Fujitsu's New Laptop in Japan Includes Optical Drive Abandoned Elsewhere (tomshardware.com) 51
Fujitsu has released a new laptop in Japan with a built-in Blu-ray drive. The FMV Note A A77-K3 includes a BDXL-compatible optical drive that can read and burn discs. Most laptop manufacturers globally stopped including optical drives in the second half of the 2010s. The Japanese market has refused to follow that trend.
Shops in Tokyo's Akihabara district recently experienced a spike in demand for optical drives and systems capable of reading Blu-ray discs, Tom's Hardware reports. Fujitsu sells two additional models in the FMV Note A line using Intel thirteenth-generation chips. Those systems include DVD drives instead of Blu-ray capability. Some other Japanese manufacturers also released optical-drive-equipped laptops earlier in 2025.
Shops in Tokyo's Akihabara district recently experienced a spike in demand for optical drives and systems capable of reading Blu-ray discs, Tom's Hardware reports. Fujitsu sells two additional models in the FMV Note A line using Intel thirteenth-generation chips. Those systems include DVD drives instead of Blu-ray capability. Some other Japanese manufacturers also released optical-drive-equipped laptops earlier in 2025.
Bring back the floppy disk (Score:2)
The floppy was a lot more convenient than USB and it locked in securely.
Re: Bring back the floppy disk (Score:3)
To store what?
A single document?
1.44MB isn't going to get you very far these days
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Conciseness = value.
Re: Bring back the floppy disk (Score:5, Funny)
My floppy only had 360KB, you insensitive clod!
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The first floppy disks I used had a capacity of 51.2 KiloBytes
It was 5 and a quarter inches acoss
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Are you sure those weren't 8"? The first single side/single density 5.25" I thought had 90KB. What system had such a non-standard amount of storage for 5.25"?
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Panasonic made floppy drives that could store 32MB on a normal high density diskette. Unfortunately it never caught on, as by that point Zip disks were already popular, and they only lasted a few more years due to CD burners being cheap and ubiquitous.
overheard in Akihabara (Score:2)
A man of fine taste, and to make this an excellent deal all around, I will toss in 64M of RAM from a bygone era, RetroMan
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A man of fine taste, and to make this an excellent deal all around, I will toss in 64M of RAM from a bygone era, RetroMan
I'll pop my one megabyte expansion from my Apple IIgs. That one meg upgrade was an entire evening of Dad & Me popping chips into an expansion card bigger than most PCI cards are now. It covered the entire length of the inside of the case. The salesman told us, "You'll never need a full megabyte of RAM. You're crazy to spend that much money on it." THOSE were the days.
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Japan clung to 8-inch floppies far longer than most countries. The most famous holdout was the Japanese Ministry of Defense, which—until 2022—still used 8-inch floppy disks for certain administrative data transfers. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry had similar legacy systems too.
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Re:When Windows 10 ended support (Score:4, Interesting)
There are sooo many external USB bluray drives to choose from, and literally the first item I searched for was a 4k bluray player (with software included). Some even have built in USB hubs [media-amazon.com] if that's your thing. A quick search for internal drives finds plenty from Asus, Hitachi, and Liteon - do you have some weird specific thing you are looking for that limits your options??
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Any for under $100? I was expecting something maybe twice the cost of a DVD drive ($40), but couldn't find anything on Newegg for less than $120 or so.
Don't care about burning or 4K. I'm assuming that all blu-ray discs come with lower-resolution copies, but I have no idea. If there are discs that only contain 4K encodes, then I would need 4K playback.
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>It's bizarre because you can just install off a USB stick and it's much faster but I guess that's just not what they are used to.
For installation media specifically you have to use up a USB stick entirely for the duration of its life as install media. This is true of optical media as well, but the USB stick costs way more. The installation disc you made also just sits around until you throw it out in a year or whatever.
But installation media is kind of a carefully picked example right? I mean, it's som
Waste machine (Score:2)
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Sure, burning 10 discs to give out for your campaign is convenient and cheap, but it leaves a bunch of plastic waste. If you give out USB keys, your players are likely to copy the data to a larger medium, and then reuse the flash. Now scale that out 1000000x to a release of Windows and you start talking about significant portions of a landfill.
