1TB Blu-Ray Compatible Optical Disc Announced

red_dragon writes "An article on The Register tells the news of an announcement of a new 1TB optical drive and disc that will be backwardly compatible with Blu-ray discs. The technology, developed by Call/Recall in partnership with Nichia, uses a rhodamine-type dye in a 200+-layer recording medium that gives off light when excited by a laser beam, along with a single fluid-filled lens to read multiple layers by varying the amount of fluid to change the focal length. The technology is designed to work with Nichia's blue-violet laser diodes, which are already used in Blu-ray drives."

Comments

Finally....

[Anonymous Coward]

...we can fit your mom on blu-ray!

Re:Finally....

[Anonymous Coward]

And for you, only a DVD is required to store your mental state.

Re:Finally....

[Bovarchist]

I'm stateless.

Re:Finally....

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot to check that "Post Anonymously" box this time, noob troller!

Re:Finally....

[zukinux]

...we can fit your mom on blu-ray! If you already mention that,
Tell Miss Coward (your mom) I said hello :)

Re:Finally....

[Anonymous Coward]

Mom says hi.
Mom also says "You owe me 18 years of child support"

Typo

[kernowyon]

uses a rhodamine-type dye in a 200+-later recording medium
Presumably the correct phrase is laser recording medium?

Re:Typo

[simcop2387]

nope, its most likely layer not laser.

Re:Typo

[nacturation]

I'd say layer -- having several hundred lasers in a single drive is a sure sign you've jumped the shark.

Re:Typo

[Jason1729]

I would have guessed 200 Layer recording medium.

Re:Typo

[kernowyon]

Ooops - my bad! Having rtfm'd, it should be layer

Re:Typo

[Anonymous Coward]

A disc destroyer.

And a lot of frickin' sharks.

Re:Typo

[Anonymous Coward]

I see what you did there...

Re:Typo

[Anonymous Coward]

Lawyer.

  I'd be excited by burning through them with a blue-violet laser, 200 at a time.

Re:Typo

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"I'd say layer -- having several hundred lasers in a single drive is a sure sign you've jumped the shark."

Hmm... actually, why don't they use mutiple lasers on a disc? Get some paralell reads going...?

Re:Typo

[FurtiveGlancer]

I'd say awesome -- having lasers mounted on several hundred sharks that can drive....

Re:Typo

[davolfman]

They did that once. A friend bought it on my recommendation. He's still mad because it sucked.

Re:Typo

[Anonymous Coward]

But, I hardly know her!

Re:Typo

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

What sucked about it?

Re:Typo

[bkr1_2k]

Power consumption would be my first guess. Second would be the fact that you won't get much better playback of any video from multiple reads so it's only good for reading data and then only if you have enough buffer space and fast enough bus to actually do something productive with that data.

Re:Typo

[milsoRgen]

It was done long ago during the twilight of CD only drive...

See...

http://everything2.com/e2node/TrueX
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-ROM#Transfer_rates
http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Multiheaded_20CD-ROM

I believe the main issues were reliability, cost and lack of noticeable speed gains when using the CD-ROM in common tasks. Although there isn't much to be found (or said) about them anymore. It would seem the increased density of today's optical media put a damper on the need for increased spindle speeds making multiple lasers an unattractive way to boost speeds.

Also if I remember correctly they were entering a market at a time when CD-R/RW drives were becoming more cost competitive.

Re:Typo

[Kwiik]

No, what they really mean is that if you want to record 1TB on to an optical disk, you should start now because you will be spinning in their desk-chair until 200 *years* later

Re:Typo

[xbytor]

>having several hundred lasers in a single drive is a sure sign you've jumped the shark.

But think of the seek times...

Re:Typo

[ShieldW0lf]

So, how long before I can buy the Library of Alexandria in a Chinese market stall for 10c?

Re:Typo

[Jason1729]

So who's the idiot who modded this redundant considering I posted it within a minute of the first person who posted a similar reply.

Re:Typo

[gweihir]

I would have guessed 200 Layer recording medium.

I resent this needles bashing of the innovative ''lala''-technology! 200 lalas are clearly superiour to every other medium on th market!

Re:Typo

[mrbluze]

But, I hardly know her! Don't let that stop you!

Re:Typo

[flyingsquid]

Personally, I'm just thrilled by the idea of 1 terabyte disks. I can't wait until I can back up my entire porn collection with only 50 or 60 disks.

Re:Typo

[Anonymous Coward]

But think of the seek times...

If you're talking great whites with lasers, don't you mean "shriek times"?

Re:Typo

[afxgrin]

Yay for mutagenic dyes used in consumer products!! Yay!!! Let's make these, in the millions!!! YAY!!!

