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Science

Penny-Sized CDs 68

Posted by Nik from the I-shall-call-him-mini-CD dept.
|deity| pointed us at Discover Magazine, which is running an article about nanoimprint lithography. Cutting to the chase, this gives you 400 gigabytes per square inch, or 180 gigabytes on a CD the size of a penny. The advantage of this manufacturing process over others, such as the optical memory featured recently, is that the moulds can be reused, allowing easy mass production.
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Penny-Sized CDs More

Penny-Sized CDs

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  • "Dodge this!"
    --
  • I thought that was a mini disc. Like the ones sony uses.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Yep!

    Of corse, I will have to buy the White Album again! Damm the RIAA!
  • They also had the things that *were* penny sized in Escape from LA. You know, the one that had the "666" shut down all electricity code on it...

    BTW, I did like EFLA, which a lot of people seemed to hate. Maybe it's because I haven't seen EFNY yet.

    Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled Slashdotting!

    /ramble

    The one and (thankfully) only,

    LafinJack
  • What really matters is the next removable storage format that will be accepted as the standard format.

    A 3.5 inch floppy still holds the same 1.44 Mb that it held in 1980, and the CD Rom is still the same capacity it was in 1990 (although the players have gotten faster).

  • Remember those CD singles that required a special slot on your CD-ROM tray? What ever happened to them? Normal size CD's just so cheap to make anyways that CD-Singles not worth it? Does anyone make CD-R that size? If they had, say, 250 MB of space, and cost only $.25, I think they would possibly be worth it.

  • Columbia House (Score:4)

    by cje ( 33931 ) on Monday November 15, 1999 @05:43AM (#1533275) Homepage
    Does this mean that I'll be able to buy eleven penny-sized CDs for only a penny?

    Hmmm ..
  • ...has been around for a while: have a look at http://www.norsam.com/hdrom.htm [norsam.com]: NORSAD has been building archival storage using charged particle beam writers and optical readers for some time; they get 165GB on a disk (for computer use), and also have a low-tech analog variant where they put analog images down on silicon wafer (so that, if you have to, you can read it with just a microscope; no special hardware required. Think of the latter as the ultimate (?) evolution of microfilm. The digital HD-ROM gets write rates of 20 Mb/sec, and read rates of 60 Mb/sec, with hopes of pushing these into the Gb/sec range. Using silicon-wafer disks, both the digital HD-ROM and the analog microfiche-variant should be _very_ permanent archival media.

    And real enough that they're getting some of their funding from IBM, fwiw.

  • Neat stuff!!! Finally we will have the storage capacities that the movies and such have promised for years now...

    I remember a hard drive manufacturer explaining at one time how there was literally no limit to the amount of data stored on magnetic platters, until you reached the point where you moved individual electrons around on the disc. Looks like maybe we won't need to push that technology quite that far though... look what's here!
  • Sounds to be a potentially impressive technology. I have to wonder how reliable the players will be. It sounds as though it will have to be magnitudes more precise than a CD player as far as positioning, and seems that it will be easier to jar and possibly damage. How does the scale of this compare to CD and hard disk technology as far as the head movement/distance from media/etc?

    One other thing comes to mind: this is yet another of a series of "better than CD" storage devices I've read about, and I suspect it will not show up in my home any quicker than the Ruby/crystal storage devices that I remember there being so much excitment about a couple years ago. What's the ratio of exciting new storage device ideas to new storage devices?
  • Yeah, this technique sounds neat... Mass storage, unlimited possibilities!

    But what about dust and scratches from which we all suffer with the current CDs?

    Sounds like this technique is only suitable for harddisks...
  • ... do people often insist upon ending articles on potential future technology with stock quotes like
    "And we would not need to type into it--we would just need to speak to the computer to input all the information."
    Mark.
    --
    "I am not a nut-bag." -- Millroy the Magician
  • I wonder how many DVD's you would fit on these micro-mini-ultra-compact discs? The days of having every episode of every TV program ever made on a piece of silicon are close...

