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."
What are these shiny discs you speak of? (Score:3, Funny)
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Bandwidth isn't cheap in some areas...
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"Bandwidth isn't cheap in some areas..."
It wouldn't matter if it was. Time after time, we have seen problems arise... not because of "online technology", but because of human failure. Failure of the people you're supposed to trust at "the other end".
PEOPLE at these organizations have repeatedly failed in areas of organizational ability, reliability, and trustworthiness.
Unless and until we have the technology that can replace human trustworthiness (or lack thereof), "cloud" storage will not be ready for prime time. Even if you make it snoop-
Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of? (Score:5, Interesting)
I live twenty minutes from a high tech city. A city that even hosts a world-reknowned "interactive" conference (along with a movie and music conference) around this time of year.
The best uncapped bandwidth I can get? About 1.2 Mbps. And it's wireless with intermittent drops in coverage.
The best capped bandwidth I can get? About 9 Mbps, but I'm limited to 12GB/month.
Hundreds of thousands of people live near this same city with similar or worse bandwidth availability. Unless I spend hundreds of thousands of dollars or more to start my own ISP and run some fiber for me and my neighbors, that's what we're stuck with.
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Why is a disk superior to tape? Tape is
* Cheap (dont think anything comes close in $ / GB)
* Fast (sequential speeds ~ 150MB/s)
* durable (no need to worry about scratches, no dies to degrade)
* Already has enterprise infrastructure at most places-- autoloaders are not exactly rare
Id actually be astonished if you could get GB / Volume close for these disks. We're coming out with 3TB native / 5+TB compressed LTO tapes soon, so youd need ~15 of these archival disks to match them
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just only for greedy tele-cos who like to rape the masses
FTFY: just only for greedy tele-cos who like to rape them asses
Telco defined (Score:2)
Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of? (Score:5, Informative)
Ten years ago, I had a pretty large DVD collection. I still do, I guess, though it's archived in big folders now rather than the original cases, for space reasons. I was in no way unusual in that; almost everybody else I knew at the time had a DVD collection.
Today, I actually have a relatively large blu-ray collection. But nobody else I know does. In my case, I have the large blu-ray collection because I watch a lot of anime and support for that on streaming services is patchy (Crunchyroll isn't bad, but older shows do vanish from it with no notice sometimes). But if I wasn't interested in niche stuff, there'd be no practical (as opposed to philosophical) reason to continue to collect physical media.
With a large collection of the movie-buying public having looked at blu-ray and gone "meh", I think the challenge of trying to movies to a new generation of optical media is probably insurmountable.
And the other uses of optical media?
The newly launched games consoles have blu-ray drives - but I suspect they're the last generation to support optical discs. More and more sales are shifting online and that proportion will only grow as broadband speeds improve. Even for online-only refuseniks, Vita-style memory-card distribution may prove more convenient in the long run. I honestly cannot remember the last PC game I bought via a physical copy. Probably the Wrath of the Lich King expansion for World of Warcraft - because I guessed that Blizzard's download servers would die on launch day.
And for data archival? My experience of writable CDs, DVDs and BDs is that they're time-consuming to write to, physically fragile, space-inefficient and unreliable over time. If I want a local backup these days, I pick up an HDD, fill it up and then store it away.
So yeah, this all feels a bit like nugatory effort...
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But, while broadband speeds increase, broadband penetration may not (probably won't).
So, I have a feeling that Netflix, Gamefly, etc. will still ship physical disks... and console games will too.
I also think that instead of changing standards to increase data density, or using any extra density a new format brings, we'll see things that are more about control (DRM)
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Maybe where you live the ratios have not increased but where I live they have. The government in some countries are getting involved and forcing ISPs to provide a minimum level of service as well as setting limitations on what they can charge overage on. Cheap access to unlimited information normally equals a more educated population and better social awareness.
Companies like Bell have found other ways around charging more for bandwidth. Instead they control content and charge large dollars for it. Same goe
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Funny that in a civilization where it's all about having more and more stuff, more and more people have no issues about having their stuff ephemeral or dematerialized.