Re:Typo

[davolfman]

Slow spindle speed to allow CLV at the time meant that it's seek latency more than made up for the bandwidth increase on larger files.

Re:Typo

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think thats the proper use of the term "jump the shark"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_shark

Video uses

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo]

It's hard to imagine a single movie on a 1 TB disc. At first glance it looks like it will make backing up a cinch. But most of my burned CDs and DVDs start flaking after just a couple of years, unless they can make these ultra high capacity formats more archival friendly it's just going to be wasted space.

Re:Video uses

[andrewd18]

It's hard to imagine a single movie on a 1 TB disc.

Metal Gear Solid 5 will require three of these.

Re:Video uses

[mpapet]

Oh if only the unwashed masses understood the peril of backing up to CD/DVD/Blu...

Unless the owners of the Bluray IP buy into this scheme, it's as good as dead. They'll probably knock off the technology anyway because they can.

Re:Video uses

[OldeTimeGeek]

What peril of backing up to CD/DVD/Blu-ray does the great unwashed just not get?

Re:Video uses

[Gat0r30y]

more archival friendly Well...

Call/Recall also intends to use the technology for the enterprise market for the archiving of corporate information. It would appear that is one of the applications they are aiming at. Since this is WORM I would suspect it would be handy for archival, but not much else - you can only write this stuff once.

Re:Video uses

[maxume]

People think they are a 'hard' copy and 'safe' whereas they are 'another' copy and 'unreliable'.

Re:Video uses

[Martin Blank]

DVDs are beginning to come up short in backups, but Taiyo-Yuden makes high-quality recordable DVD media that should last you at least a couple of decades if kept in reasonable environments (mostly what you would find in a common home). It's a little more expensive, but it's worth it for backups.

Re:Video uses

[dreamchaser]

That's nothing. Duke Nukem Forever will take 10 of these disks, all loaded in drives at the same time in order to just play the game.

Re:Video uses

[Grishnakh]

No, even if these failed after a few years, they'd still be really useful: instead of having to re-burn your entire DVD collection every year or two, you'd only have to re-burn a few of these 1TB discs. Even if you have a ton of data, it probably wouldn't take many of these to back up everything you have, and making copies at 100MB/sec should be pretty fast. Making a copy of everything once every year or two is much easier if your whole library consists of 5 discs instead of 500.

Re:Video uses

[Grishnakh]

It would appear that is one of the applications they are aiming at. Since this is WORM I would suspect it would be handy for archival, but not much else - you can only write this stuff once.

All my CD-Rs and DVD-Rs are WORM as well. What's the problem? When would I ever want to re-write a disc when they're so cheap I can just throw them away and burn new ones?

As long as the blank media is cheap, I have no interest in rewriteability.

Re:Video uses

[Idbar]

I would say, next thing to do, is to break that 1T into 5 x 200G (Which is still plenty of room) and make a RAID 6 type of algorithm to overcome to scratches, and improve the longevity of the disks and resistance to abuse.

Re:Video uses

[failedlogic]

I've about 1 GB of personal work I absolutely have to have reliable backups of. So I've burned to several CDs and DVDs (different manufacturers) and I've created a RAR file and PAR archive with 100% recovery record. Its CPU intensive (esp on my P4 rig, Core2 might not be as bad) and takes a few hours to do it all). I stored some of the backups in a fire-proof safe. I sleep better at night!

I'd love to see these discs come to market. But, the media has to be affordable. $10 to $30 a disc would be great. At the least, I hope a higher premium might deter most companies for making cheapo discs as has happened with CDs and DVDs. I started to use Tayis but I've been using HP, Verbatim as alternate backups. This is really a serious waste of resources when one or two discs don't do the trick. Sigh.

Re:Video uses

[bkr1_2k]

People think they are a 'hard' copy and 'safe' whereas they are 'another' copy and 'unreliable'.

As opposed to what? Seriously, how is any back up different than the original in a digital medium?

Re:Video uses

[kesuki]

"most of my burned CDs and DVDs start flaking after just a couple of years,"

well, your mileage may vary, but i've had almost no problems with optical media degradation.

my secret? i only check the disks very rarely, and never expose them to harsh temperature changes, and i don't let them go into dark, damp places, because of the use of organic dyes that are suceptible to fungal degredation.

plus, i've always gone for the highest grade media available. I avoid cheap meadia like the plague...

Re:Video uses

[MBGMorden]

Same here. I haven't bothered with RW media in ages. Usually by the time I want to erase it it's got enough scratches that I don't trust it (maybe if caddy's made a comeback I'd use RW media more . . .). With DVD discs running $0.25 or so (and an RW disc running many times that cost), I just don't care enough to worry about reusing it.

