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Now we're talkin' storage!

The technique employs nanometre-scale particles of gold as a recording medium.

Researchers at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia have exploited the particular properties of these gold "nano-rods" by manipulating the light pointed at them.

The team members described what they did as adding three "dimensions" to the two spatial dimensions that DVD and CD discs already have.

They say they were able to introduce a spectral - or colour - dimension and a polarisation dimension, as well as recording information in 10 layers of the nano-rod films, adding a third spatial dimension.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8060082.stm

sounds expensive. but cool

bye bye blue ray!

I bet you could buy 100 blue rays for the price of one of these blank discs. Nice to know that they're still working on better methods though.

Says the physical cost of the discs is around 5 cents. Though at this time, the equipment needed to record is too large. The one part this article lacked is transfer speed. If this thing transfers data just as fast as a DVD does, or slower, that much data is going to take a long time to transfer. Lets hope there isn't a scratch

I think at this point, making the media less susceptible to scratches is where the next path needs to be taken. Also, a better method of transfer designed to have the read speed of a disc restricted only by the system bus itself. Perhaps using a refractive laser design.

Honestly, I believe higher quality optical media isn't going to survive anyhow. Everything is really moving to either online or just plain hard drives. Heck, I've copied all of my DVDs to a single hard drive already. Why should I have to stand up to get a DVD when I can just click on it.

Well the real value of this is for business data backups. DVD's (even dual layer) are already to small for some of my client's backups, tape is archaic, and any kind of hard drive (NAS or whatever) does not answer the issue of keeping a backup copy off-site.

It is also a lot to lose if there is some minor glitch with the media or the software. Its life is important, more especially in the backup environments.

Well redundancy is everything. I never allow my clients to rely on a single point backup.

I also personally don't believe in incremental backups for small businesses. Every backup media should contain the WHOLE backup, and something that contains the whole backup should be taken off-site at least on a weekly basis.

yeah, this would be a good storage option for small businesses. tape is still the way to go for larger needs though. we use LTO4 Ultrium drives at work...an LTO4 tape holds 800GB uncompressed...1600GB max (so, say 1000-1200GB realistic after compression). these are in a library of 30...with multiple tape drives running concurrently so you can back up multiple servers at a time.

for home use, i'm on the backup to an external HD and critical goes to online storage routine.