I'm gonna go build myself a real stone castle and fill it with antique furniture. When you won't be able to get your pictures off Facebook because your bandwidth is capped at 20Mb except for ComcastView and GooglePlusPlus, I'll have my local storage out of reach of marketers and spooks, and they won't remotely disable my books.
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You know the 80s are over right?
Online content has much value. Is it miss used? Maybe a little but I can tell you it makes my life easier.
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But if I wasn't interested in niche stuff, there'd be no practical (as opposed to philosophical) reason to continue to collect physical media.
I'm the complete opposite. I have some digital stuff but otherwise I continue to collect physical media whenever I can because I'll always have access to it and some big company won't be able to pull the licensing agreement and suddenly the movie/show/game is gone from my collection on Amazon or something because the big company wants more money from Amazon for their 20 year old movie.
When it comes to physical media the first sale doctrine is king so in addition to the already mentioned benefits of always h
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Right hows your VHS collection going then? VHS tapes were still sold often only 10 years ago.
The problem is never if you have the 8mm, 8-track, vinyl, cassette, minidisk, etc.
The problem is if you still have a functioning player for such thing.
There are original Wax cylinders created by Thomas Edison. There wasn't a player for them for 80 years. until someone custom made one at great expense.
digital copy only means you at least get to keep a functioning player as well. By using smart backups and doing s
External DVD drives (Score:2)
So you might have access to that media, but eventually it will be like it is today trying to run down a way to read an old 8 1/2 inch floppy disk.
How "eventually" are you talking about? I don't see external USB CD, DVD, and BD readers going away at least in the next decade.
Re: External DVD drives (Score:2)
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A previous place I worked at provided an online service for medical data that was supported by a huge, custom built DVD "jukebox"
At some point in the last decade the economics of large hard disk arrays rendered this technology effectively obsolete.
If the dollar per GB economics of these disks were attractive enough, they could, potentially, make a comeback in applications that are willing to put up with the latency of mechanica
Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of? (Score:5, Interesting)
I got my first CD-RW drive in 1999. Some of the discs I wrote on it still work perfectly. Others are completely unreadable. There's no pattern to it - no particular manufacturer's media has fared better than another's. I have cheapo 20-for-a-dollar discs that still work and expensive ones that don't - and vice versa. I also have discs written much more recently which have become unreadable. For all I know, the discrepancies are as much down to which disc was stored on the top of the spindle or in the outer-most pockets in the wallet as to anything in their manufacture.
Which means that as a long-term archival solution, optical discs are just too erratic.
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There is a pattern, you just don't see it. Taiyo Yuden discs stored properly and burned with a good drive (Pioneer or LiteOn in a pinch) will last. There are a few other quality brands like Verbatim and TDK, but none are on a par with Taiyo Yuden for CD-Rs and DVD-R/DVD+R.
Everything else is hit and miss, even if stored properly.
sunlight? (Windows = lost data) (Score:2)
Just as with operating systems, with optical disks, windows destroy data. The sunlight slowly "burns" all the bits if a disk is stored when sunlight beams in. That's one pattern of failure that someone might not identify, but it is a known pattern you can avoid.
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I have really fast broadband over cable, so I signed up for the online backup service Crashplan so I would have an offsite copy of all my data. I ran into two killer problems: notwithstanding my blistering upload capacity, the backup service still plods along at 500kb or less, meaning that my 1T archive disk will take about six months to backup. The cherry on top is that my ISP imposes a usage cap, which prevents me from taking advantage of even that speed. If optical discs of 300G or more become available,
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What good does it do to have 1TB optical disks, if the write speed is only 350kB/sec? It would take more than a month of steady writing to fill up a disk.
It will probably be faster than that, but who knows? I checked TFA, and it says absolutely nothing about bandwidth, either read or write.
every optical disk writes full disk in three minut (Score:2)
CD, DVD, and Blu Ray have all been writable at about 16x, meaning you can burn a disk in two - three minutes. The write speed has scaled with capacity. I see no reason to think the next generation will be any different.
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they just got clone wars onto netflix so expect star wars soon as well
now that disney owns star wars you can expect more than periodic releases on dvd or blu ray with slightly more content for GL to get more money from you
Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of? (Score:4, Interesting)
It would be great to get a series on one or two disks instead of these huge boxes.