Re:Video uses

[maxume]

Even people that have experienced hard disk failure or floppy disk failure think that burned discs simply will not fail. I'm surprised you haven't encountered such attitudes.

Also, pressed media is probably more reliable than burned media.

Re:Video uses

[bkr1_2k]

Yes, pressed media is more reliable than burned media, but we're talking about back-ups here, not music sales.

That still doesn't explain what perils these would pose rather than some other option.

Re:Video uses

[maxume]

The original question was "What peril of backing up to CD/DVD/Blu-ray does the great unwashed just not get?" my answer, in essence, was that they aren't reliable (this *is* something that the great unwashed masses do not get).

I never said that they were better or worse than anything else...

Re:Video uses

[Vancorps]

Blue-ray "Professional" disc is in a caddy format. Nice and bulky, I first saw it and thought "retro!"

Then I realized how crappy it is to store video on blue-ray for production purposes. It takes so long to get the video off of it that it's pointless.

My last event produced over 100 blue-ray discs at 25gig each that's not really that much video. It's taken over a week to get it onto the SAN where it is actually useful. 1TB blue-ray might be more worthwhile, we'll see when it comes out.

Re:Video uses

[Idbar]

Yes, that's my point. They keep trying to put more and more information in a single disc without any sign of improving reliability. This way, the only thing they are increasing is the amount of data you lose when the disc goes bad. As you are not supposed to trust the media (even more when you are in charge of the backups), they should give some sense on increased reliability to the people so they can safely move to a new technology.

Although, what I said is an application, doing it in hardware would probably improve the speed that you are talking about, when you need to break backups into multiple RAR files. Even worse, when you know that a missing RAR file could cause the whole backup to be unrecoverable. (I don't know if they have implemented some sort of algorithm to make those pieces redundant and recoverable from an accident on one of the files, but certainly, would be the same kind of application I'm talking about).

Re:Video uses

[kootsoop]

It's hard to imagine a single movie on a 1 TB disc.

Duke Nukem Forever will require three of these. There, fixed it for you.

Re:Video uses

[dgatwood]

CD-R discs flake. DVD-R discs have the metal layer between two layers of plastic, so they can't flake (unless you mean the label paint). They can oxidize, but not flake. As a result, DVD-R should be much less susceptible to accidental damage than CD-R media.

Re:Video uses

[mrops]

640kb should be enough for everyone

Re:Video uses

[sponga]

Well by than like any technology the discs will be about $0.10 a disc like it.

Personally I cannot wait to go to Fry's and buy a 50 pack of Blu-Ray discs for $15, but hard drives will be so cheap by than that it might be pointless as I could carry a drive around almost. I will need like 1 disc with all my MP3's on it to play in my car.

HD-DVD could never match BR anyways even when they both come out with more layers, I don't know what some were thinking when rooting for that.

Re:Video uses

[dgatwood]

Even people that have experienced hard disk failure or floppy disk failure think that burned discs simply will not fail. I'm surprised you haven't encountered such attitudes.

In practice, they're probably right far more often than they are wrong. While it is true that all media are inherently unreliable, magnetic media are particularly unreliable. At least if an optical disc fails, you usually only lose a small portion of the data (unless you break it in half or scratch off the silver layer on a CD-R). With a hard drive, you snap one head off and you're so totally screwed it isn't even funny.

Last night, I cloned off my dying MythTV box after a Seagate 500 GB SATA drive turned into a chainsaw (I could hear the grinding sound as I walked in the door of my house four rooms away). About a year old, incredibly well cooled (barely luke warm), never transported. Thankfully, I had a 500 GB Seagate PATA drive lying around because it wouldn't work in my Series 1 TiVo (a buggy ATA implementation caused it to fail to start loading the kernel about 90% of the time), so I'm back up and running. Even still, my level of trust in Seagate drives just took a rather massive nose dive. There are now precisely zero hard drive vendors on my preferred list.

I've even seen tape drives (okay, camcorders) where a fleck of something on the heads ripped oxide off the tape. Magnetic media is horribly fragile---far more so than optical.

I'd take optical media over any other media. At least there is no physical contact between the read/write mechanism and the recording surface (nor any possibility of accidental contact as is frequently the case in catastrophic hard drive deaths). In the worst case, if you scratch the thing, you can probably fix it by polishing the surface. Worst case is you have to add resin to replace the missing material, then polish it until it is smooth.

