<story><title>New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray</title><url>https://www.tomshardware.com/news/5d-storage-optical-data-cube</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gjm11</author><text>In case anyone is wondering what they mean by &amp;quot;5D&amp;quot;: they mean it&amp;#x27;s a 3D array of marks, each of which has both size and orientation. The 3D array is three 2D layers.&lt;p&gt;According to this definition, a DVD or Blu-Ray disc is &amp;quot;4D&amp;quot; because it can have multiple layers each of which stores 1-dimensional data (pit versus no pit). And a book is at least &amp;quot;7D&amp;quot; because it contains a 3D arrangement of marks, and marks can vary in (at least) what letter they are, how large, how bold, and how slanted. (It would be easy to add to that list.)&lt;p&gt;I would describe this thing as 2.5D storage: it&amp;#x27;s basically 2-dimensional but with multiple layers.&lt;p&gt;If it&amp;#x27;s genuinely 10000x denser than Blu-ray, great! If it&amp;#x27;s likely to last longer, also great! But there&amp;#x27;s no need for this &amp;quot;five-dimensional&amp;quot; bullshit.&lt;p&gt;(It looks to me as if what they have at the moment is not anything like 10000x denser than Blu-ray. I&amp;#x27;m not sure it&amp;#x27;s even 1x denser than Blu-ray at present.)</text></comment>
<story><title>New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray</title><url>https://www.tomshardware.com/news/5d-storage-optical-data-cube</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>MisterTea</author><text>The other day I was talking with a friend about the high cost and perceived fragility of tape drives for long term personal archival while bemoaning the loss of higher density optical storage technology. It&amp;#x27;s not easy to backup or shuffle around terabytes of personal video, audio and pictures. Hard drives aren&amp;#x27;t exactly the right media for safe deposit boxes.&lt;p&gt;In the 90&amp;#x27;s I had an Iomega Ditto 250MB drive that held 120MB per tape for $15-20 per tape and my hard drive was 540MB. This was when hard disc storage cost $1000&amp;#x2F;GB. The tape drive had a quarter the capacity of the hard disc and was cheap by comparison. It was practical. Later when CD burners came out they offered 650 then 700MB when hard drives were less than 10GB. Then they became too small and DVD came out but shortly was also passed up as 4.7GB wasn&amp;#x27;t much storage. Bluray was DoA with too little storage to be of real interest with a paltry 25-50GB.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d love to see CHEAP &amp;gt;=1TB optical discs with a write speed of 100MB&amp;#x2F;s allowing us to burn a disc in ~10 minutes. I&amp;#x27;d happily pay $1 a disc in bulk and upward of $1000 for a drive. I&amp;#x27;d also happily pay $10+ for an archival disc that has a guaranteed shelf life of 50+ years. Bring back the 100 disc juke boxes while we&amp;#x27;re at it ;-) Cheap storage for everyone!</text></comment>