What a useless headline. God forbid they just give the actual capacity rather than some abstract, bullshit, flexible measure that means nothing to anyone.
I especially like it when they use airplanes to illustrate weight. “… the same as 15 Boeing 747 jumbo jets”. Airplanes are made to be as light as possible, they go to extreme lengths to save as much weight as they can. As such, a 747 is much lighter than most objects of similar size. People have no intuition of the weight of such large objects to begin with, but then they add to it by using something that is much lighter than you’d expect.
200TB
Woah, I can’t wait to never afford that!
So like, 5-6 uncompressed 4k movies
It’s larger than 6 olympic swimming pools and fits in my pants.
They have to make it as accessible a headline as possible, especially when most don’t read past the headline anyway these days. The average person probably doesn’t have much of an idea as to what 125TB looks like in real world use.
I’d argue that most people would have a better idea of what 125TB looks like than knowing the size of a 4k movie file, let alone 14,000 of them. They can at least compare 125TB to their 500GB/1TB phone/computer storage.
Not to mention there’s nearly 10x difference in bitrate between 4K streaming video and actual 4K HDR off a bluray. The only people who know how big a 4K video is these days are nerds and pirates, because it’s not like Netflix tells you.
But bigger number mean more better
It does 89 285 714.3 floppy discs
Most people aren’t tech savvy, and industry acronyms chase them away.
On the other hand, a movie is something everyone can understand.
You can understand it but you can’t interpret the value. How many movies is a CD? Or a DVD? Or a 1TB SSD? Or even Avatar in 3D (presumably not 1)? How many movies have even been released in total/last year?
The number awes non-tech savvy folk but it doesn’t really inform them of anything. You could just as well write “more movies than you will ever need”.
And besides that, I personally think that news should try to educate folk. I’m completely fine with a comparison in the article. But why in the headline?
If it wasn’t an effective marketing tactic Apple wouldn’t have used it as a metric on their tablets and ipods.
Not really. A 4K movie means nothing to 99% of people. Is it 4GB? 40? 400? How many can my phone hold? Or my computer?
This only makes things more understandable if you use a point of reference that everyone you’re talking to is familiar with. The fact that they had to then explain how big a 4K movie is in the article clearly shows that even they know that this doesn’t help people. It’s just a big flashy number.
Just for context, I’m a writer, I understand the point of using these abstract measures to give a frame of reference. But in this case, just giving the capacity in GB/TB would have been easier to understand. It just wouldn’t have been as sensational of a headline.
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1.4Pb (~175TB), the quoted number of movies is based on a 14GB movie which is very small (most BluRay disks hold somewhere between 25 and 50GB) and no discussion about write speed, so basically this is cool research that someone has done and is no closer to a commercial product that any of the dozens of other articles that have come out on this topic in the last 15 years
I rip enough physical media to tell you that post-compression 14GB is not far from average for a 4K movie. I guarantee that Netflix isn’t storing those any bigger than that. Hard drives don’t grow on trees, you know?
It’s still good to know where the top end of optical storage is, even at an academic level, even if these end up not being widely used or being used for specific applications at smaller capacities. We’ll see where or if they resurface next, but I’m pretty sure we’re not gonna get femtosecond lasers built into our laptops anytime soon.
Streaming services definitely don’t give you full quality files. They’re compressed to save bandwidth. Netflix only uses about 7GB per hour in 4k. That’s about the exact size of the higher quality 1080p movies I download.
It’s usually less than 7gb per hour, it ranges from 2 to 7GB, it adjusts butrate on the fly. Netflix quality sucks.
Edit: realized I typed butrate instead of bitrate, it fits, so I’m leaving it.
Yeah it’s fine, especially with recent codecs like AV1 and you’d expect future codecs to improve further.
These aren’t really trying to target a commercial product, at least not anyway. For now these are of interest to enterprises.
I could see them being archival backups for TV broadcast, quite a few are still using tapes for long term archive.
And I believe 4k blurays are on average around 100 gb? So that will be about 1800-2000 movies. Still a lot, but not the 14.000 they say.
The rips I pirate aren’t re-encoded and are usually in the range of 50-75GB, depending on the length of the film.
Hmm, interesting. I guess on actual Blurays they would have space for extras, menus, sometimes different dubs etc, so that makes sense!
From the article:
What’s almost more remarkable is that the scientists say a single new blank disc can be manufactured using conventional DVD mass production techniques within six minutes.
If this was a response to write speeds they meant the speed at which data can be written to the disc, not the time ot takes to build the disc. Read/Write speeds are a standard measure used to tell whether something would be efficient to use. For example one could say storing an OS on a DVD and booting would be dumb because it would run extremely slow, where as the read speed for playing music or a movie off it wouldn’t be an issue as it doesn’t need higher performance for such.
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That’s nearly 4 Call of Duty games
Maybe without the useless campaign mode.
How much is that in football stadiums?
I wonder what the longevity of one of these discs is? The article says they can be manufactured in regular DVD production facilities, so it probably depends on the material used (which I think can range).
