50GB CD ROM'S

[StuartW]

Hi Floppyman. As I understand it Cconstellation is working with leading manufacturers to produce a player, which will also be able to read existing DVD's and CD's.What is interesting is that the discs can be made of glass as well as plastic, as bubbles in the glass do not effect performance. Glass discs should have a life of hundreds of years, which would make them ideal for archive material. As to cost, I would imagine if mass produced they should not cost much more than ordinary CD's.
By splitting the laser beam many layers on the disc can be read at once, perhaps giving reading speeds of over one gigabyte a second.

[StuartW]

Constellation 3d www.c-3d.net/ (http://www.c-3d.net/) have recently demonstrated a protype CD ROM with huge capacities. The Fluorescent Multi-layer Discs ( FMD-ROM), have dozens of layers, each the capacity of a DVD.Each of the pits in the disc is filled with fluorescent material.When the light from the laser hits the fluorescent matter,it glows, which is picked up by the reader and registered as 0 or 1. Unlike reflected light in conventional lasers, fluorescent light is incoherent, which means it is less affected by flaws and scratches.It is likely that the player will use a blue laser with a wavelength 400nm. It is claimed the system will be backwardly compatible, and should ship out within a year.
This poses the question what on earth would you store on a 50GB + CD. ?

[This message has been edited by StuartW (edited 06-25-2000).]

[Tiretool]

You could get rid of the old hard drive and use a cd-rom only! LOL

http://www.pcmech.com/ubb/tongue.gif

[Floppyman]

Cool! Thanks for the link Stuart....I guess you could be the backup of all backups. Who knows maybe this will replace tape drives. Do you need a special cd-rom to read/write to these disks or will standard "burners" be able to? Any ideas on prices of these disks?

[HAL9000]

Yea... but then again, my first hard drive was 210Mb when the average was 120Mb... what to do with all that room. Then I got the 850Mb, everyone thought I was crazy...400-500Mb was more than I would ever need. Then came my 2.1, the 4.3, the 10.2, the 13.6, the 20.5 and the larger drives just keep coming.

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If it ain't broke, you're not pushing hard enough!

[Toaster]

Glass media made a try back in the late 80`s when HP and others produced HDD`s with lab glass platters. The biggest drawback from this media was "ringing" such as when your case were struck lightly whilst the drive was functioning. The ringing allowed the media to vibrate resulting in a rather catastrophic head crash under certain circumstances.
Metal (aluminum) HDD platters suffer from this but not to the extent of glass.
In CD-ROM applications, it might work better due to it`s "non-contact" method.
I would imagine this media to be very expensive and problematic when reading "plastic" media.
The biggest drawback of "plastic" media is it`s tendency to "grow" due to centrifical force. Plastic media has a "true" limitation of about 5500 RPM before "growth" must be contended with. This would equate to about a "true" 80x drive. Most CD-ROMS use the "CAV" principle where the drive rotational speed varies with the disk access point.

[robo555]

Here's an article about it:
http://betanews.efront.com/article.php3?sid=story385dc825d903d