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Taiwanese Company to Mass Produce Rewritable HD Discs
Lucas123 writes "Ritek Corp. plans to start mass producing BD-RE and HD DVD-RE next quarter. 'Initially, however, BD-RE and HD DVD-RE discs will be pricey. The average cost per disc will remain around $10 in retail outlets, despite production costs of around $5 per disc, said Eric Ai, a Ritek representative. Prices won't likely come down until other mass disc producers in Taiwan win accreditation to make the discs, and ramp up volumes.'"
$10 retail on something that costs $5 to produce is pretty standard.
paintball
You mean Hard Drives arent rewritable....
The headline implies that Ritek is located in Thailand.
Way to go, American geography experts!
My userid is prime!
Are these even available yet? I see the BluRay ones on NewEgg, but never any HD-DVD burners.
$10 for the ability to read/write 20GB+ of stuff at a time looks pretty cheap when compared to a thumb drive that could do the same thing.
Ummm. editors, please?
This was the same story for CDR, DVDR, etc. Eventually, a spindle will be available for 12 bucks at Fry's. I am hoping it's not a long wait, this kind of storage will be great for those of us who make frequent backups of our home directories.
But which format should I get? Ray or HD?
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
It's especially cheap compared to the value of that time. I've been trying to back up photos on DVDs, but with the amount of pics and movies I can take with a 2 GB card, it's a pretty time-consuming process. On the other hand, with 500 GB external drives for ~$140, that's less than $6 for 20 GB, so that's still a cheaper option at the moment.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
This is straight from the corporate website. Confusing Taiwanese with Thai can get you shot in certain parts of the world :)
Corporate Name RITEK Corporation
Establish Date December 29, 1988
Date of IPO April 23, 1996
Headquarter No. 42, Kuan-Fu N. Road, Hsin-Chu Industrial Park, 30316, Taiwan
Employees 3723(Q4, 2005)
Capital 698 million USD (Q4, 2005)
Even Microsoft, the one supporter of the HD-DVD, have given up on the format. BluRay has been selling 70 percent share of the market in all three major regions, Asia, NA, Europe, for all of 2007.
One has to wonder if Toshiba is still holding on just to save face.
That's not pricey compared with what it is now.
It looks pretty bad when you can get 500 GB hard disks for less than $150. 25 times the storage for 15 times the price isn't bad. Also, I've never seen rewritable media that comes anywhere close to the reliability of a hard drive.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
That particular offense gets your heads (both of them) cut off!!!
This could be cool, but don't drop the disc. It will chop off your penis.
Slashdot editors cant distinguish between Thailand and Taiwan.
I dont have an account, didnt feel like creating one just to point out American idiocy.
Is the Format War over yet? It seems to me, that when HD media is readily available for a relatively cheap price, the public will go with it. Is anyone doing this with Blu-Ray discs?
I change my sig often.
You can buy a 500gb HD for $100. That equates out to .20 cents a gig for a rewritable device capable of sustained 60-80mb/sec. Factor in that and the cost of the HD and Blueray writeable drives is above $1k and you have a long way to go before these discs are cost effective to use as a storage or backup solution. Right now the sweet spot is eSATA backup solutions. If they were to jump right to 40 and 50gb discs then it would be another story but I expect those to be a pipe dream as far as consumer media goes just like DL-DVD's never really have panned out.
"Confusing Taiwanese with Thai can get you shot in certain parts of the world :)"
:P
So can confusing Taiwan and China
I have a couple systems capable of writing dual layer DVDs, which would be a pretty nice data backup option at ~ 8.5GB per disk.
But, you almost never see dual layer disks available for purchase. The few times I have seen them, they were ridiculously expensive. I heard that this was because of the patent holder limiting production or charging too high licensing. But, I don't know if that's true.
Are Dual Layer DVDs an option? Will they be coming down in price, or will we be skipping right to BR/HD-DVD writing?
RE? Short for REwritable? Why in the world can't they just keep things uniform and stick with the RW designation. Does it really need a new acronym? What is the major different that would warrant that.
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"And may your days be long upon the earth."
Until regular old read-only drives become cheap and plentiful--nay, let's just even say available for now--my enthusiasm is somewhat dampened.