Sure, you have the problem of data retention due to dye fading and/or oxidization of the foil layer with optical media, but with modern magnetic media, you have several fundamental design flaws that can be just as bad: the medium being essentially inseparable from the drive mechanism (which is orders of magnitude more likely to fail than the medium), sharp objects (heads) in close proximity to the recording surface, the susceptibility to magnetic fields, the medium being inseparable from the drive electronics (again, orders of magnitude more likely to fail), the fragility risk of glass substrates, the extra cost associated with having to repurchase all of the electronics and mechanism along with the media, etc. That's not even considering the question of superparamagnetism and the need for increasingly complex checksums to prevent random bit flipping on the magnetic media....

IMHO, there are three basic requirements for a good backup medium:

1. It should be reliable for a reasonable period of time.
2. It should be cheap enough that you can afford to have at least three relatively recent, viable backups at all times. In the case of non-reusable media, this means you should be able to back up two or three times before the reliability of the earliest backup comes into question. In the case of reusable media, this means that you should be able to have at least three sets of media between which you alternate; failure detection takes care of itself for reusable media.
3. Individual discs/tapes/* should be large enough that an average computer can be backed up at least once without changing media so that users can do backups while they are at work or asleep.

#3 is currently the killer for all currently-available optical backup media. In fact, all but the most expensive tape drives also fail #3. And of course, if you are buying the really expensive tape drives, the price of the tapes causes them to fail #2.

Don't worry, though. There's little danger of this new technology changing the status quo significantly. By the time this media becomes av

Re:Video uses

[maxume]

Right, that's why I called them 'another' copy. 10 DVD's is a big pain in the ass compared to an external HD drive, but it is another layer of protection.

As far as capacity, I disagree. I kept up with capacity gains from 1995 to 2005 by digitizing music. I have little desire to do the same for video, so 0.5-1.0 terabytes will last me for a very long time. Even if I started doing video, I don't see the need to go all that far past DVD resolution (I'm cheap and only by 'small', 40" screens), so a couple of dozen of terabytes is going to last a very, very long time.

Re:Video uses

[failedlogic]

Here's the details on the PAR files (its on Sourceforge), and its cross-platform: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive. PAR has noting to do with RAR.

And yes, it still negates the usefulness of backups when the media is unreliable as you mention(ed). If you don't end up with a bad hard drive then it tends to be more reliable at backups. I'd considered using Tape, but having very little experience using them, and based on what I've read on the Net, they can still be unreliable thus the rotating backup scheme. DVD-RAM seems great but is hard to find drives. The caddys are/were a great idea. I hope this new format adopts it and DVD-RAM style file system. If manufacturers pro port 20-year+ longevity on media, then back-it up with a warranty. I should be able to return DVDs that have failed within 2-years (I would say out of 100 DVDs only 10 have failed). Those are out of the ones I've had time to test. And others from years before (about 40 CDs) and have already been backuped (ironically onto DVDs) mostly all the CDs have failed in 5 years.

Even 3.5 and 5.25" floppys were more reliable. I think my Win 95 on 40 Floppys still works. I've worked in Government and many employees are sticking CDs, DVDs and floppies into archives relying on the 20+ year longevity quoted by the manufacturer. Burnable CDs, let alone DVDs, have not been around for 20 years (esp manufactured *cheaply* as today). It certainly does not stand the test of time, and doesn't tend to last anywhere near that either!

Re:Video uses

[Ucklak]

Cheap CD-R discs flake.
Taiyo Yuden discs don't flake.

Re:Video uses

[mikael]

The problems with CD/DVD burners:

1. Different burners have different formats. You have to be sure that when you have completed a backup, that it has been "closed" and prepared for use as a generic CD-ROM. Your worst nightmare is being in some remote location unable to get a replacement drive that reads the exact same formats (Roxio/DirectCD/Nero) as your previous one.

2. It's hard to remember the exact compatibility's between different CD and DVD formats DVD-R/DVD+R/DVD-RW/DVD+RW 16x/8x/4x/2x, DVD players and the various different materials.

This is to such an extent that numerous sites have sprung up to provide compatibility lists between players and DVD's.

3. You are never quite sure whether a backup will have enough space to save a full backup unless the amount of data is substantially less that the free space available on a partially used DVD or CD. CD's don't really have that much space when it comes to saving large zip files.

4. CD's and DVD's can be permanently damaged through a simple scratch with anything metal while being removed from the drive bay.

If you have an external hard disk drive, then you don't have to worry about such problems - the format doesn't need to be "finished", the worst hassle you have is to syncing the drives, and you can use a RAID array for additional security should one drive fail.

Re:Video uses

[westlake]

It's hard to imagine a single movie on a 1 TB disc.

