Iomega Patents 800 Gig DVD That's 30X Faster Than Current DVDs

[Tuckerfan]

Bonus features on DVDs now to include electron microscope photographs of stars soiled undies.

The tantalising prospect of DVDs capable of holding almost a terabyte of data - or several hundred movies - has been presented in a patent issued to US storage company Iomega.

The US patent describes a disc that could store 40 to 100 times more information that a conventional DVD, using more nanometre-scale sloped ridges to diffract light. US patent number 6879556 - entitled “Method and Apparatus for Optical Data Storage” - was issued to Iomega on April 12 2005.

Conventional DVDs store information in the form of ridges and depressions, each several hundred nanometres wide. These correspond to bits of binary data - “1”s or “0”s. The data is read from a disc by bouncing laser light off its surface and measuring the angle at which it reflects.

The next generation of DVDs can hold almost 10 times as much data, using light with a shorter wavelength to read even smaller surface features. Two standards that use this principle are currently vying for market adoption - HD-DVD, created by Toshiba, NEC and Sanyo, and Blu-Ray Disc, from Sony.
Combining angles

However, Iomega’s proposed technology, dubbed Articulated Optical Digital Versatile Disc (AO-DVD), could boost disc capacity further still. Sub-wavelength surface bumps on an AO-DVD would slope at slightly different angles - this could be used to encode up to 100 times more information.

[kanicbird]

Too bad Iomega came up with this, they seem to favor the quick buck (zip drive), instead of making a long lasting standard.

[ReuvenB]

Somehow, I don’t think this will pan out. Since it relies on the angle of the light reflected off the disk, any sort of scratches would seriously hurt your data, even ones not visible to the naked eye. Any sort of smudge would also alter the path of the light, resulting in corrupted files and such. It sounds too delicate to ever be usable. If they can correct for this stuff, then maybe it’ll catch on. Otherwise, I don’t want to have to deal with messed up files every time I want to change discs.

[Fritz]

Meh…I can’t get interested in any technology that hasn’t been demonstrated to work yet.

Articles like these remind me of the ones in the '50s: “Scientists say that every family in the US will have a Flying Car by 1990”, or even today’s “How Exoskeletons Will Work” or “How Antimatter Spacecraft Will Work” at How Stuff Works.

Will there be much higher density formats after HD or Blu-Ray? Absolutely. Will it be the one described in Iomega’s patent? Don’t hold your breath until you see one working.

[bouv]

@XWalrus2

Somehow, I don’t think this will pan out. Since it relies on the angle of the light reflected off the disk, any sort of scratches would seriously hurt your data, even ones not visible to the naked eye. Any sort of smudge would also alter the path of the light, resulting in corrupted files and such. It sounds too delicate to ever be usable. If they can correct for this stuff, then maybe it’ll catch on. Otherwise, I don’t want to have to deal with messed up files every time I want to change discs.

Simple, albeit not a fun solution: keep it in a protective case. Sure, it would be the sixe of a DVD in a thin-style CD jewel case, but it solves that problem, I would think.

[ParentalAdvisory]

@kanicbird

Too bad Iomega came up with this, they seem to favor the quick buck (zip drive), instead of making a long lasting standard.

I still use the original 100mb zip discs and drives. Not one failure yet. And I still use the original disks around the time they were first released. YMMV.

[Mr.Blue_Sky]

@bouv

Simple, albeit not a fun solution: keep it in a protective case. Sure, it would be the sixe of a DVD in a thin-style CD jewel case, but it solves that problem, I would think.

They could also use the DVD-RAM style catridges. That way you never touch the disc.

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