Who would use them? Serious question.
Netflix likely won't adopt any future disc standards for the disc side of their business. Blu-ray is already an additional charge, and they've made it very clear that they view that side of their business as a dying, legacy one, and they even made an effort to divest themselves of it back when they tried to split it off a few years back. Storefront video rentals are nearly extinct, with Redbox and digital distribution displacing them, and Redbox certainly won't be offering whole series anytime soon, since it makes no sense for them to do so. For movies, blu-rays already serve all of their needs. In other words, there's no market for AD rentals.
I suppose Amazon and other retailers may sell the discs, but who would buy them? Hardcore collectors, sure, but outside that niche? The way I see it, you primarily have two types of folks:
1) The folks already using blu-ray. Theoretically, AD would draw primarily from this group, since they are the ones who would care about any benefits it has to offer, but it seems to me that its primary benefit is easier distribution than blu-ray, which is something that digital distribution already deals with for most people, and it's already being adopted by this group as the next step beyond blu-ray. As for content availability, most people would prefer to purchase a few extra blu-rays during a transitional period to the digital distribution that they've already started adopting, rather than investing in an entirely new format so that their shelves will be a bit tidier.
2) The ones who have to be dragged forward. They're the ones still using DVDs and who will only upgrade when they are forced to do so. Since AD players are likely to be backwards compatible with DVDs, these people will see no reason to purchase anything more expensive than DVDs, which, as is the case today with blu-rays already on the market, will keep the market for DVDs alive and healthy. They'll never upgrade to AD, since AD isn't forcing them to upgrade in the same way that DVD forced them to upgrade from VHS.
Really, the only use I see for these discs is...wait for it...archiving. Assuming they have a decent shelf life, I could see these replacing, or at least supplementing, the backup tapes that are still widely used in business settings.
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Some people still like to own their media rather than just streaming or renting DRM laden downloads. As long as you can rip whatever optical format they deliver music and video on there will still be a market I think, and you will always be able to rip.
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I'm actually in the group you're talking about. I rip all of my discs, keep them stored locally on drives at home, and prefer to properly own the films that I plan to re-watch repeatedly, rather than relying on Netflix or the like. But please note that my previous comment uses the term "digital distribution", rather than "streaming", and that renting was only a small portion of what I was discussing. I used that term quite intentionally, because I wanted to include digital purchases made from online-only di
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There are few places you can make digital purchases online, most places only rent you stuff with DRM that can be revoked any time. For example you can't buy ebooks from Amazon, only rent them. You can't buy games from XBOX Live, only a limited time license to use them.
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"Some people still like to own their media rather than just streaming or renting DRM laden downloads."
LOL. You mean some people still like to own their own DRM laden media rather than just streaming or renting DRM laden downloads. If you're going to rip your *future* AD collection, why bother? I'm sure there'll always be the usual pirate sources ready to download without the need for some DRM crack or whatnot.
Ishtar skipped DVD (Score:2)
[Cheapskates] will see no reason to purchase anything more expensive than DVDs
Until movie distributors start skipping DVD and going straight to BD, AD, or whatever for new releases. The film Ishtar, for instance, skipped DVD [badassdigest.com].
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"Cheapskates" and "people who don't care about the benefits offered" are not synonymous terms. And small wonder that a film that only appeals to niche collectors would be released using the format that appeals to niche collectors.
Trial balloon fever (Score:2)
"Cheapskates" and "people who don't care about the benefits offered" are not synonymous terms.
I apologize. I was confused by some Slashdot users who have called me a cheapskate for not caring about the benefits offered by, say, a smartphone with a $35/mo data plan over a dumbphone with a $7/mo voice-only plan.
And small wonder that a film that only appeals to niche collectors would be released using the format that appeals to niche collectors.
I saw it more as a trial balloon for eventually dropping DVD and its weaker DRM, just as the home video distributors had dropped VHS.
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Ooh, you mean a hard drive! I've been busy ripping everything I have on disc, as discs are just a pain.
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even with disks games still require DRM servers
Since when do games for any PlayStation, Xbox, Wii, or Nintendo DS product require a server for single-player, split-screen, or LAN play?
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.'