Not so hard to imagine it being easier to find shelf space for the 68 episodes of Upstairs, Downstairs, or the 161 episodes of The Avengers. It's not easy to beat that shinny plastic disk as a distribution and storage media for video.

Re:Video uses

[thetoadwarrior]

I back things up on DVDs but I also try to keep as much stuff on Rsync.net. That is the best form of backup as my backup will be backed up and I can access it from anywhere.

Re:Video uses

[m50d]

It could allow lossless movies, which would be nice. I recently was transcoding a half-hour episode and found it easier to work with a raw .y4m; 50GB's worth, at dvdish resolution (60fps though). I could easily go with at least 2.5x that both horizontally and vertically, call it 7x overall so that makes 700GB an hour - so these disks have enough space for a movie, and, as a bonus, no space for pointless "extras". Sounds like this format could be good.

Re:Video uses

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you need to invest in multiple readers. You do know that tasks like file copies are embarrassingly parallel, right?

Re:Video uses

[dgatwood]

As somebody who does audio recording as a hobby, a terabyte is maybe six months worth of recording on the weekends.... Forget video....

Re:Video uses

[dgatwood]

AFAIK, any CD-R disk will flake given a very small amount of abuse. Aluminum foil isn't naturally sticky, so the only thing holding it in place is the stiffness of the lacquer layer on top of it. All you have to do is take out a compass and drag it across the top of the disc a couple of times to fracture the lacquer layer, and even with the best CD-R media, the foil will come off in large clumps.

Don't get me wrong, such flaking shouldn't happen without abuse... but it's pretty easy to make it happen. Just give your two-year-old physical access to the media and your choice of a pair of scissors, a screwdriver, a spoon, a key, the corner of your computer desk....

Re:Video uses

[maxume]

Oh, I realize that it varies a great deal from person to person, but I don't think that you are anywhere near the mean, or the median. To some extent, I expect that I use a good deal more space than your average computer user, and certainly more than the average person.

Re:Video uses

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you need to invest in multiple readers. You do know that tasks like file copies are embarrassingly parallel, right? And multiple hard drives, NOT in RAID. File copies are only "embarrassingly parallel" if you don't have to SEEK. Otherwise, they're "embarrassingly sequential."

Re:Video uses

[dgatwood]

Well, I suspect we will soon see a lot more people (legally) downloading movies instead of buying DVDs. The average person buys something like 15 DVDs per year. If we transition to a download-based delivery system (which is almost inevitable, IMHO), then even at non-HD resolution, you're talking about the average person downloading and storing some 138 gigabytes per year. For an HD movie at 25 GB of content, you're talking about 375 GB per year. :-)

Re:Video uses

[arodland]

"Partitioning" a disc for error resilience doesn't really help, or you would see it in use with today's big hard drives. Strong error-correcting codes are more effective, and they're already in use on every kind of optical media.

Re:Video uses

[maxume]

Fair enough. I really hope that movies are eventually downloadable for restricted playback though, at much lower cost. I would love to be able to rent a movie for $1 and watch it for 72 hours or so. At that price, I don't care about being able to resell it or if I own it or whatever.

Re:Video uses

[Idbar]

I think the reason of failure in HDD is different from discs. The thing is how to correctly physically partition a disc to get gain out of it.

For the case of the hard drive, the problem is that several things can fail, including the heads, and I remember at some points even the heads would scratch the media and break it. In this case, the media is independent of the "reading" mechanism, the laser doesn't need to be even close. However, the failure is more likely related to scratches that can be located in particular places, since the data is written sequentially in the disc, a scratch will cause the loss of a sequential chunk. In the case of a DVD, randomly accessing the information will translate into delays reading the data, but if data can be read at 100MB (probably sequential too), perhaps a good rate can be achieved reading randomly. But that's just a thought.

Re:Video uses

[mattack2]

I'm not sure where you're buying them, but at least if you're buying discs on the weekly sales that seem to run almost continuously (rotating between different stores), one can often get DVD media (even 'name brands', though it often doesn't matter) much less than $.25/disc.

Also, RW discs aren't always "many times" that cost ($.25). DVD-RAM discs are, though they also act much closer to a hard drive (can delete particular recordings and regain the space immediately), and are supposedly more reliable than other media.

Anyway, DVD-RWs often show up in sales (such as at Office Depot) for $.33 to $.50 each in 25 or 50 packs.
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=614479 is a good thread to keep track of various media deals of the week.

Re:Video uses

[mgblst]

No, the discs will be really expensive, becuase nobody will make them anymore, and there are only a few in a warehouse somewhere in China.

