004

But seriously. Try backing up a 200GB harddrive onto DVDs.

Or backing up a 120GB harddrive of mp3s onto CD-Rs. Ugh, nearly 4 full CD-R 50-spindles and one huge CD-binder later...I managed to lose the thing when I moved out of my apartment a year ago. Probably serves me right as a pirate. Arrrrrr!

In retrospect, I should have invested in a DVD-RW. Them purty things are cheap now, too. I fancy myself those external drives....mmmmm.

And on what function these new CDs can have: I have pure camcorder footage files that hinge on 20GB.
posted by Mach3avelli at 12:59 PM on August 25, 2004

My mini-Frisbee collection is about to skyrocket!
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 1:16 PM on August 25, 2004

can you buy CD's that are supposed to last longer than the typical cheapo CD-R's?

To answer my own question, these should last "well in excess of 300 years".
posted by jacobsee at 3:09 PM on August 25, 2004

With a terabyte disk, I could back up:

Everything I've ever done on a computer (since 1981);

High-res scans of every piece of art I've ever drawn;

High-res scans of every page of every book I currently own, have ever owned, or have ever even read.

And probably have room for more stuff, too.

Of course, my 40-DVD set of Trek:Original Series (2-episodes-per-disk) would take up a second one...

But I'd have a lot more room in my apartment for toys and Legos. :)
posted by zoogleplex at 3:13 PM on August 25, 2004

I'll take a 100 count spindle, a writeable drive, and a portable mp3/video player.

*sees the cold shower motion - raises by feverishly smoking a cigarette*
posted by loquacious at 3:41 PM on August 25, 2004

Dude, that's a lot of porn.
posted by NortonDC at 5:06 PM on August 25, 2004

Norton, my friend, you took the words right out of my mouth.
posted by Joey Michaels at 6:15 PM on August 25, 2004

You could fill the history of recorded music in a room.
posted by Keyser Soze at 6:28 PM on August 25, 2004

Somebody please correct me, but is it just 925GB? (1250x740mB)

If we start saving homemovies, movies etc. in their non-compressed format, that's nothing. The normal tv-signal is about 3Mb/second, HD about 5Mb/s. How about a feed of 9000x16000 pixels? You are going to need much more than that disc to store up all that data.

Btw. Audio on dvd's audio is compressed. It a limited media even now. I remember reading about George Lucas's digital movie cameras a couple of years ago that had a problem with all the information coming from the cameras (80Mb/s)...

100 inch displays are going to be the standard in a few years. We need resolution...
posted by hoskala at 7:23 PM on August 25, 2004

archive.org sold at BestBuy for $20
posted by stbalbach at 7:34 PM on August 25, 2004

There's the potential for massive redundancy: 1000GB = 100 copies of a critical 10GB data file. Like, say, army payroll records. ;) Granted, it can still be lost or destroyed all at once, but the data will survive a lot of disc-scratching and bad sectors.

I can't remember who brought this point up on Slashdot first, but given sufficient storage space, the concept of 'deletion' becomes obsolete. There's no need for it - just keep a copy of every single version of everything, forever, for perfect Undo-ing.
posted by aeschenkarnos at 7:51 PM on August 25, 2004

Chaos Manor, Byte 1991 First things first, then: make backups of everything on the Cheetah 386/25. Doing that ought to be simple enough: for years, I've been doing XCOPY *.*/s/m onto the Maximum Storage APX-4200 WORM (write once, read many times) drive that's part of the Cheetah 386/25 system. I not only have all my current files copied onto a WORM cartridge, I have older versions of everything as well, since when you copy over a WORM file you don't actually overwrite anything and the previous file is retrievable. Furthermore, WORM disk files are essentially eternal, no one has seen any deterioration of WORM disks in the past decade.
posted by dhartung at 10:29 PM on August 25, 2004

hoskala, if audio on DVD is compressed, it's almost always losslessly compressed. Don't forget you can do that for video too.
posted by Pretty_Generic at 3:28 AM on August 26, 2004

funniest line on this thread is Capn's.
posted by Peter H at 9:33 AM on August 26, 2004

if audio on DVD is compressed, it's almost always losslessly compressed

Nope. Both Dolby Digital (AC-3) and DTS soundtracks use lossy compression. Dolby's about 400kb/sec and DTS can be up to 1.5mb/sec.
posted by kindall at 10:20 AM on August 26, 2004

corrected
posted by Pretty_Generic at 12:19 PM on August 26, 2004

Uncompressed HD digital video is around 1 Gbps (the 20Mbps data rate of an HDTV broadcast signal is some number of multiplexed MPEG-compressed streams). So this disk would store 8000 seconds = about 2 hours of uncompressed high resolution video.
posted by hattifattener at 12:34 PM on August 26, 2004

Do they have to be yellow? I really hate that color.

Still, a terabyte in the palm of your hand sounds pretty damn great. The future is now!
posted by Down10 at 8:08 PM on August 26, 2004