    That is if they agree to some format with "copy protection"...


  • Apparently an old story (Score:3)

    by copito ( 1846 ) on Monday November 15, 1999 @12:29AM (#1533285)
    The byline for the story said "Posted 7/27/98" so this is apparently fairly old news. It was the subject of a Slashdot article in July http://slashdot.org/articles/99/07/30/1612205.shtm l [slashdot.org]. At any rate the commercial realization of this work will be some time off since it requires dramatic retooling and the development of a viable atomic force microscope on a chip. The article says 5-10 years, which I interpret as technospeak for not in the forseeable future.

    What is more interesting to me is not how well this process will enable the encoding of a ROM since static data has limited applications which will be increasingly displaced by wide band network connections, but whether the atomic force microscope on a chip being developed by IBM will enable the manipulation of a miniature hard disk or particularily dense large hard disk.
    --
  • Either that, or 30+ hours of uncompressed 6-channel 40-kHz 24-bit-deep music. Audiophiles unite!

    Or more than 100 uncompressed 16-bit-per-color 16K x 16K pictures. Now, make that recordable and fast so I can put it in a digital camera...
    --

  • Maybe. Imagine it... your portable mp3 player now holds not one hour, not 80 hours, but something like 216 DAYS worth of music! 5200 hours of it! And that's only if you used the aformentioned "penny" sized disc. Make that a 3 inch platter and god only knows what will happen.

    Now, the reason this will not happen is because you cannot make one of these little wonders in a 5.25" bay sized WickedBurner(tm) with today's technology. It's based on a mold, like mass produced CDs are.
  • This is rather old. As the article says at the bottom:

    Posted 7/27/98

    In fact there was a nearly identical story on slashdot story here [slashdot.org] about the same researcher... just a differnt publication.

    dox
  • "But what about dust and scratches from which we all suffer with the current CDs? "

    CD's currently have error protection such that if 600 bits in a row are miss-read the corrected stream is still correct. (If I recall correctly.) This is why radial scratches on a CD do not harm the data. (They tell you to clean them by rubbing from the hub outwards with a soft cloth.) However, scratches going the other way destroy data.

    By using higher order codes you can make the biggest corrected miss-read sequences longer. However, this drops the effective storage density. You could still have an external disc based on this technology - but most of the data on the disc will have to be there to remove the errors produced by dust on the surface...

    Floppy discs originally had the same problem - but when they are put into self-cleaning jackets it went away.

    These new discs will probably have to be protected inside some form of cartridge if they will be removable.
  • That's 128 days (approx.) of non stop listening to MP3's...

  • Wow (Score:1)

    by Darchmare ( 5387 )
    Good thing too, just in time for Windows 2001. :>

    - Jeff A. Campbell
    - VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com [velocinews.com])
  • sorry for the redundancy... his post wasn't up when i started writing... his is far better anyways:) Moderate me at will.


    dox
  • With proper error correction codes, any amount of expected dust and scratches can be accounted for. In fact, with the CD audio standard, one should be able to make a perfect reconstruction of the data on the CD even if it has a 1 mm diameter hole in it. The fact that your player skips is more a problem of the playback hardware not taking full advantage of the redundant information than of the CD itself.

    That being said, I would imagine that these "CD's" would be hermetically sealed and sold with the reading hardware. It would be more like a read only hard drive than a CD. Dust wouldn't cause obstruction, but catastrophic abrasion in an unsealed system because the contacts are so close. A surface coating can't be used since the atomic force microscope needs almost direct contact with the surface, like a head on a hard drive, not like the laser and optics on a CD or DVD.