Re:Video uses

[craagz]

hmm sex robots!!
btw 1TB that's a lot of pr0n!!

Re:Video uses

[bkr1_2k]

Good points. I hadn't really considered compatibility issues, but I would think anyone who has taken the effort to actually make backups in the first place would have media (and appropriate readers) to minimize the impact of that particular problem.

As for the space issue, I know exactly how much data I'm backing up, and the application running the backup usually tells me, so I don't see how it's that difficult to "know for sure" but I may be missing something.

CDs and DVDs can both be permanently damaged, but so can any other backup media. Hard drives fail, RAID drives fail, there is no perfect solution, and that was my point.

Re:Video uses

[Vancorps]

Except that professional disc readers/writers are on the order of 10k each. Not so embarrassingly parallel especially given that file copies are not a consistent length and there is no dedicated personnel. Right now it's a batch file that messages a user's computer to let them know it's done copying. Pain in the arse when an LTO4 drive can hold more than 10 times as much data in a smaller package.

Re:Video uses

[petermgreen]

1. Different burners have different formats. You have to be sure that when you have completed a backup, that it has been "closed" and prepared for use as a generic CD-ROM. Your worst nightmare is being in some remote location unable to get a replacement drive that reads the exact same formats (Roxio/DirectCD/Nero) as your previous one.
Afaict theese are usually dependent on the software package not the burner and both roxio and ahead are quite happy to sell you non burner locked versions of their software both through major computer stores and directly.

Re:Video uses

[kesuki]

"Just give your two-year-old physical access to the media and your choice of a pair of scissors, a screwdriver, a spoon, a key, the corner of your computer desk...."

the up side of never getting through a relationship long enough to involve even the chance of spawning little ones, is that my media have never been in the hands of children... relatives rarely come to visit me, and none with small children would visit me now anyways.

i was lucky enough that when i started burning CDs that the people i was living with then had no small children, and then i moved in to my parents, who live too far away from their grandkids, and now i live alone, in a small apartment.

I know a lot of slashdot have 'grown up' and got married, but at age 30, i already know I'll never get involved with a woman long term... it doesn't help that people with my mental illness tend to Prefer staying single, even medicated... but perhaps that's a good thing, and a reason why only 1% of the population wind up with my mental illness.. the genetics for it, tend to breed out of the population.

Ironic

[Anita Coney]

That these Blu-ray compatible discs will be primarily used by consumers to store ripped Blu-ray movies.

Re:Ironic

[Darkness404]

That these Blu-ray compatible discs will be primarily used by consumers to store ripped Blu-ray movies.

You could say that about any media, CDs, DVDs, even floppy disks (for holding ripped games), but I don't see the average consumer wanting/needing that much storage, in fact my current low-end computer only has a 20 gig HD and after installing tons of programs and Xubuntu I still have 15 gigs free (now granted, my image, movie and music collection is small on that) but still, I just don't see the need of the average person to need 1 TB of BR data even to store ripped movies as it would be easier to buy a cheap 25 gig disk and burn it to there. An increase in storage space is nice, but for 98% of the population, it is needless.

Re:Ironic

[Das Modell]

A 25 gb disk is woefully inadequate for storing Blu-ray rips, or even standard 1.35 gb rips. A 1 tb Blu-ray disk would be most excellent for backup purposes.

1TB disc!

[jez9999]

How many libraries of congress could you hold on that?

Re:1TB disc!

[denzacar]

I'd say a football stadium of horse carts filled with candles. Or two.

Re:1TB disc!

[morgan_greywolf]

What's the conversion for that in 'Volkswagen Beetles'?

Re:1TB disc!

[Anonymous Coward]

How many libraries of congress could you hold on that? I didn't know there was more than one library of congress? How many were you planning on needing to store? By storing multiple library of congresses, would this effectively be a redundant array of inexpensive RAID disc?

Re:1TB disc!

[Ken_g6]

How many libraries of congress could you hold on that? It looks like 1 LoC = 70TB. So that's about .014 LoC/disc.

I guess we've finally found something that takes more than one disc!

Re:1TB disc!

[torgis]

Wouldn't the proper term be "multiple libraries of Congress"? Similar to how we're supposed to say "Courts martial" instead of "Court martials" or "Attorneys General" instead of "Attorney Generals." I won't pretend to understand it, but it was written in a condescending tone by an angry English major in a forum on the internet somewhere, so it must be true.

Re:1TB disc!

[Anonymous Coward]

All of them.

Re:1TB disc!

[Astadar]

The reason we have courts-martial and attorneys general is because martial and general are the modifiers.

