Hitachi Maxell 1TB SVOD optical disc cart

Good morning, kids. Are you ready for the optical disc format of the day? It's Hitachi Maxell's 1TB stacked volumetric optical disc (SVOD) array, comprised of rather thin DVD-size discswith DVD-size capacities: 9.4GB total storage each on two 92µm thick data layers. Yeah, we know, we promised a terabyte; well, watch and learn. These polycarbonate discs may be too thin to be manufactured from typical plastics, but they can be stacked in an optical array 100 tall, and 6.5 x 13.3 x 16.1cm (2.5 x 5.2 x 6.3-inches) in size. Even though Hitachi Maxell wants to make the terabyte carts relatively cheap at ¥40,000 (about $340 US) and claims there are consumer applications, don't toss that HD DVD player just yet. It's pretty easy to realize why optical arrays are really of only limited utility for the end-user; if these should ever be popularized, we'd imagine it would serve first as data archival medium for businesses before you'd ever outfit your rig with, like, the high def optical disc system, dude.

[Thanks, Andrew]

[Ryan @ Apr 20th 2006 9:48AM]

"relatively cheap at �40,000 (about $340 US)"...ummm...with that much i could get an xbox360

[Johnny @ Apr 20th 2006 10:06AM]

...ummm... but not with a 1Tb hard drive.

[Darksquirrel @ Apr 20th 2006 10:41AM]

yeah thats a good price for a 1tb hardrive. so this price dos'nt seem too bad.

[TeleCustom @ Apr 20th 2006 11:01AM]

it didn't seem like they were talking about a hard drive, more like a 1TB next-gen cd of some sort. a tape drive replacement, if you will.

[TIMMAH! @ Apr 20th 2006 1:20PM]

Yeah, well how do you crack open the case when one of these discs jam? I've had 0% success with every multi-disc changer that I've ever owned.

[Don Wilson @ Apr 20th 2006 1:25PM]

1TB for $340? What an amazing price and an awesome technology. Here comes low-budget competitors to google. :)

[Weezey @ Apr 20th 2006 1:32PM]

Looks like those punch cards from the pre-cool computer days.

[Trevor @ Apr 20th 2006 2:31PM]

Yeah...well long before this is really comes out (probably won't see the light of day)...you will be able to get 1TB HDD for less than the promised price of this impractical vaporware.

[WingedPower @ Apr 20th 2006 3:19PM]

$340US can buy you about 600GB of HD space(2 300GB 16MB cache hard drives at around $150 each) which provides high speed RW access.

What this amounts to is a tape changing robot that changes CDs. Or a CD changer. The difference being that the DVDs here are super thin. I would imagine that would be like getting 100 9.4GB hard drives together. Wonder what the failure rate on a device like that would be?

If the device presents the storage as 1 TB to the computer, then it is spreading the data across the disks. How much data would be lost when one disk is lost?

If the device presents the 100 DVDs as individual storage, then it's a waste of time for anything other than archival. And even then, it's questionable archival as you are continually subjecting the dvd disks to the heat, vibration, and airflow of the drive unit itself. It would also be fairly slow, with the possibility of drive contention for accessing data that was split between more than 2-3 discs.

I think by the time this device comes to market, you can do alot more with hard drives with $340 US.

[Gidge @ Apr 20th 2006 3:36PM]

Dammit, what happens when you lose one of the hundred discs?

[Addicted @ Apr 22nd 2006 1:38PM]

Well, I have always loved hitachi, they have always created great media formats, the micro drive was around way before the Ipod I recall and this is simply amazing, but what would you do with A TB, but I guess not that long ago, we though what would you do with an entire GB. I just wonder how much bandwith it has.

[kolcu @ Apr 22nd 2006 5:31PM]

1 tb; very much!

[archiver @ Sep 2nd 2006 6:49PM]

The way I read this is that it is $340 for the cartridge, but how much is the special drive that reads both sides of these floppy discs (this unit does not flip these double-sided discs). So how much is the drive??