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Re:Amazing! (Score:5, Interesting)
The replacement for tape is different tape. Optical media isn't going to catch up to the data densities or transfer rates that tape has to offer any time soon. The (kinda old) LTO4 changer I use for my personal stuff handles 800GB/tape and only needs about three hours per tape. This new disc format isn't even going to be competitive with an eight year old tape spec.
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I've thought about going tape for local backup, but I never felt comfortable with it, because I have the impression that the lifespan of tape is poor. What's your experience in tape lifespan (which I suppose also involves how often/whether you rewrite instead of getting a new tape)?
(Currenly local backup for most of my stuff is "put it on the file server", where it's mirrored, which is of course not perfect. But the file server is also backed up offsite through CrashPlan.)
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LTO lasts 15+ years (and if you can afford the drive, chances are you won't need to re-use tape too often). Cheap tape was always bad.
However, it's vital to verify tapes as you write them. Non-cheap tape doesn't really "go bad", but can be bad when created (even though the tape drives verify in hardware, I've seen issues). You don't need to verify the whole tape, just verify something on the tape, ideally with a different drive.
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The replacement for tape is different tape. Optical media isn't going to catch up to the data densities or transfer rates that tape has to offer any time soon. The (kinda old) LTO4 changer I use for my personal stuff handles 800GB/tape and only needs about three hours per tape. This new disc format isn't even going to be competitive with an eight year old tape spec.
Tape may be faster to write for now, (They never said the speed...) a single file restore will not be. Especially if it is towards the end of the tape. THis has alwayse been the limiting factor of tape.
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QFA has mitigated this problem for quite some time now. Simplistically, an index is built identifying files and their relative positions on the tape. The tape is loaded and then fast forwarded to that location to restore it. I had a 4-tape capacity "mini-library" nearly 15 years ago that could do this. A small single file could be restored in a minute or two.
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First copy is to spare HDD (kept in a box). Tapes are the "just in case". It's just much easier to store tape off-site: mail to a friend, stuff in storage or safe deposit, whatever.
Tape drives are quite expensive, but if you can afford them they rock. If I had the bandwidth, I'd use glacier or whatnot, but since I have DSL I'm saving for tape.
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Tape may be faster to write for now, (They never said the speed...) a single file restore will not be. Especially if it is towards the end of the tape
With archival formats that really doesnt matter, and generally youre not restoring half of a backup.
If you want really good access speed AND high density you go HDD.
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Tape isn't really a good option for consumers who are used to accessing media directly. You will find tape is a hard sell for most people. Also tapes are not actually that robust, they can stretch and warp or get mangled if you do a lot of seeking and stop/start.
Even for us nerds it could be a better option if the media is cheap and it is well supported going forwards. Modern BD drives can read the 32 year old Compact Disc format perfectly, tapes not so much.
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If it stays just archival storage, something that is desperately needed....
This is too little, too late.
Anything that requires me to be physically present to swap media during a backup isn't even up for consideration.
300Gb of data per disc means I'd have to swap discs a dozen times to back up my current pile of data data. Not happening.
By the time it reaches 1Tb per disk I'll have even more data to back up. Half a dozen swaps? Still not happening. I want to set the backup going then go to bed while it does its thing.
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300Gb of data per disc means I'd have to swap discs a dozen times to back up my current pile of data data. Not happening.
Why would you use 300GB disks to backup your data? The reason to use CD's, DVD's or BD's and now this proposed media is to archive specific data that you require access at a latter date. As long as the disk has a device that can read it then your archived data can be read unless the disk is damaged so any archived media needs to be preserved (minimum of two copies) and checked periodically.
It must be noted that there is huge difference between a "backup" and an "archive". If you only use HDD's to "backup"
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Can you clarify what you mean by "proprietary"?
Great: Bonus Content (Score:2)
500gigs of it now.
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I'm thinking the movie you want to see is encrypted and buried in such a sea of garbage that it becomes impractical to extract it without the master key....
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Nothing about shelf-life. (Score:4, Informative)
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Not only that, but the size advantage of optical media is simply gone.
When CDs first came out, they easily held several times the capacity of a standard HDD. DVDs were much the same way. Then, a few decades go by, and little changes. BlueRay holds much less than a stock HDD, and was that way when it finally won the format wars.
