How large (i.e diameter) would a vinyl record need to be to hold the same amount of data as a 4.7GB DVD?

Question

This assumes that both sides could be used, like any normal 12" record and that someone had a record player big enough to play it.

Answer 1

Based on my explanation and schoolboy calculations below the record would need to be approximately. 36" in diameter and it would take nearly 9 hours to transfer the data off it into a player/computer in order to watch the film.

Here's my explanation:

Well it would really depend on how close the grooves were together and what sampling rate you were using on the data.

However as a rough estimate. a 12" record plays up to 30minutes of stereo sound per side. The quality of the sound is roughly equivalent to a .WAV file (the standard quality of an Audio CD. CD hold approximately 80 mins of sound equivalent to 80 minutes of Audio or 700mb of data. Therefore a CD can hold 1.33 times as much music as 2 sides of 12" vinyl. Therefore a 12" vinyl record will hold approximately 526mb of audio data. or 263mb each side.

Now we need to scale this up to 4.7GB.

4.7GB is = to 4,700mb therefore each side of vinyl will need to hold 2,350mb of data.

Of course the bigger the diameter of the record the longer the groove and the more data is held per revolution so the amount of data held per each additional inch of diameter increases as they are added. A rough proxi of this might be area on the record. The area of a 12" Diameter record is Pi X Radius Squared which is 3.14x6"squared = 113.04"sqr. Therefore the data held pre square inches is approximately 263mb/113.04"sqr = 2.33mb. Therefore the area of one side of a record to hold the eqivalent of a 4.7GB DVD would be: 2,350/2.33= 1,009"sqr.

The diameter of a circle with this area would be: the square root of the area x the reciprocal of Pi all multiplied by 2. Therefore the calculation is: 2(Sqr(Area(1/3.14)))=35.852"

Therefore the diameter of a vinyl record would need to be approximately 35.852" assuming both sides were used.

The real rub to this is the time it would take to 'load' the information into the player or computer. The transfer rate of analogue information is about (263mb/30mins) 8.8mb per minute based on our assumptions above (very slow). So to watch a DVD it would take you 534 minutes 8 hours 54 minutes to load the information to the player or computer probably 4 times as long as it would take you to watch the film.

Great questions. I'll stick this on watch to see what else others come up with

Answer 2

Big but smaller then you think remember that a DVD holds digital info so complex sounds take up more room then simple ones.

A record records in a analog format and stores vibration patterns and not info so a complex song takes up the same amount of space.

But were still talking huge

Answer 3

Probably the same as the diameter of the planet Earth.
The 1980's game Defender used as much data storage as that needed to just hold your cursor on the screen of todays computer.

Answer 4

The way of storing is very different so you can not really compare. But if it is music you want...

I guess you should have 8 times as much length to the track. That would make it about... um. 2 sides..

70" (guessing but I should be close)

Answer 5

its so insanely large it would not work... you would have a long long needle arm and all the weight put on that needle would almost just peirce through the record if not the player itself lol... what brought this question about?

Answer 6

18 trillion miles wide....which means you'd need a record player 24 trillion miles wide to play it......