Could the CD be about to make a comeback ?

[ursaminortaur]

Sabine Hossenfelder talking about new optical technology similar to CD technology which could provide petabits or petabytes of storage.

https://youtu.be/6a_yxsJuOMY?si=gdfIXVvoFOXNVxg1

[JohnB]

It might be a great storage solution, but I don't see its place in the consumer market which is going towards the cloud.

[ursaminortaur]

It might be a great storage solution, but I don't see its place in the consumer market which is going towards the cloud.

How long will it take to upload petabits or petabytes of data to the cloud ? And yes once you have got that level of storage capacity people will find ways of using it (even if a lot, such as higher definition sound and vision, is marketing hype rather than something people can really detect).

[JohnB]

People as scientists yes, not people as consumers. I spent my career accessing petabyte datasets, but I can't see people consuming media at higher resolution than the human eye can see.

[scotview]

Well, as a seventy something, here's the deal. We've recently subscribed to youtube premium which has given me and the misses add free viewing and access to an amazing audio library.

But.........ah but, the leveler is the investment in the receiver and floor standers. Digital audio is much better than what really good analogue audio components can deliver (in my humble opinion).

I'm very, very please with my what my Xperia youtube audio streaming gives, coupled to my Denon receiver and German floor standers deliver..........a whole new world.

[9873210]

It might be a great storage solution, but I don't see its place in the consumer market which is going towards the cloud.

There's a strong case for removable media. Cloud storage is always online and subject to online attacks, ransomware and the like. The WORM cd storing my old tax returns etc. in my sock draw are not subject to online attacks.*

Also cloud storage is not a product. Your information is the product. Nobody operates a cloud in good faith. The lack of a good removable storage media is a measure of the bad faith of the entire tech industry.


* They are subject to breaking down my door attack or burning down my house attacks, but those attacks do not scale, and can't be executed by Russian hackers in Russia. You will never read a headline that a million peoples personal information was disclosed by millions of hackers raiding sock drawers.

[scotview]

Unlimited, good quality music to the floorstanders, via your phone, who needs tv ?.........apart from the footy, FA cup in particular.

[JohnB]

How many people are frustrated that their £10 64GB sdcards just aren't big enough to get all their precious bodily fluids personal data on. People just don't generate that much content. My 20 years of photos is only 140Gb. And the 5 for a quid deals I can get buying dvd's in nearby charity shops suggests that people are chucking their collections because they don't feel they need to own the media. I doubt many have ripped them, they are just expect to rent them back on demand.

[servodude]

It might be a great storage solution, but I don't see its place in the consumer market which is going towards the cloud.

How long will it take to upload petabits or petabytes of data to the cloud ? And yes once you have got that level of storage capacity people will find ways of using it (even if a lot, such as higher definition sound and vision, is marketing hype rather than something people can really detect).

I'd argue that latency was as big an issue for the decline of optical storage as density was.

I would expect this could find a home in archiving - much like how some places still use tape drives.

[JohnB]

To give people a feel for a petabyte

The movie Avatar needed about 1 PB of storage to render those graphics.

It's estimated that the human brain can store around 2.5 PB of memory data.

Over 3.4 years of 24/7 Full HD video recording would be around 1 PB in size.

As of late 2018, the Wayback Machine was storing over 25 PB of data!

1 PB is equivalent to over 4,000 digital photos per day, over your entire life.

https://www.lifewire.com/terabytes-giga ... ey-4125169

[odysseus2000]

The primary advantage of the cloud is accessibility from all one’s devices which at the same moment is its weakness if hackers get a way in. CD are the reverse of this.

Then comes the issue of reliability. Cloud data is mirrored & if one centre is lost the information is stored elsewhere & can be recovered.

If one’s cd becomes corrupted the data is gone unless you have a second or more cd stored elsewhere which adds the chore of keeping them in sync etc.

Meanwhile paper has lasted a long time, stone even longer & it now looks like reading of the books (scrolls) in the library at Herculanum is possible even though they were covered by volcanic fallout & got very hot. The Dead Sea scrolls have a similar long history.

If the ideas of an AI copilot or AI Guardian angel become reality, it will have to store all the details of every individuals life & be able to access all the worlds knowledge to perform its function. At some point the store may become the individual in a real practical sense.

Whether a cd with its need to be accessed can ever compete with solid state memory that is more easily accessed is not clear to me.

Regards,

[servodude]

Whether a cd with its need to be accessed can ever compete with solid state memory that is more easily accessed is not clear to me.

Optical storage competes because, being very different, it has different strengths and weaknesses

The time taken to access (specifically to start any read) for SS storage is pretty much uniform
- you "tell" the chip which page you want and read from there, moving from any page to another is an identical action because it is only done at an electronic level.

For an optical disc you need to identify where the data is physically likely (I say likely because "tolerances") to be and position the pickup to read it
- this extra overhead is ameliorated if the data you want to read is contiguous beacuse the pickup then just follows the spiral of the disc to the end (it has traditionally been one big archimedes spiral starting from the centre of the disc and winding outwards)

Where SS wins absolutely hands down is in convenience of writing
The overheads of having to deal with "physical" storage on a discs are quickly compounded if you want to do anything other than a sequential write of the whole thing.
Even then you will normally have to "finalise" the media by writing an index at the start of the thing, and that can be a pretty terrible user experience depending on the use case - if you've ever tried to use a DVD HandyCam you might have experienced this

Where optical discs have traditionally won out is being a cheap and cheerful way of distributing relatively large amounts of data
I don't see a need yet for petabytes there?
It's just too far ahead in terms of redundancy (like HVD was back when it was touted) - perhaps once we're at Banks' "Culture" levels of backing up our ownselves

[9873210]

For backups you mostly care about write throughput. Within reason read latency does not matter, if you're in a position to notice you're thankful you had a backup.

One use for a large optical drive is as part of a journalling file system, with an SSD as the working copy and the journal on the optical disk. In normal use the journal is sequential writes, mirroring all the SSD writes with meta-data. You can roll back any file to any particular time if you are willing to wait. With a petabyte journal and a terabyte SSD you'd only need to swap the backup occasionally, or when you wanted to send a backup off site.