    --

  • Re:Wow (Score:2)

    by copito ( 1846 )
    Make that Windows 2010. This technology is 5-10 years down the road. That's 15-30 Internet Years (tm).
    --
  • I suspect that some other sort of application will come of this technology. Even if it is ten years before they are available for the market, CD's and DVD's will not be rendered obsolite overnight. People still play vinyl records and some radio stations still use 8 tracks for commercials, right? It does sound nice in theory to have that much storage capacity. Imagine the talking into a wrist computer like Dick Tracy and his two-way radio. Ah well, it's all vapourware until I actually get to hold one. Enough of this wishful thinking, I am going outside to daydream. It's sunny and warm.

  • Ahh! (Score:4)

    by pen ( 7191 ) on Monday November 15, 1999 @12:48AM (#1533296)
    Nobody move! I dropped my backup on the floor!

    --

  • No, 2001 would be the correct date, IF the date on that article is correct (1997?). For the five year projection, that is.

    -Fran
    ==============================
    Fran Frisina (franf@hhs.net)
    Yes, you can make money on the web!
    http://www.zero-productions.com/money
  • Really Compact Disc
  • I can't believe I actually measured this.. but I had a ruler and a penny.. :)

    The penny is approximately 3/4 of an inch in diameter.. so r=.375, a=pi*r^2, a=3.14*(0.375)^2

    a=0.44

    x/400 = 0.44
    x = 400*0.44
    x = 176

    approximately 176/400s of an inch.

    hehe.. ^_^

    -Paul
  • until you get that teeny little scratch on the plastic...
  • I know it's still alot, but it's GigaBITS, as opposed to Gigabytes as posted in the headline :P

    Saving the world from insignificant typos,
    --hakie~!
  • When CDs first came out, the 8cm singles were supposed to be a big hit, seeing as they required less plastic, time to burn off, etc. They never took off though for some reason.
    They do come out with them still however (I work at a record store..), they just came out with a really awful RunDMC one in fact...
  • Top 10 ways to lose a penny size CD

    top 10 going by what I can think of right now anyway:

    _"Ahh!! my contact is bent!!!"
    _"oh no! I just bought a can of (insert softdrink name here) with my copy of Linux!"
    _(manual)"Warning: always hold the CD by the edges" *crack* "damn! too thin.. I broke it in half"
    _(someone in desperate need of ca$h)"It really is an 1856 penny!!"
    _"free pennies for halloween!! hey... where'd my porno go?" "mommy! what're these people doing?"
    _(from pen) "Nobody move! I dropped my backup on the floor!"
    _(from cje) (Columbia House) "Does this mean that I'll be able to buy eleven penny-sized CDs for only a penny?"
    _"Why're you tearing apart the couch?" "I lost my business presentation :-\"
    _Toss it in a jar thah collects change for blind people
    _send it through the washer and dryer... clean, and maybe a little melted..

    *phew* enjoy :-)
  • Obviously the amount of error correction is inversely related to data density and latency. I think you are correct that a CD as we know it would be out of the question, for reasons of dust as well as surface flatness.
    --
  • The drive is basically an atomic-force microscope. I once used a device like this when I was on the solid state physics course. It was not the latest and greatest model, but it was huge. I mean physically, it weighted a few hundred kilogramms. So I wouldn't count on a watch sized model in a near future...

    Szo
  • The original article said 400 Gigabits/sq in, and 180 Gigabits on a penny-sized disk, not Bytes as reported in the /. article. Still pretty remarkable, especially for what could eventually be a cheap mass-production technology.

    Note, however, that the state of the art in hrd disks is now up to c 50 Gigabits/sq in (what a nasty unit that is) so the advance is not that huge.

    I have heard of rewritable technologies along these lines. A short burst of electrical current from the AFM tip is used to melt a but, which then cools flat. The same AFM tips are used to scratch new pits.

    An interesting side question -- what is the smallest reasonable size for a removable data medium assuming that you have plenty of capacity for your purposes: credit-card sized? large coin sized (UK 50p or £1, US quarter)? Small coin sized (US dime, UK 5p or even Netherlands dime)?

