We have some strange conversations at work some times, and I figured, why not add the Axiom crew to the craziness.

So, lets say that you could use Blu-Ray technology to put data onto a Laserdisc sized media. How much data could it hold?

Here is a picture for those that have never never seen the size difference. Laserdiscs are 30cm (11.81 inches) in diameter and Blu-Ray discs are 12cm (4.7 inches). For this excersize, lets just look at single layer capacity. I picked Blu-Ray just for the larger single layer capacity, but if someone wants to figure out the HD-DVD single layer capacity on Laserdisc sized media, that would be cool too since HD-DVD supports triple layers.

terabytes ... petabytes ... my mind is exploding ...

Wow... No takers on figuring this out... I'm actually somewhat surprised...

I skimmed your post the first time and missed that it contained a quiz! Let's see...

A disc with 6cm radius has a 25GB capacity. With a little math, that works out to be a data density of about .221GB per unit of area. A laserdisc-sized Blu-Ray disc would have a 15cm radius. Multiplying it's area by this density factor yields a capacity of approximately 156.25GB, or about 6 times the capacity of the normal disc.

If I were being really thorough, I would have subtracted out the area of the hubs in my calculations (since no data can be written there), but I'll leave that to some other anal mathematician.