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5 responses to “Terabyte DVDs – One little question…”

1. 2004/09/28

   163.1.22.53

   re: Terabyte DVDs – One little question…

   Well, if they were a stable medium then it might be useful for archival storage. However, that is a BIG if.

   I’m not sure I could find a use at home for a terabyte of disposable data (yet). Other than maybe for weekly back-ups. Remember, it won’t be long until a 1TB hard disk appears for desktops. They’re already pushing 400GB or greater.

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2. 2004/09/28

   bartb

   re: Terabyte DVDs – One little question…

   Seen the limited lifetime of CDR/CDRWs (vulnerable to scratches, protective layer peeling off,…) I think I’ll pass on this one for archiving…

   Now, the papertape thing might not be a bad idea — we have more experience how to safeguard paper then how to safeguard most current data carriers… (I just gave a 1962 document to a friend who could read it just fine… care to find someone who can easily read papertape, those C64 cassette tapes, floppies,…)

   Though maybe it would be better to print the symbols (circle, square, triangle, star, dubya) instead of punching them (as that weakens the carrier, and printers+scanners are quite common already).

   (And if you use the first few pages for printing a human readable decoding scheme then you can have decode it, or write something to decode it even in the absence of the decoding program)

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3. 2004/09/29

   Clive

   An AV geek perspective

   Say you fancied fitting a 2.5-hour-long film onto a disc. That would be a bitrate of 900Mbps.

   If you wanted eighty frames per second of 24-bit ten-megapixel video, that would be 19,200Mbps. That would entail compressing to 1/20 of original size, which sounds pretty plausible given the 1/10 compression on existing DVD-Video.

   So yes, such discs will be needed when people start downloading IMAX-quality pirated movies over their home obeseband Internet connection in 2020. It’s just as well the boffins have already started developing it!

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4. 2004/09/29

   Dave Walker

   re: An AV geek perspective

   You’d still need a whole bunch of rather higher access rate storage (memory, HD etc) to pull the video down and do the compression in, I suspect, before burning to one of these disks. Also, as with current encoding systems for DVD media, you’d need to decompress the data in some similar rapid, random access buffer before rendering it.

   Hmm… in terms of improving disk access times and giving some measure of physical media redundancy to guard against disks being damaged, maybe it’s time RAID technology came to the party…

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5. 2004/10/04

   Clive

   Current hard discs are about 250GB capacity and burst at 750Mbps to disc; assume they can sustain 250Mbps.

   In 2020 a hard disc will therefore (Moore’s Law) hold 400TB and sustain 400Gbps. That’s twenty times the required bandwidth, and enough for 250 hours of video.

   Besides, by then a terabyte of RAM will cost under £100, and support 18Pbps throughput.

   Where’s the issue?

   (One downside of all this is that we have to teach the general public one new magnitude prefix every fifteen years.)

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