    Steve
  • Wow! Great news. Say, in three years the technology is there. What is left will be to agree upon a standard, of course. SONY will make their own, heavily promoted device ready in a year, but no one will buy it. Two years - the first project of HDCD (High Density CD) will arrive, and it will take no more then a couple of years to totally reject it. When it finally arrives, and companies start to sell hardware, it will turn out that due to some legal infringements it can only hold 1.2 GB, and the standard is licensed, so no GPLed Linux driver can be made. The two Norwegian hackers who reverse engineered the 8-bit encryption software protecting the HD-CD will dissappear in mysterious circumstances. However, the hacked code will spread, which will cause the companies to abandon the current standard, so the whole circuss can start all over again.

    Maybe I'm in a pesimistic mood today.

    Regards,

    January

  • Re:Wow (Score:2)

    by copito ( 1846 )
    1998 + (5 to 10) + (MS marketing version addition) = 2010 at least. Actually, I suspect that OS version numbers will very soon go the way of chip version numbers. We'll have Windows Easium or Microsoft Fenestrium I, II, and III. Heck, we already have RedHat 6.1 (Cartman).
    --
  • The potential is there, but I wouldn't expect to be buying MGM's film library on disk anytime soon. While the media costs will be much less, the intellectual property is still there and they'll still want to charge you for it. This is the same reason you don't see many albums released that are longer than 70 minutes even though the marginal cost of distributing an extra CD is almost negligible. You may soon have access to all the world's movies, but you are either going to have to pay per view (a la Divx) or pay per view for video on demand through a high speed network connection. No other pricing scheme makes much practical sense.
    --

  • 12" Version (Score:4)

    by Ratface ( 21117 ) on Monday November 15, 1999 @01:54AM (#1533313) Homepage Journal
    ... Size of a dime eh? Why can't they make these babies the size of a 12" vinyl album and give us some REAL storage power :-)

  • Johnson, your carelessness caused us to lose a year's worth of critical data!

    But sir, I just got a little scratch on our backup disk! We can recover it with a CD scratch remover!
  • hmmm.... am I the only one who doubts the size of a penny is 180/400s of a square inch ? What does this strange rounding mean in terms of quality of the announcement ? hmmm..... biiig pennies ;-)
  • If I remember correctly (an I believe I do), I read a story almost exactly the same as this one. I suppose it could be a different story, but the numbers are exactly the same (400 per square inch, 180 per penny-sized disk), so I doubt they are different stories. The only difference in the write-ups, is that this one says gigaBYTEs instead of BITS, which makes a lot of difference. The same thing happened with the other story, and it was fixed promptly after people pointed this out. If I'm not mistaken, and it is bits, then that gives you 50 gb per square inch, and 22.5 per penny-sized disk (assuming an 8 bit byte, which I think is fair). Still nothing to sneeze at, but not quite as spectacular as 400 and 180 respectively. If I am wrong and it is gigabytes, then wow.

  • I guess we can throw away all the other unlimited storage devices from past years now. My 1997 40TB credit card lookalike from Opticom is a little dated (not to mention slow).

    </irony>

    Until this is in the stores, I'll consider this as yet another fraud.

  • I don't know where you go to school, but here at ASU I sat in on a lecture by some microscope designer/physicist. He brought in an Atomic Force microscope and explained how it worked.

    It was the size of a soda can. Basically, the whole thing is a little needle on a little spring with a little sensor. That's it. Now, you might have to hook it up to a big computer to crunch through incoming data, but that actual microscope is very small.