Just had to change the back up solution for the company I work for from full backups to tape to incremental backups to tape with monthly fulls done to DVD, and writing 40 Gigs of data to DVD every month is a bit of a pain. Oh well, least I'm not salaried :). But with how expensive tape's gotten ($1000 bucks for a 90/gig drive? ouch), I can't wait for HDDVD or Blu-ray to get cheap. The whole server on two disks, 1/4 of which I can make parity files, would ROCK.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
"The average cost per disc will remain around $10 in retail outlets, despite production costs of around $5 per disc"
Of course, the higher the price of media, the less likely people will make backups of their HD movies. At $10 a crack, it's not too much more to buy another copy of the movie. I'm sure that benefit to copyright holders is factored into the cost of the media to some degree. The story makes mention of an accreditation process, which the studios undoubtedly have influence over (they had a say in developing the standard itself). Thus if the media isn't sold at the price the industry wants, the manufacturer could suddenly have problems maintaining their accreditation.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
I'm not sure if you were being funny (à la the Canada comment above), or if you actually think Thailand is an island. :(
(I do think you were going for humor, but I'm just not sure!)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
They can be used to pre-stage a DVD you are going to burn a few times, but they are not really useable as generic rewritable storage devices for a long time.
Look to see what burners you can actually buy and the answer is pretty clear (Blu-Ray).
If you think about it, the volume of Blu-Ray drives and media being produced means costs should come down for that format much faster than with HD-DVD.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is for both. BD-RE = Blu-Ray rewritable, and HD DVD-RE = HD rewritable.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Compromise?
Chinese multi format HDDVD-RW/BD-RW/DVD+-RW[DL]/CD-RW burners are bound to appear in the very near future and render the whole "format war" moot.
Until then, if you're in hurry, buy whatever format for which you can find the cheapest burner.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Way to go, American geography experts!
In hi-school geogrefy class they learned us that the world is made up of only 'merica and Freedumbhateistan.
It is well known that Ritek makes subpar media. They are a major source for many store brands too. Be very careful when purchasing.
Slashdot - The great and glorious cluster fuck of Internet wisdom.
There are lots of perfectly decent providers of blank CD's.
Anybody who writes DVD's already knows that there are only a couple of reliable brands of blanks, Like Taiyo Yuden.
If you want to write dual layer DVD's, and expect them to read right on home DVD players, the only brand you can trust is Verbatim.
Now we're talking about HD discs, single and dual layer? There'll be one okay provider, and every third blank is gonna fail.
While you are correct, there are a number of rather annoying limitations.
IIRC BlueRay and HD-DVD still use UDF which has a filesize limit of 1G. While some OS-es (pre-2.6.9 linux is an example) wrote 1G files to them that was in violation of the standard and these are not guaranteed to be interoperable and readable in the future. This is an extremely annoying limitation as far as any use for backup or "my own data" is concerned.
Compared to that a thumb drive or a USB hard drive can be formatted with a filesystem of your choice so this limitation does not exist.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Does anyone actually use RW media?
I only occasionally see it in stores and have never seen actual discs used in the wild.
Hold on there, cowboy. You're going to tell me that on a disc with a 90 minute write time (write+verify at 2X speed), you expect to hit the endurance limit on this media on a regular basis?
Let's just take a random guess that this has 1000 w/e cycles. If you re-wrote to this disc every business day of the year, it would take 4 years to hit its limit. I appreciate your handleing care and frugality in trying to keep something around for that long in daily use, but I'm just not so sure it's a real issue for production.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Lets not forget your not even counting the cost of the burner / player that is built into an external HD. Speed is also an issue I can write out a 500gb drive in about 2-3 hours I doubt I can burn 25 of these in the same time frame. Tape is the same or better than HD speeds for writing.
No sir I dont like it.
They all look the same to me. ¦-)
A few months ago, I wanted to buy lightscribe discs and they were still around $25 for a 10-pack, so about $2.50 per disc
Dual-layer discs were running about the same, sometimes more. So that would be about 4.3Gb or 8.6Gb'ish...
$1.72/GB for a lightscribe, or $3.44/GB on the dual-layer
Now compare that to single-layer HD-DVD discs with 25GB, that's about $2.50/disc again.
Not too bad, all things considered (and now the dual-layer or lightscribe stuff has gone down too).
I wonder how much a dual-layer HD-DVD or LightScribe HD-DVD disc will run? My personal hope is that the newer format discs push the price of existing DVD's (especially dual-layer or scribeable ones) down, since I'm sticking with standard DVD-players at the moment.
Slightly offtopic, but did anyone notice one of the other articles beneath this one? It appears that Sony has cut out the adult film industry from putting titles on Blu Ray.