Now, they have a format that doesn't even come close to a stock HD. (My laptop has a 250 GB SSD, my desktop computer has twin 2 TB drives) This new format would just *barely* cover my
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Hopefully they will be using something similar to the M-Disc [mdisc.com] technology to make this archival format more reliable. Organic dyes don't seem to have quite enough staying power (though I just went through some 10-15 year old CD-Rs the other day and they were still readable).
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These will not be like CD-R or DVD-R, they will be more like BD-R I expect. BD-R writers melt a layer of plastic and magnetically re-align reflective particles in it. There is no chemical process like the older discs and as such they are much less prone to bit-rot. They are essentially magneto-optical, and time has proven how robust and long lived MO formats are.
Actually there are two types of BD-R discs, the newer type being more like the old CD/DVD writable formats and thus not suitable for archival. A go
Re:Nothing about shelf-life. (Score:4, Informative)
Bit rot actually does mean what he thinks it means. And it means what you think it means too [wikipedia.org]. Both uses for the term are correct.
Here come the flippers (Score:4, Informative)
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That's simply not true [imdb.com]!
Pinball wizard (Score:2)
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That reminds me of a Kenwood CD drive [pcstats.com] I bought for my computer. It used a multi-beam technology called TrueX to parellelize reading. It cost more than most readers at the time, but only about 20% more. The technology worked well if you were ripping the whole disc.
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I saw these at the time, and wondered if they actually did show speed improvements for a long sequential read. Since CD tracks are laid out in a spiral, wouldn't you only read 7 new tracks at a time for the first revolution, then each track would be re-read 6 times?
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I don't recall all the details. You can read the linked article for insight. I see your point about the spiral, so now I too am wondering exactly how it worked. The bottom line is it was faster, but not 7x faster. It was a good idea at the time since CD rotational speeds had been maxxed out.
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This. Every optical standard has had a double-sided variety, and every time it has failed to be adopted. The closest they got was with DVDs where there were different films or different aspect ratios on the two sides (so you still would never flip).
Also, the jump in capacity here just seems to be a plateau from previous optical technology:
0.6 GB => 9.4 GB => 50GB => 150GB
We were supposed to have 150GB/side blu-rays, for crying out loud (whatever happened to 5-layer discs anyway?).
Rewritable? (Score:2)
Will there be a rewritable variant? (Skimmed the article linked to and I didn't see it mentioned.)
While I realize people mostly picked on this, I like(d) using DVD-RW and DVD-RAM for video archiving. Yeah, now I mostly just download (non-copy-protected) things to a computer, but it was much handier having it built into the recorder.
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This isn't going to be for you. This is basically a replacement for Ultra Density Optical [wikipedia.org].
Will it support iPhone? (Score:2)
I sure hope so. Or at least the iPad.
Two possible uses... (Score:3)
First, taking the name as indicative of the intended purpose, for backups. In that regard, I consider these DOA, since anyone who can fit their entire life in 300GB can use the cloud easily enough, and those of us who rip everthing we own to a home file server would already require literally dozens of these to store a complete backup. Sorry, boys, but even Grandma has a 2TB drive these days (whether or not she's used more than 2% of it).
Second, and more likely - 4k video. I don't really know where I stand on that one, because on the one hand, even BluRay has more or less flopped (it has made good ground in "replacing" DVDs, but for the most part people won't pay more for BD content); on the other hand, 4k finally represents a serious increase in quality over 480p. I still don't know if people would pay more for it, but having seen a few examples of 4k content on a 4k monitor... Just wow.
Still, if the blanks don't cost $5 each and if the DRM doesn't make these virtually worthless for anything but playing in a standalone player, I suppose these count as a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, with Sony involved, we can pretty much take it as given that they'll blow both those constraints without hesitation.
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anyone who can fit their entire life in 300GB can use the cloud easily enough
How so? iCloud only goes up to 55 GB, and that tier costs $100 per year. Besides, with ISPs capping uploads and downloads per month, some rawther severely (5 GB/mo for LTE or 10 GB/mo for satellite), it can take several months to get data in and out of the cloud.