  • what is the smallest reasonable size for a removable data medium assuming that you have plenty of capacity for your purposes
    I rather like the SmartMedia profile. I've got a little flat, hard, pouch-thing that holds six, and the cards themselves are easy enough to handle. I don't know that anything much smaller would be practical. Maybe about 2-thirds the width would be okay. Perhaps a guide is twice the area of a thumb-print...?
  • well, its great and everything, but think of the cost! i mean new CDs nowadays already cost like 18 bucks in most places, but this is gonna be insane when/if these things ever hit the market. and, think about the confusion it would make. wouldnt you think that the wrist-watch mini-Cd player thing would cost mass-money? what if you accidently put a REAL penny in there? it's screw that thing to hell and back. heh heh heh...this new crap is gonna be one hell of a trip
  • Yes, you can get CD-R's that size. I've seen them here in Australia at comp. fairs. They hold ~175 MB. More expensive though... must be novelty items.
  • Wouldn't audiophiles be better served by taking very high quality 90+Khz, 32b, etc, and compressing it to get the same ammount of music on the device?

    I mean, you lose a little bit of the data with lossy compression, but a 128kbps MP3 is far better than a 128kbps WAV, so wouldn't a 4mbps MP3 be better than a 4mbps WAV?

    Assuming you had equipment that would let you record at this fidelity...
  • Actually, that was funny.
  • There's at least one company that uses them to make business cards, silkscreened with the logo or text of your choice.

    They're about the same diameter (3") as most business cards, but, of course, you can put a lot more info on them, such as your resume, demos of your company's software, etc. Pretty cool, IMHO.

  • Why Hard Drives? Couldn't you just make a cartridge it would come in, maybe bigger, but protect it when not being used?

    Or, if you would have to make them enclosed, they could be basically a USB (firewire, whatever) plug, barely any drive. Kinda like a iKey on Meth, or something...

    Hey... that's a thought. Imagine the token-based authentication with one of these things.

    One last thought.
    The \X/4r3z kids are going to have a field day...

  • OKay, I already knew about error correction of cds and stuff... Never had any major probs with that...

    But as you state that you could drill a hole of 1 mm in a cd, then on this new format that would be at least 0.001 mm hole to lose about the same amount of data. IMHO that would resemble a VERY small scratch or a VERY small piece of dust.

    So the CD option is definetly out of the question since I don't think we all could live in a sterile world without dust...

  • Its a contradiction, really. The industry will *never* release anything like all episodes of a series on one disk/cube/whatever, simply because they can sell it easier and for more money in smaller slices.

    Of course, every copy protection can be defeated, and then you can make your compilations yourself.

  • I read this in a magazine somewhere... But this thing was way cooler than putting mass storage on a way overpriced medium...

    The article showed a backup device burning data 10 layers deep in a tesa-taperoll storing about 100 GB.

    Now, that's nifty! Storing 100 GB on a piece of plastic that costs about $0.25!

  • OK so you want to read a disk with an AFM, I have a question how this thing is going to resist vibrations ??

    Now, the AFM and the apparatus which hold the thing you want to probe are mounted on a special kind of basement, used to dampen vibrations if I am not mistaking...
    The question is how do you do this kind of thing in your computer ?? To have a good access time you have to rotate the disk quite fast, how do you prevent pin crash ? The pin has to be very close to the disk, much closer than a normal HDD head !

    Anyone knows how it would be possible ?

  • MIB (Score:2)

    by EngrBohn ( 5364 )
    Wasn't this in Men in Black, except about the size of a quarter, with Kay remarking "This is going to replace the CD"?
    Christopher A. Bohn
  • ... tried spinning any of your LPs at 10,000 rpm lately? there are a number of reasons storage platters have been getting smaller. it's difficult to find things that will attain that kind of angular momentum without warping or just plain falling apart.
  • The parallel may not be stricly accurate, but before the advent of solid state lasers, they were chunky bastards indeed. Just last night I was watching a bunch of programmes about all that electron stuff, and I was surprised by how recently laser technology became ubiquitous. If this CD proves to be better than, say, holographic storage, then a lot of people will work on shrinkng the microscope.
    However, given the choice between pennies and Bablyon 5 data crystals, I'd rather use the crystals. They're cooler.

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