TDK shows off 1TB optical disc at CEATEC

[Jos]

Earlier this year Blu-ray discs officially broke the 100GB barrier with the introduction of two new media specifications, BDXL (High Capacity Recordable and Rewritable discs) and IH-BD (Intra-Hybrid discs). And while larger-capacity disc prototypes have been touted many times before, this week at the CEATEC trade show in Japan TDK demonstrated one of the most ambitious to date: a 16-layer disc capable of storing 32GB per side on each layer, or up to 1TB of data.

The company has apparently overcome most of the problems that would stop its new disc from being viable. According to Tech-On, the technology uses the same laser system as existing Blu-ray players, meaning that it should be relatively easy for manufacturers to upgrade their devices to support the new high-capacity discs. Read speeds are also equivalent of Blu-Ray, while error rates for reading out data are within acceptable limits for commercialization.

Unfortunately, there’s still one major roadblock ahead: size. While the discs themselves are no harder to manufacture than current Blu-ray media, at nearly 3x the thickness TDK's new discs face an issue with the optical lens when trying to read the inner layers. The company believes the technology will scale down, though, and hopes to commercialize it as an affordable storage solution for home users as well as businesses in a number of different markets.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/40604-tdk-shows-off-1tb-optical-disc-at-ceatec.html

 

[KG363]

that's crazy

 

[mattfrompa]

I always enjoy seeing a visual comparison like this.

 

[TomSEA]

I know blank blu-ray media is damned expensive. Can only imagine the cost of one of these. As much as a 1TB mechanical drive maybe?

 

[Per Hansson]

Well I can buy 25GB Bluray discs here in Sweden for €1.5
50GB discs are still around €9 tho

I'm sure in it's current iteration this 1TB media would cost as much as a mechanical harddrive, but price does eventually come down
Would be cool if they managed to get it down to the same thickness as normal Bluray's, I guess technically all that would be required to read it then would be a firmware update...?

 

[gwailo247]

Burning these things will probably approach a religious ritual, especially if they cost over 50 bucks each.
Don't use any appliances in the house, make sure no heavy people are walking around the computer, and whatever you do don't touch the mouse.

 

[Per Hansson]

gwailo247 said:
Burning these things will probably approach a religious ritual, especially if they cost over 50 bucks each.
Don't use any appliances in the house, make sure no heavy people are walking around the computer, and whatever you do don't touch the mouse.

Exactly my memory of first using a burner on my cousins computer
External 1x SCSI burner, it sat on a piece of cellfoam cut out from a mattress
But even then it was enough if someone closed the outside door downstairs to fail the burn, and the discs cost like 20€ back then too!

 

[Kellie Dobbie]

Imagine accidentally breaking a disc full of data....

 

[TorturedChaos]

So if I read this correctly its essentially a 16-layer double sided Blu-ray?

 

[tengeta]

Blu-Ray prices still haven't dropped for crap, I don't even want to know how they think these could get off shelves.

 

[Per Hansson]

mattfrompa said:
I always enjoy seeing a visual comparison like this.

I would have liked to see floppies included with the visual comparsion too

 

[vangrat]

And yet, the average corporate user still only uses CD-Rs as they rarely, if ever, have more then 700MB of data to transfer. But who cares about them, it's all about the video games, imagine the graphics that could be stored. That is, if we still weren't using 32bit games running DX9....*sigh

 

[Guest]

Well good luck to them, but if they can't sell the disks at a reasonable enough price then forget it. I only use optical disks to backup my data, but frankly I hate it because accessing is painfully slow, burning data takes a long time and if the disc is scratched up or broken, you lose that data forever.

I'd be willing to buy the disk if it was relatively inexpensive the way DVD disks are now but otherwise I won't bother. Hard-drives are now cheap enough to use as backup storage. Plus accessing is reasonably quick and instantaneous once you hook it up to your pc.

I like discs because I can free up HD space and store my data elsewhere-but optical storage has always been a laggard and playing catch-up, with HDs and storage media has been way too expensive for the first couple of years...then when they get cheap enough they are obsolete.

Just look at Blu-ray trouncing DVDs and even 50GB disks are kind of paltry (and exorbitantly expensive) nowadays when you have a few TB's you want to backup. But the worst is the slow burning and data access speeds (also the coasters they create). So many annoying hang-ups for me with optical storage that I'm fed up of it. While I don't like dropping lots of money on bulky HD's, they suit my needs best for now.