Not Archival (Score:2)
More importantly, a disk-based storage medium is not likely to be useful as "archival" due to both format rot, and the inevitable loss of accessibility as the market moves to other devices. Can you read your MO or Bernoulli disks today?
This (US Patent 8,085,304) [uspto.gov] is a truly archival technology. One that a naive user with a flatbed scanner and computer could find and read. Say, for example a government in 30
750MB Zip Drive (Score:2)
Pretty much all of my audio, pictures, and video lives on my NAS. It almost seems quaint when I have to fire up the DVD player.
Wasting their time. (Score:2)
Double sided? Only 150gb at the moment, at best 500gb?
Nope and nope, it's not going to catch on, you can buy a portable 1TB HDD now for $65
If they can do single sided, 1TB, at least 50MB/s and blank discs under $15 a pop? You've got some small potential to maybe oust DVD / BR - otherwise, forget it. It's unlikely to catch on even then though.
Pointless (Score:2)
With the exception of some "write-once, read-only" backup schemes, this will fail at the $300/disk level.
Meanwhile, go google "1TB USB Flash" and see the $1200 USB flash drives. These will cost a lot less ($100 each in two years I bet) in a few years, just in time for the first of these already-failed optical disks. Plus you don't need anything special to use a USB flash drive...
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.
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Optical format has always been awful for backup. It has all the bad parts of tape and none of the good ones; its only benefit is that its ubiquitous and pretty cheap. Reliability, speed, cost/GB, all suck.
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Optical media tends to degrade even if you stick it in a vault. Magnetic media does not.
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This way they can charge you $10 a pop for the blanks that cost pennies to make (after up front costs), > 50% of which will be wasted on bad recording sessions or discs that didn't get filled. They can also charge you more for the burner/player than that 4TB hard drive costs, and sell "premium" machines with the differentiator being that the lower line models only have BluRay burners....
I won a notebook that came with a BluRay burner, I think I played one BluRay movie in it, one time just to see that it
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Translation: Where is the consumer solution? (Score:2)
I can't find any data on MSRP now, but back in the day it seems to me that there were storage choices that were not so cost-prohibitive for consumers.
4mm and 8mm drives with multi-gigabyte capacities that compared favorably with hard drives of the time could be had for $hundreds to $a thousand or two, with media costs in the $10-$25 per tape range. At the time, there were also MO drives that had significant capacities in similar ranges, with slightly higher media costs.
Back then, the capacity of one removab
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For some reason this has me wondering what the cost breakdown is between the mechanical part of a hard disk and the controller portion.
Is there ever a use case for a cartridge-style drive that basically houses the controller and all you insert is the platter container?
Could they devise a cheaper disk cabinet that plugged just platters in and used a common controller?
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Could they devise a cheaper disk cabinet that plugged just platters in and used a common controller?
SyQuest did this, as did Iomega with the Jaz drive. CD-R and DVD+R ran them out of business.
Yes, yes, yes. (Score:2)
I paid $600 at one point for a used full-height hard drive that was made out of a solid hunk of alloy for the first hard drive for my PC.
So?
Way to let the point fly over your head.
By the time we were mid-'90s, we could get backup solutions that were—yes—$1,000 to $3,000 for the mechanism and $15-$30 for each piece of media.
But they:
- Would cover the space of most consumer drives at the time within 1-4 cartridges
- Would thus backup your entire consumer data library for $50-$150 per complete backu
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When you've used up the 4TB, you'll be able to get a 40TB drive and copy over your old data so you won't need to have two drives always on.
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So, what do I need a 300GB, when I can go to Fry's and get 4TB drive and just plug it in?
And when you run out of space, you just buy another unit and plug it in? Why have a unit always on just for an archive? Sucking up power just for a day that you might need the archive.
Most drives can easily spin down when not in use. Then there is a small delay as the platters spin back up but the power consumed when a drive is not spinning is quite minimal.
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Keeping your backup drive plugged in 24/7 is a good way to getting it fried by the first nasty electrical event.
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.
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I was doing CD-ROMs in 1993. It required a very special full-height SCSI 1 GB hard drive that did not recalibrate itself from time to time, and a $3,000 1x SCSI writer. Turn off all services, screensavers, etc., hit write, and don't breathe for the next hour or so. Underrun buffer? What's that?
