Terabyte hard drives are getting to be old hat… but what about removable media that can store 1Tb of data? It looks like it’s on the way. TDK showed off a 1TB optical disc at Ceatec in Japan last week,
The disc has 16 recording layers, each storing 32GB per side for a total of 1024GB of storage capacity.
Blu-ray discs, by comparison, can handle about 25GB to 50GB.
Unfortunately, TDK’s new discs are about 2-3 times thicker than a Blu-ray disc, which can make them difficult to read using existing disc drives. If and when the company overcomes that problem we could start to see ridiculously high capacity optical discs hit the streets — if people still use removable storage at that point.
via Engadget
I just stacked three current DVDs on my desk….wow that’s thick TDK! 😉 I can only imagine the torque of spinning that much plastic around in a drive. Some of my thin media already shakes my computers when it spins these think discs will be like a washing machine full of wet towels.
Yeah, the capacity of storage media becomes bigger. But, don’t forget your files become bigger too.
Another big problem in using removable media is technology obsolescence. It’s very difficult to entrust your data to a particular technology, when that technology’s drives and media disappear from the marketplace.
The media life might be 25 years, but try finding a drive for that media
10 years from now, let alone 25 years.
So you end up transferring your old backups onto a new technology
every few years. If you forget to transfer something, that thing could be hopelessly “lost” forever.
This is partly driven by the vendors’ desire for revenue. Witness
Intel, which developed USB, initially refusing to back USB 3.0,
instead trying to replace it with its optical interconnect. If Intel
had its way, USB external storage devices would vanish.
The biggest problem i see is that blu-ray recorders and media are still to expensive for most uses.
If they don’t significantly increase the read/write speeds it won’t really matter how much these things hold. No one wants to wait a year for a disk to finish writing.