Any research in process to make the CDs/DVD's smaller?

It seems to me highly desirable and possible to make CDs/DVDs smaller, so the drives will be smaller, and we can have ultra portable laptops that include optical drives. Considering the invention of flash drives, shouldn't the optical media and drives get a substantial improvement? Is it going to happen soon?

 

doubtful. There isn't much money really to be made by doing this. Also, they have moved to Blu-Ray as the future of optical storage (for now) as it easily holds much more than a dual layer DVD.

They did have the smaller cd's that held 170MB (I think it was that figure) and 1.3GB mini DVD's. They never did make a drive just for those though, as that would be pretty small.

 

The main reason discs are the same size is for backwards compatibility. But optical media is dying anyway. I wouldn't be surprised to see people buying movies on thumb drives in years. Or downloading them.

 

I prefer flash drives over optical disks, therefore I really don’t care about a smaller DVD or a BD. I'm actually looking forward to seeing a standard like SD cards replace optical disks completely.. A micro SD can now hold up to 16GB and the size is only a fraction of a CD\DVD\BD.

 

I agree, flash drives is much preferred, but the problem is, all those software are on CDs, that's where the inconvenience comes in: after you buy an ultra portable laptop, you need an external drive to install all the software.

How about having all software on flash drives?

Btw, it's said data could be completely lost on flash drives for whatever reason, so it's a little risky to rely on flash drives?

 

actually there is, there is the invention of the dremel
You can just install any cutting wheel you like.
Tape the dvd down to the table, look at the data on the disc to find where it is.
Than use a sharpie and mark just outside of the data.
That circle will act as your guide.
Turn the dremel on, and start cutting. Be sure to make the cut a perfect circle, or else the modified disc may vibrate too much when it is being used.

K-TRON

 

You could always use an imaging program to create a CD image and mount the CD as a virtual disk using Daemon Tools. Works with the majority of software CDs out there, although a few are quirky and refuse to work as images.

Regarding the topic of the thread: as flash memory becomes more ubiquitous and cheap to produce, we'll likely be seeing more of them rather than mini-optical disks.

 

That doesn't make the drives any smaller.

 

There are small drives available to OEM makers but they are very hard to find. The most common use is in camcorders that use 8cm discs but I have also seen an MP3 player that used 8CM discs as well.

For general use they are rare.

 

CDs and DVDs are ancient. Just buy a bigger hard drive.

 

That or just image your dvd/cd on sd cards or flash drives since they're pretty much dirt cheap....