Courts-martial are courts where martial law is adjudicated and attorneys general are the general practice attorneys for the government.

Looking at it the other way, attorney generals would be generals (military, I presume) each of whom is an attorney, and martials doesn't make sense as plural.

As an aside, one of my Dad's biggest pet peeves was RBIs in baseball. Again, it should be Runs Batted In (RBI), not Run Batted Ins.

Re:1TB disc!

[fr4nk]

Also, how many laptop miles do I need to pipe that amount of data through bzip2 in 1 minute?

Re:1TB disc!

[Spatial]

It looks like 1 LoC = 70TB. I read that as 'Line of Code' at first, and began to wonder if they stored their source code as screenshots of 72-point font pasted into .doc files...

Re:1TB disc!

[mikael]

Looks like that would be enough capacity for a second generation Domesday Project. The first version only allowed every school to provide a few pages of text and a couple of images (total memory = 1.2 Gigabytes).

Re:1TB disc!

[oblivionboy]

I think he meant to ask that in terms of Space Shuttles per Stadium.

nice but...

[pilgrim23]

A whole TB and there is STILL not a thing to watch! Seriously. I am more interested in an affordable Blue Ray WRITER for backup. I am sure the typical coach potato will love this but a burner is all that will get the DVDR out of my machine.

Re:nice but...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827106254

$350 doesn't seem too expensive...

Speed?

[Oxy the moron]

100MB/sec? Assuming that the capital "B" is the intent, that means it would take close to 3 hours to write a full 1TB disk. Is that fast enough for most backup applications? I mean, obviously it would be fine for archival purposes, but it doesn't seem practical for daily backups.

Unless you're doing daily backups of Libraries of Congress, then it should function just fine. :)

Re:Speed?

[Reality Master 101]

Is that fast enough for most backup applications? I mean, obviously it would be fine for archival purposes, but it doesn't seem practical for daily backups.

For home or office use, it'd be great. Do you use your computer 24 hours a day? Three hours is fine. Pop a disk in before you go to bed (or leave the office) and let it go to town.

Re:Speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

but it doesn't seem practical for daily backups Increments?

Re:Speed?

[H0p313ss]

but it doesn't seem practical for daily backups.

Can you give an example of a competing technology that is practical for backing up 1TB daily? Short of having your own tape/cd burner farm?

Re:Speed?

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

100MB/sec? Assuming that the capital "B" is the intent, that means it would take close to 3 hours to write a full 1TB disk. Is that fast enough for most backup applications? I mean, obviously it would be fine for archival purposes, but it doesn't seem practical for daily backups. Well you wouldn't have 1TB of data to back up every day in 99% of cases.

Re:Speed?

[SBrach]

Even if bus speeds increase to 10 GB/s? I mean eventually I/O speeds will make a TB trivial. Can you remember a time when it didn't take a long time to move around the full capacity of the largest storage medium? It's not like we had SATA II speeds when 10GB was a big drive.

Re:Speed?

[jellomizer]

Lets think of it this way. Being able to burn a CD 7 seconds. Or a double Layered DVD under 2 minutes. Thats pritty fast. As of 2008 Most people do not need a 1TB Drives. Unless it is a backup drive. Waiting 3 hours to burn a terrabyes to Backup your Backup drive doesn't seem to crazy. It often takes longer then then to write to the drive anyways espectially if it is an exernal USB 2 drive, which are normally slow, (but cheap and hold a lot of data)

Re:Speed?

[Gat0r30y]

And what advantage would this offer over a hard drive? Cost? I seriously doubt a writer and the disk could be procured for less than the cost of 1TB HDD (around a couple hundred right now, and undoubtedly significantly less by the time this comes out). Personally I don't see the draw for these types of optical storage, other than the mobility of a disk vs. a HDD (which is negligible) What would the advantage to this be? (not trolling, if anyone has any ideas please reply)

Re:Speed?

[Tadrith]

That would be more than enough speed for backing up, especially at the right price. I have a client who has approximately 7TB of data. It isn't because of wasted space either, but because of the industry they are in. We could perform a full backup say, once a month on the weekend, and that would greatly reduce the disaster recovery time.

He currently backs up on a "per client" basis on DLT tapes, which is fine, but my own personal nightmare is that everything crashes and we have to restore from the 50+ tapes lying around. Obviously all of this data is on arrays with hot spares and such, but I would be more than happy to have some sort of "interim" solution in the event that somehow, everything blows up.