If they could combine something close to this data capacity level with the M-DISC standard (which supposedly last for about 1,000 years once you take into account the organic ingredients) that would be fantastic.
There’s no point making it last 1000 years since there won’t be any working drives by then. You usually need to move data to a newer format every 15-30 years. Look how hard it is to recover data from 8" floppy disks or old tape formats now.
Tape storage 100% is still a thing and is valued for a lot of truly critical data.
Also, WAY too much critical infrastructure still depends on floppy drives because… there is not a good reason to upgrade the hardware when they need data on the order of hundreds of kilobytes every couple of months.
Storage with purpose will be preserved. Maybe not in a computer sold in best buy but very much in “computing” as a whole.
I can’t think of any situation where THIS disc is useful. But optical drives themselves are 100% going to remain a thing because they provide write once data storage (and OS installation) which is incredibly useful in secure environments.
Tape is still very popular. There has been a new LTO version released every few years. The recent ones are only backwards compatible with the previous version and the older ones supported 2 previous generations. If you need to read 20 year old data from an LTO tape, you will have to find an old drive that’s compatible with that version.
There is a surprising amount of equipment still reliant on 3.5" floppy disks. Unfortunately it’s getting much harder to find new old stock disks. Many of the older disks are degrading now. I’ve had some where a lot of the magnetic material gets worn off after a single read. At least there are floppy drive emulators now that can be used to prolong the life of older equipment as long as it doesn’t use a weird format or interface.
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1.6 Petabits or 200TB
The article says “What is that in terms humans understand,” then does some math, and produces the figure of 14000 4k movies.
I’m a human and 200TB makes a lot more sense to me than 14000 4k movies. That isn’t a standard unit. 14000 4k movies means nothing. You can have a 4k movie that’s 200GB (that’d be 2.8PB) or 2GB (that’d be 28TB). What’s the bit rate? In the article they mentioned that they just assumed that a 4k 2 hour long movie is 14GB.
What I’m way more concerned about is how expensive the disks and readers/writers are. According to the article, the disks are manufactured similarly to the CD, but what about the readers/writers? Could we see these as competitors to HDDs? 200TB is friggin insane, at a good price you’d be spending 2 grand on that much HDD storage.
In the article they mentioned that they just assumed that a 4k 2 hour long movie is 14GB.
That’s more what I would expect out of a 1080p movie on a disc. If I have 200TB to play with, I’m not going to care much about compressing the video any more than what the disc it originally came off of was at since artifacts could be introduced. Sure, I probably wouldn’t notice most artifacts, but with that much storage even the massive 100GB rips would be a drop in the bucket so why risk it?
Could we see these as competitors to HDDs? 200TB is friggin insane, at a good price you’d be spending 2 grand on that much HDD storage.
I doubt it would compete with HDD for home use. Loading times off of optical discs are atrocious. Just archiving data, sure, but my HDDs actually still have games on them that I run. Old games, sure, but not something where more storage would be worth the reduced read/write speeds. Maybe for a home video server, but that’s about it, and there’s going to be some significant loading compared to current servers with HDDs.
Yeah, for sure, I look for my larger files when I’m legally obtaining my movies.
I’d definitely have a place for them in my NAS, if they were much cheaper than HDDs. It’d be like an SSD cache to go with your HDDs, but a third slower tier for rarely accessed files.
I can’t comprehend it. Please elaborate it in numbers of an average-sized white truffle.
Mildly infuriating photo of the disc being inserted upside down.
Double sided disks look like this
Which this probably is if they want to pack as much data as possible in one unit.
You seem like you’ve handled quite a few double-sided disks in your day.
Call me when you can buy a spindle with 100 for $50
New optical-disks able to hold a shit ton more storage sounds cool, until you realize you probably ain’t gonna be seeing widespread adoption of it among the general public due to cloud storage and things like that, so if it ever does become publicly available it’ll cost way too much.
Cloud storage gets very expensive when you need to backup tens or hundreds of terabytes. You need very fast internet and you still need a local backup too. A second NAS and a tape drive will probably be cheaper than this new optical drive though.
That’s what the article said.
Yeah, that’s going to be the thing. LTO tapes/drives would be dirt cheap if the demand was anywhere near where DVDs were at their peak
And also probably need to use a new reader to play the disc. It’s probably gonna be expensive.
I hope they come in vacuum cases, or the scratch is gonna hurt
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The DVD.
It finally hit the corner straight on.
These would be great for backups if they’re cheap enough.
How great would it be to include a Case Logic binder in a safety deposit box.
It would also be cool to see a comeback of those old optical disc overlay file systems that let you treat the file system on read-only media as if it was mutable.
It would certainly be a fun challenge to design a modern file system on top of append only media.
With that said, I’m very concerned about cost. It’s hard to imagine this seeing mass adoption.
I hope they actually end up calling it the Very Big Disc ™
But how many hamster tails is that because I maybe have like 20. With maybe a few more here and there.