That might be true for one flash key, but I have a bunch in my drawer, and I basically use less than one per year. In the years before convenient networking and cloud storage, USB flash was more useful, but not anymore. Then again, if I'm distributing files, cloud is the way to go.
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The USB stick can be wiped and reused for something else.
USB sticks, or SD cards etc are not very expensive.
The optical media might be cheaper, but the combination of media and drive is not, plus to get a good price on media you usually need to buy a spindle. Unless your regularly using optical media for other purposes, it's actually a lot more expensive for a one off installation.
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I know the 4K ones are going away because the DRM is so miserable that the company that makes the playback software has given up on them. Literally every time you play a 4K Blu-ray it has to phone home to make sure you're not a filthy pirate.
!00% false. I have a 4k Blu-ray player that's not attached to any network at all and it works just fine. If you're letting it phone home, that's on you.
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Literally every time you play a 4K Blu-ray it has to phone home to make sure you're not a filthy pirate.
That's simply not how Blu-Ray DRM works in any way shape or form. Hint: revocation keys are on the disc. If you had a combination disc + software that played, it will continue to play and there's no requirement or even a mechanism for phoning home.
What you may need is a software update if you had a key revoked. That doesn't need to phone home either, you can just go and download the update the old fashioned way.
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The obvious explanation is that streaming video quality is pretty garbage. Especially 4K which often looks like it's 720p on netflix and amazon.
When it comes to live actors, yes, 4K is sometimes overkill. But when it comes to Anime and theatrical films, the streaming experience has been degraded substantially on streaming services, including youtube to the point that "1080p" looks like 360p a 4' away.
There's such better use of that space in a laptop (Score:1)
I'd much rather have anything else that's not an optical drive in that volume. Mostly battery but even just some usb ports would be better.
Optical drives being gone is a feature not a problem.
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You lose a capability and still pay for it in the sticker price, and you get nothing with the space.
It's an absolute ripoff and I bought correct laptops until the big companies just stopped making them correctly. Now I have to drag around little USB external guys, which isn't great at all.
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yeah. I'd rather have the feature internal. The thing is that the drive itself doesn't need a full cubic-shape of volume, there needs to be enough room for the disc itself and for the read mechanism, but the read mechanism doesn't cover the entire footprint of the disc. It was doable in the past and should well be doable in the future.
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I'd much rather have anything else that's not an optical drive in that volume. Mostly battery but even just some usb ports would be better.
Optical drives being gone is a feature not a problem.
Older Thinkpads have an ultra bay slot to hot swap different components. I have a battery, DVD drive, HDD and SSD for mine. Been a while since I've used the optical drive but love having the options and found them to be useful over the years.
Of course Lenovo subsequently destroyed all this in later models the same way they trashed the reputation of their *-series laptops.
Not a bad idea... (Score:2)
Hopefully the drives are BDXL. Even now, if one has small datasets or collections of documents, being able to have WORM media easily accessible isn't a bad thing. Every so often, copy stuff to the disk, finalize the media, toss it onto a case or container. This is probably the most reliable way to store data, long term.
Wish this spike in demand would get Sony and the other big names to start looking at advancing optical. Even a 1TB BDXL disk would be very useful for backups. Something along the lines o
Re:Not a bad idea... (Score:4, Informative)
> China's 200TB optical disk
This exists in a laboratory and nowhere else. The technology used for it hasn't been commercialized and might not be able to be. It's good science for sure, but pretending it's a real thing that someone somewhere can use for data, is dishonest. Extant optical media is very slow compared to magnetic media (including tapes) and electronic media, so is this high density disc something that has a good speed or a bad speed, if it were developed more? Hard to predict based on the pretty much nothing we have to go on.
It would be nice to see more progress though. Optical media done correctly can outlast everything else we use day to day, which is its own sort of interesting thing. If you put your family recipes on some high quality blu-ray and put it in a drawer, that could be readable longer than any other way- even potentially books.
Available outside Japan (Score:1)
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You could order it from Japan and pay shipping, 15% tariff, and a ~$20 customs fee.
BDXL for semi-archival backups (Score:2)
I don't mind losing my optical drive (Score:2)
But they didn't replace it with more USB ports. My current (work) laptop is especially annoying with 4 USB-C ports. It wasn't too hard to swap my keyboard's cable with a usb-c to usb-c cable, but my wired mouse isn't the same. So I ended up getting a wireless with nano transceiver.
