What a useless headline. God forbid they just give the actual capacity rather than some abstract, bullshit, flexible measure that means nothing to anyone.
It also stands out a lot more than using meters. And gets people to talk about the ridiculous unit of measurement. In short, it drives engagement, which is the point of the title these days.
Our ongoing war with Canadian geese are actually the reason why we didn't convert to metric. The geese have a harder time converting their flight paths if we list things in imperial.
It would seem attractive for me 20 years ago - as in funny and colorful. A little bit like Neal Stephenson's writing in Cryptonomicon.
The problem is that various kinds of storage are something completely mundane today, and that particular thing is not going to reach us anytime soon, and BR is not too common as well.
And the initial association with optical discs for me is about scratches. Maybe if those were distributed in protective cases like with floppies, they'd live longer.
They have to make it as accessible a headline as possible, especially when most don't read past the headline anyway these days. The average person probably doesn't have much of an idea as to what 125TB looks like in real world use.
I'd argue that most people would have a better idea of what 125TB looks like than knowing the size of a 4k movie file, let alone 14,000 of them. They can at least compare 125TB to their 500GB/1TB phone/computer storage.
Not to mention there's nearly 10x difference in bitrate between 4K streaming video and actual 4K HDR off a bluray. The only people who know how big a 4K video is these days are nerds and pirates, because it's not like Netflix tells you.
I especially like it when they use airplanes to illustrate weight. “… the same as 15 Boeing 747 jumbo jets”. Airplanes are made to be as light as possible, they go to extreme lengths to save as much weight as they can. As such, a 747 is much lighter than most objects of similar size. People have no intuition of the weight of such large objects to begin with, but then they add to it by using something that is much lighter than you’d expect.
You can understand it but you can't interpret the value. How many movies is a CD? Or a DVD? Or a 1TB SSD? Or even Avatar in 3D (presumably not 1)? How many movies have even been released in total/last year?
The number awes non-tech savvy folk but it doesn't really inform them of anything. You could just as well write "more movies than you will ever need".
And besides that, I personally think that news should try to educate folk. I'm completely fine with a comparison in the article. But why in the headline?
Not really. A 4K movie means nothing to 99% of people. Is it 4GB? 40? 400? How many can my phone hold? Or my computer?
This only makes things more understandable if you use a point of reference that everyone you're talking to is familiar with. The fact that they had to then explain how big a 4K movie is in the article clearly shows that even they know that this doesn't help people. It's just a big flashy number.
Just for context, I'm a writer, I understand the point of using these abstract measures to give a frame of reference. But in this case, just giving the capacity in GB/TB would have been easier to understand. It just wouldn't have been as sensational of a headline.
If you have like 1-2 petabytes of data to upload to amazaon, sure, they have that special truck you can use. Otherwise, 200tb, i think it would be faster to upload it rather than travel to their offices.
And dont forget its only going to get even faster. Whilst the media isnt going to get bigger at the same rate.
You do know its much safer and much more highly available to store it in a cloud rather than a piece of plastic, right?
In a cloud you get it raided on multiple sites, etc… obv. Depends on how much you pay.
Dont forget that CDs in their best of best conditions had a lifetime of merely 10 years. Dont know how much this new media holds with such density…
I'm not saying you don't own the data, I'm saying it's more expensive than storing it yourself. Obviously it depends on the purpose and budget; if you need it to be highly available and secure, and you have thousands of dollars to direct to the project, the cloud is great. If you want to make a backup of all your DVDs that fits on a single disc, it might be overkill.
The sort of data suited to discs like this is probably pretty different than the sort of data suited to an S3 bucket. It could make a decent tertiary backup though, a local copy of your data stored on offline media can be a lifesaver.
This isn't a competing technology to the cloud, it's complimentary.
The article says "What is that in terms humans understand," then does some math, and produces the figure of 14000 4k movies.
I'm a human and 200TB makes a lot more sense to me than 14000 4k movies. That isn't a standard unit. 14000 4k movies means nothing. You can have a 4k movie that's 200GB (that'd be 2.8PB) or 2GB (that'd be 28TB). What's the bit rate? In the article they mentioned that they just assumed that a 4k 2 hour long movie is 14GB.
What I'm way more concerned about is how expensive the disks and readers/writers are. According to the article, the disks are manufactured similarly to the CD, but what about the readers/writers? Could we see these as competitors to HDDs? 200TB is friggin insane, at a good price you'd be spending 2 grand on that much HDD storage.
In the article they mentioned that they just assumed that a 4k 2 hour long movie is 14GB.
That's more what I would expect out of a 1080p movie on a disc. If I have 200TB to play with, I'm not going to care much about compressing the video any more than what the disc it originally came off of was at since artifacts could be introduced. Sure, I probably wouldn't notice most artifacts, but with that much storage even the massive 100GB rips would be a drop in the bucket so why risk it?
Could we see these as competitors to HDDs? 200TB is friggin insane, at a good price you’d be spending 2 grand on that much HDD storage.
I doubt it would compete with HDD for home use. Loading times off of optical discs are atrocious. Just archiving data, sure, but my HDDs actually still have games on them that I run. Old games, sure, but not something where more storage would be worth the reduced read/write speeds. Maybe for a home video server, but that's about it, and there's going to be some significant loading compared to current servers with HDDs.
Yeah, for sure, I look for my larger files when I'm legally obtaining my movies.
I'd definitely have a place for them in my NAS, if they were much cheaper than HDDs. It'd be like an SSD cache to go with your HDDs, but a third slower tier for rarely accessed files.
1.4Pb (~175TB), the quoted number of movies is based on a 14GB movie which is very small (most BluRay disks hold somewhere between 25 and 50GB) and no discussion about write speed, so basically this is cool research that someone has done and is no closer to a commercial product that any of the dozens of other articles that have come out on this topic in the last 15 years
I rip enough physical media to tell you that post-compression 14GB is not far from average for a 4K movie. I guarantee that Netflix isn't storing those any bigger than that. Hard drives don't grow on trees, you know?
It's still good to know where the top end of optical storage is, even at an academic level, even if these end up not being widely used or being used for specific applications at smaller capacities. We'll see where or if they resurface next, but I'm pretty sure we're not gonna get femtosecond lasers built into our laptops anytime soon.
Streaming services definitely don't give you full quality files. They're compressed to save bandwidth. Netflix only uses about 7GB per hour in 4k. That's about the exact size of the higher quality 1080p movies I download.
What’s almost more remarkable is that the scientists say a single new blank disc can be manufactured using conventional DVD mass production techniques within six minutes.
If this was a response to write speeds they meant the speed at which data can be written to the disc, not the time ot takes to build the disc.
Read/Write speeds are a standard measure used to tell whether something would be efficient to use. For example one could say storing an OS on a DVD and booting would be dumb because it would run extremely slow, where as the read speed for playing music or a movie off it wouldn't be an issue as it doesn't need higher performance for such.
I'm imagining the RPMs on these babies trying things trying to load Gigs worth of data at a time. I like to think it will start glowing from the heat generated.
You're just sitting on your couch, trying to watch a movie, when your blu ray player suddenly begins to sound like a leaf blower, until a glowing hot disk of destruction shoots through the tray at fourty thousand rpm, ripping through your walls, decapitating your neighbor and taking down some sattelites in orbit
That's enough to store a high detail photo of every single man and woman posing naked in every possible position and combination of positions. And it lasts 10 years like parts of some CDs and DVDs did? Wow! Incredible!
