Sony & Panasonic Next-Gen Optical Discs Moving Forward 250
jones_supa writes "From last summer you might remember the Sony & Panasonic plans to bring next generation optical discs with recording capacity of at least 300GB. Various next-gen optical discs from different companies have been proposed, but this joint effort seems to be still moving forward. The disc is called simply Archival Disc and, roadmap and key specifications are out. First-wave ADs are slated to launch in summer of 2015 and will be able to hold up to 300GB of data. Archival Discs will be double-sided, so this works out to 150GB of data per side. Future versions of the technology will improve storage density, increasing to 500GB (or 250GB per side) and 1TB (500GB per side) as the standard matures."
Amazing! (Score:2, Insightful)
More proprietary garbage. Everyone knows they'll try to do the same thing they do with everything else: Infest everything with DRM and secrets to stop 'pirates.'
Re:Compared to 4TB? (Score:4, Insightful)
Glad you weren't making the decision back when floppy disks were 1.44M and my Hard Drive was 250M...
Without knowing the specifics, this could be a great form of backup, which judging by the name, is exactly what this is for.
Re:Compared to 4TB? (Score:4, Insightful)
Pretty much.
CD-Roms first became popular when 80 meg hard drives were considered large.
Now, you can buy few terabytes of space for $100--$200. Parceling out your data in 25 GB chunks, at a dollar a disk doesn't seem all that thrifty, unless you distribute large amounts of data to people who don't have high speed connections.
I know, it's slightly cheaper as a backup option-- if your time isn't worth much.