There are a few
nerds, like myself, who are buzzing with the information that a new laser
technique for burning DVD’s has surfaced which gives us the ability to put 1,000 Terabytes of information/data on a disc that could previously only hold 4.7 gigabytes.
Most people shrug and wonder why we’re working with DVD’s in the first place. Wasn’t that a hot 90’s tech? How could
society possibly benefit from such massive storage on a disc notoriously known
for being easy to scratch or for losing everything? Or even worse; having fragmented
files or movies that would maddeningly stop and jump all over the place. Well
my friends, this has bigger implications than just a better burning process.
Everything we know about this technology is about to change and get
exponentially better!
1.
It’s 1,000 Terabytes on a DVD!
Even
for those that don’t know how big file sizes are or simply believe your computer is a magic box that spews out pretty
pictures, 1,000 terabytes is still a really
big number. That’s 50,000 HD movies. I’m trying to think of how I could
possibly find a Petabyte (one-thousand terabytes) of information to store on
one single disc. I work in the video world in an age of High Definition
shooting. We are accustomed to ridiculously
large numbers when talking about small bits of video where for every large file
size comes a large price tag - it’s the way technology works. A bit of tech gets halved in size and
doubled in price (anyone who uses P2 cards, can I get an AMEN?). This has
changed everything when it comes to digital storage. I can shoot all day long
on a RED or Alexa and never have to worry about filling the DVD. But Jeremy,
you say, DVD’s are really fragile and couldn’t even protect 4.7 gigs without
getting scratched to hell. With that
being said, how can this be a viable storage medium for so much
condensed information? Well I’ll tell you this...
2.
We’ll fix all the Problems
Do
you know why all those DVD’s were so easy to scratch in the first place? It’s
because the companies pumping them out didn’t see a reason to protect them any
more than was cost efficient. So for something storing so little information,
it wasn’t worth protecting. Now that I have the ability to store my entire
digital life 30 times over, it will be
worth it for these companies to likewise make the discs themselves
better. If you have any Blu-ray discs, do me a quick favor. Take one out, rub a
brillo pad all over it and then pop it back in the player. (***Note: Rubbing a
brillo pad on your Blu-ray disk is at your own risk***) That’s because when Blu-ray
technology was first introduced, the disks were made to be scratch resistant due
to the extremely large amount of information they are able to hold. A Blu-ray,
at its max and most expensive, can hold 128 GIGABYTES of information. The
company viewed this as a good
enough reason to make them scratch resistant. Don't you think it will logically follow, now that DVD’s can hold
more information than EVER before? Manufacturers will rework the disc and make
it completely scratch proof!
3.
Looking back and leaping forward
If
I showed you an 8-track, told you that I had a new way of making it hold every
song on your iPod and that it gave you a way of playing your music better, you’d probably tell me to get back on
my meds and wonder what museum found
an 8-track in. Well, this is the same thing. The fact is, with this amount of
information now able to be stored everything is going to grow 10 fold. Huge
storage servers which always run hot and are hugely expensive are going to
become cool DVD towers capable of processing and storing massive amounts of
information at a fraction of the cost (and heat). Processing power is where
this is really going to get exciting. In
science, computers allow us to run applications such as protein folding simulations
which are helping to cure disease; they also help perform complex computations
that help us further define the most fundamental laws of physics. Previously,
theses endeavors had been limited by the amount of processing power computers
can put toward the simulations. Now take that computer and expand its
processing to the tenth power. This has almost put us to the apex of what
computing power is capable of. But wait...
4. We've conquered light! (And that’s just the beginning)
This
new laser technology is really quite exciting. Without getting too technical, it actually consists of two lasers.
However, in order to explain
what they do, we first have to look at how we write DVD’s today - it all has to do with light.
When a DVD is burned, a single light laser burns a binary (ones and zeros) code
into the disc which is then translated by an optical eye into data (i.e., the
movies we enjoy, the information on our computers, etc.). The limiting factor
to this was the size of the laser, which is limited to the wavelength of light.
In 1863, a German physicist, Ernst Abbe, published a law that states the
diameter of a spot of light obtained by focusing a light beam through a lens
cannot be smaller than half its wavelength. Because of this, we couldn't make
the ones and zero nanosized and couldn't store more information than the light
would let us burn. And then these people threw out the rules of physics and
said "we're going to make it better." With this new two laser system, they've found a way to make light write nanosized digits that can be read by a
regular DVD eye. I’m not sure if I even fully understand what they're doing
here but I’m going to give it a try. Knowing that both beams cannot be smaller
than half their wavelength means they cannot produce smaller dots individually,
but they gave the beams two distinct functions. Much like the single beam
system does now, the first beam has a round shape and is used to make the
recording. This is called the writing beam. The second beam plays an
anti-recording function and is shaped like a donut, inhibiting the function of
the writing beam. The two beams are then overlapped, as the second beam cancel's
out the first in its tight donut ring while
the recording process is tightly confined to the center of the writing
beam. This technique produces an effective focal spot of nine nanometers or in
better terms, one ten-thousandth the diameter of a human hair.
And voila!
Cheap, effective, digital storage for all! Best of all, this dual laser breakthrough is the only one in which conventional optical and
laser elements are used, so DVD production facilities can start rolling these
off tomorrow!
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By: Jeremy Hatfield
Filmmaker/Tech
EFillF Productions, LLC
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