Here is it.
I'm still waiting for cheap DVD +- DL to arrive by the spindle...
Will DL ever take off? Or will HD be mainstream by the time it arrives?
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Back when they were somewhat new and writers were just starting to become affordable. BD/HD-DVD drives are still pretty expensive now though.
Yeah, you can take a whole 2GB worth of pics and movies.
... and then they built the supercollider.
It's just a block device, IE it's a big string of data...
What's to stop you putting another filesystem on it?
UDF may be the most common filesystem, but any unix OS will quite happily read a DVD which contains it's normal format (ufs, ext2 etc)..
It's only windows that has ridiculous restrictions on which of the supported filesystems can be used on which of the supported media types.
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Te point is that with hi-res cameras I can fill up 2 GB in a weekend, meaning that my photo/movie library grows by that amount on a pretty regular basis. Thus DVDs tend not to be enough.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
--You might want to "trim the fat" a bit; convert pics to a standard resolution + less colors, and only keep the _absolute best_ pics out of the lot.
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
+ Mod parent up
.iso image to DVD. Use RW discs at first to make sure you get it right, and verify the disc can be mounted and read properly.
.iso image) and WinSCP.
--Yes, this is a somewhat little-known feature of *nix OS. You pretty much set up a loopback filesystem (ext2, since 4-8GB DVD-size filesystem fsck is negligible, and you don't need Journaling on something that's going on read-only media) -- copy your files onto it, dismount the loopback, and burn it like an
--If you need to migrate the disc data to Windoze, you can use Vmware + Linux Livecd (bootable
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
... that expire in 6 months or so and manage to push quality Japanese media off the shelf. I can't wait!
But what difference does it make if it's pictures? 2GB is 2GB, regardless of the source.
... and then they built the supercollider.
But what difference does it make if it's pictures? 2GB is 2GB, regardless of the source.
The reason I originally brought it up is that back when I bought my DVD writer (early 2003), my camera had a 256 MB card. It took quite a bit longer to fill a DVD with that, and thus backing up to DVD wasn't so painful. I don't have any other sources of data that generate gigabytes and require backup; video torrents may be that size, but you have a handy backup at piratebay...
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
You are both totally wrong.
1. UDF compared to ISO9660 is designed as a read-write system. It is one of it major advantages (and the reason why it is worth using it on RW CDROMs instead of ISO9660). You can actually write straight to the disks instead of having to maintain multi-gigabyte buffer space. By the way, your loopback approach does nothing at all regarding the 1G limit. Your ext3fs will be limited to 1G in size because the max file you can write to the disk is 1G. In addition to that as UDF supports ownership and normal unix-like attributes there is very little sense in doing this in the first place (unless you need posix ACLs or extended attributes).
2. The DVD readers especially the combined super-duper-ultra-blah drives have some capabilities to read and understand UDF and ISO9660. You simply cannot burn a non-standard FS on many of them and if you have succeeded in burning it there is a fair chance that it will not read on anything but the same device with the same firmware. This totally defeats the idea of having removable media. Removeable media should be readable at least on the same OS with a same type device (not the same brand, model, firmware revision, patch level and manufacturing date). After all you burn it for two main purposes - backup and moving data. If you cannot move your data freely you have shot yourself in the foot. If you cannot read any of your backups on the computer which has replaced your stolen one - you have shot yourself in the foot twice with a bazooka while looking at the exhaust.
3. That is besides all strange devices on the market that are UDF, while using non-standard media like the iOmega REV (which is not the only one). You cannot format them either and you are stuck with the UDF limitations.
So yeah, fine, while it is very nice to see BR and HDDVDRW disks rapidly go down in price I still get shivers when I have to use them for backing up and moving data. Oh, and by the way, my backup system in my home office operates on DVDRW so I have been through all this a couple of times so far.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Still doesn't make any sense. You take more pictures merely because of the size of the media? Shouldn't you be taking the amount of pictures you want to take, regardless of media? This implies that you are either taking too many photos now, or you weren't taking enough photos back then.
... and then they built the supercollider.
This implies that you are either taking too many photos now, or you weren't taking enough photos back then.
Actually, it's mainly longer mini-movies. And yes, back then I could only take 10 second ones with the camera I had, so I wasn't taking "enough" back then. The current camera allows me to take movies as much as the card will hold.
Also, the pics are somewhat higher resolution, and thus larger, with my more recent camera.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.