Why a wired keyboard? Because I'm literally less than 3 feet from my computer when I am using a keyboard. Why would I transmit my passwords, credit card, and bank account numbers over wireless?
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You can get a USB C to USB A adapter dongle. I know dongles suck, but if you have a particular peripheral you want to use then at least you have the option. Or attach a USB hub with both the keyboard and mouse on it, then you only have one wire to plug in (and in many modern laptops it can charge through that USB C port too).
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This. Get a type-C dock so you only have a single cable to plug in when you set the laptop down.
These docks typically come with multiple A/C ports, monitor connections, ethernet, power for the laptop, extra storage (automated backups whenever you're at your desk etc).
Cheaper archive? (Score:3)
I use the Mdisc Blu-rays as a back-up of family photos which are also stored offsite on a cloud solution, but it makes me feel a little more secure having a physical archive that I can turn too should something happen to my cloud account and once they are burned they cost almost nothing to store.
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Optical discs are so slow though. Why not just use old school huge sized HDDs? SSDs could work, but they cost more.
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Why not just use old school huge sized HDDs
I suspect they are more prone to corruption than Blu-rays? But I don't have the data at my fingertips to say this with certainty.
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I have had bad luck with optical discs. Even during and right after burning (unreadable)!
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Even Bluray recordable manufacturing is winding down now, unfortunately.
Either way, you really need a 3-2-1 backup strategy. 3 copies, 2 types of media, 1 off site. So both Bluray and cloud.
Sneakernet is back. With a vengeance. (Score:3)
“Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.”
— Andrew S. Tanenbaum, 1981
There’s a convergence of cultural, technical, and trust factors that make the “return of the Blu-ray” make sense right now, especially among technically literate users who understand both the fragility of cloud promises and the hunger of AI data-collection pipelines.
Japan’s media culture amplifies this trend. Japan has always favored physical ownership: CDs and Blu-rays still outsell streaming in most demographics. Fujitsu, Dynabook, and NEC are catering to domestic demand from people who want to own their media and archives, not rent them. Western markets dumped ODDs; Japan never stopped making them.
I think what's really pushing this is archival paranoia and AI distrust. It isn't just the tin-foil hats that are worried about hungry bots sniffing through cloud data. Professionals in medicine, law, R&D, and creative fields are increasingly moving sensitive or original work to offline media to avoid involuntary ingestion into training corpora. Blu-ray, especially BDXL (100–128 GB discs), offers a long-term cold-storage medium immune to ransomware and metadata harvesting. It’s slow, yes—but trustworthy in a way that nothing cloud-based can match.
As cloud platforms blur the line between storage and training data, more and more consumers are realizing that the cloud is just someone else’s computer with a data-mining clause buried deep in the EULA. These users are rediscovering that a $40 external ODD is the cheapest privacy policy money can buy. It's an easily accessible, low-tech firewall against Sam Altman's or Mark Zuckerberg's bots crawling through personal files in the name of innovation. A $40 external ODD can’t phone home, can’t be hacked from the cloud, and won’t volunteer your data to the next training corpus.
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My retention of physical media is simple. Once I have it, it's a lot harder for publishers or distributors to take it away from me or to otherwise prevent me from using it.
Plus there's something about having to make an intentional choice to watch something rather than the system itself telling me what it thinks I should watch that's helpful, if I can't decide what to watch then perhaps I shouldn't watch anything and should do something else with my time.
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I've seen 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 both be revoked from e-book readers.
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Plus there's something about having to make an intentional choice to watch something rather than the system itself telling me what it thinks I should watch that's helpful, if I can't decide what to watch then perhaps I shouldn't watch anything and should do something else with my time.
Well said. Huxley, Orwell, and Bradbury salute you. Solzhenitsyn would’ve smiled — quiet dissent is still dissent. We welcome you to the Gulag. :)
Who makes the drive? (Score:3)
Pioneer exited the optical drive market last year.
LG stopped making drives a few months ago (and no one really noticed).
The only manufacturer left I can thing of is Lite-On, but I don't think they were big in the Blu-Ray game, at least, when looking at Blu-Ray compatible drives they were usually either LG, rebadged LG (i.e., Asus), or Pioneer.
offline content (Score:2)
Japan still has a lot of stores with offline content. This means a person can watch whatever they want without having to give up their privacy on the Internet.