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I know, it's slightly cheaper as a backup option-- if your time isn't worth much.
Don't think so, a 4TB drive is 1200 NOK and cheapest 100-pack 4.7GB DVD-R spindle I can find 204 NOK - clearly more bang for the buck than BD-R or dual layer. Still 4000/(4.7*100) ~= 8.5 spindles means 8.5*204 = 1736 NOK for 4TB so almost a 50% premium and that does not include the DVD writer. And I did check tape drives but while the media is cheap - but not that cheap - the tape drive itself sinks the entire budget. And the other killer is the memory stick, if I wanted to move 10GB around offline I'd rath
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Amazon sells BRD-Rs in 25 packs for 22.97. Buy 7 packs (for $160) and you have as much storage as a 180 buck 4TB hard drive, assuming that you have the recorder.
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But that's not even as big of deal as it was a few years ago when most homes had 1 computer. Today our home has 8 computers, two tablets, and two smart phones. And right now it's just me and my wife. (I do IT stuff and she's a geeky lawyer who likes tech stuff)
If one of our machines are doing a back up, chances are we just go to another room and use a different one.
That being said, I installed a 16TB FreeNAS system on the home network last year and that's now how we keep track of most things these days.
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You have to understand how most consumers "back up". They go on holiday and take some photos, shoot some video. Then they get back and save their stuff to disc for viewing and safe keeping, and that's it.
For that point of view an archival grade disc is attractive. You can watch the video or look at the photos on your TV any time with a player, and you don't have to worry about the disc degrading over time if you look after it. Make two copies if it matters that much.
That's the level of sophistication that m
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Tape backups aren't really the target. This is intended to replace UDO disks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] which were mostly used in jukeboxes for paper work heavy businesses such as financial institutions storing loan documents.
Yes, for some reason all of our CT scans are stored on MO even though we use an online PACS [wikipedia.org] for everyday use. We have a whole roomful of the stupid things and they only hold 500 MB a piece. We have to store them for 20 years (in the case of a minor patient) or at least 7 (Statute of Limitations). A 300 GB system is a big enough upgrade for us to consider it.
If it ever ships.
Of course, I'm waiting for holographic storage, but I'm a patient kind of guy.
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Caps (Score:2)
Get ready to stream 90 GB 4K movies?
Not as long as ISPs continue to impose caps even on premium tiers of home Internet service. And I see discs remaining popular in rural areas where the best available ISP is satellite, which has a cap well below 10 GB/mo.
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sigh.
"looks like I'll have to buy the White Album all over again."
one of the best movie quotes I can remember hearing. really sums up the media 'upgrade!' wars.
(and yes, I think I did have the white album on vinyl, 8-track and cassette; and when cd came out, yes, I bought the white album all over again. I won't buy it any more. well, I don't think I will, lol)
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That is too funny. I just watched MiB with my son last weekend. I laughed when I heard that line because it was so long ago, but people still keep doing the same thing.
At least with physical media you have control. If you bought it on itunes you are locked into the Apple-verse for life.
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You got a hand-me-down DVD player and it glitched out, what a shocker
Buy yourself a decent BluRay player that has LAN access and the ability to either decode video itself or can pick up an XBMC server and then boosh you have all your videos on your TV
I bought an LG a few years ago that can play most of my videos right off a network share or use my Plex Media Server and it still does BluRay and DVD
So yeah, disc media may be declared dying but having a cheap ($200) cross media player in your living room is pretty goddamn handy
Do not count on using your BluRay player as a player for any ripped content.
They all have (or will soon have) Cinavia DRM built in, which will trigger on any ripped content that has that watermark. There is currently no known way to detect and remove the Cinavia watermark.
I rip all my shit and play it via an old Windows box using CCCP http://cccp-project.net/ [cccp-project.net] (and it all works even in Windows Media Player if you disable the media foundation thing). All HD audio formats are bitstreamed to my receiver, and
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No, you can't. Spot pricing on pricewatch or google shopping or whatever, the lowest prices are $80 for a drive from a company that will hold your order forever as "pending" because they never had any is stock to begin with. You will pay $100 at least after shipping