Obviously long-term archiving on it may be an issue, but I'm not looking for that so much as I'm looking to have some sort disaster recovery option. Backup systems seem to be falling far behind the amount of data that many companies generate, so much so that we have begun to turn to redundant systems instead. For 1TB, this works great - just have a single IDE drive and back up to that, with tape for long-term, but it gets pricy for larger systems, and it does not have the benefit of being able to be brought off-site. We always recommend that bring their current backup with them each night, so if the building burns down, they still have their data.

Re:Speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

rsync to a remote computer (through ssh of course)

As long as not much data is changing each day, the backups take five minutes or so. If someone renames a huge directory, then hours.

I use this in combination with cp -al to create hardlink copies of the data to simulate daily snapshots. I do hourly snapshots similarly to an on-site computer.

Re:Speed?

[Bloodoflethe]

Incremental or differential? Discuss. (again)

Re:Speed?

[HalAtWork]

Right now I would be happy just to be able to back up so much data on a conveniently sized medium that has no moving parts.

Re:Speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then dont use it for daily backups...

Re:Speed?

[Wavebreak]

100MB/sec is faster than current hard drives, so I wouldn't exactly call that slow.

Re:Speed?

[Reality Master 101]

And what advantage would this offer over a hard drive? Cost? I seriously doubt a writer and the disk could be procured for less than the cost of 1TB HDD...

Media cost, diversity and archival. A hard drive gives you only a single backup, and is unlikely to get stored off-site. (Relatively) cheap media allows for many backups over time, and allows you to easily store them permanently off-site. You can also archive off old crap that you don't want sitting on your active media.

Re:Speed?

[Ex-MislTech]

Also, One Rsync variation uses a Delta copy method where it only
copies over the data that has changed even at a file level.

Ex: a 700mb movie file is slightly edited, it does not
recopy the whole movie file, just the diff.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsync#Variations

Thus can make for faster backups.

Re:Speed?

[TooMuchToDo]

I highly suggest you look into Amazon's S3 cloud storage service. We back up hundreds of TBs of data into it for one of our clients. No media to worry about. You just need fat pipe (100Mb/s transit, or even business class FIOS).

Re:Speed?

[Reality Master 101]

I should've also mentioned that a voltage spike (e.g., lightning) can fry your entire computer, including the backup drive, should it be attached at the time. Poof! Everything's gone.

Re:Speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

LTO4 is 120MB raw (uncompressed)

This is not that far out of the ballpark.

Re:Speed?

[urieleoc]

100MB/sec is very common for backup speeds. Many small-medium businesses backup across Gb lans to some sort of NAS device. I've seen a couple multi-TB daily backups in these sort of places. Unless you're running LTO4, I don't even think you'd see 100MB/sec in tape applications with stand alone drives.

Re:Speed?

[Grishnakh]

I'm sure that 10 years ago, no one thought you'd ever have to back up more than 4.4GB of data. Now, the 4.4GB limit of DVDs seems really small for backup purposes.

Re:Speed?

[Tadrith]

It looks like a great service, but in the few cases I have, my clients don't really have the ability to pay for that kind of pipe, and unfortunately, Verizon's FiOS still hasn't gotten to quite everywhere here in California.

We do have a couple clients with that sort of line at several datacenters, though, and this looks like an excellent solution. I will have to look into this further, as it would certainly simply things a lot, and we wouldn't have to worry about calling the datacenter to get tapes changed.

Re:Speed?

[Jesus_666]

So is everything when a voltage spike hits your computer while you're burning your TB-BR. No medium will protect you from a voltage spike that occurs during backup.

In case you assume that a hard drive always is built into the PC: The 90s are over and so is that moniker. FireWire S800 is already four times faster than this disc and not very expensive. And even though I haven't yet seen an eSATA compatible PC in the wild, there are external enclosures that support it. There really is no reason why a backup HDD should be connected internally.

Re:Speed?

[vux984]

Well you wouldn't have 1TB of data to back up every day in 99% of cases.

I dunno. I do daily incremental backups, but once a month, I'd like to take a complete snapshot of our servers. So for me its 1/30th the time... or around 97% of the time I don't need a full backup, but that 3% is still a killer PITA.

Re:Speed?

[Nulifier]

But you only ever need to buy one writer, so the cost of the writer is a one time cost. The only real cost that you have to worry about is the disc so they just need to be priced bellow hard-discs enough for it to be worth it.

Re:Speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't LTO-4 Ultirum tape up to 800GB native/1.6 TB compressed? If your 1TB of data is somewhat compressible, you can back it up using one tape. If not, get a tape library (or just a drive and switch the tapes manually if you must) and use two tapes per day.

That ain't too bad.

Re:Speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

If they're burning to a Disc, I assume they want off-site backup... I guess you could use external SATA drives for that, but I wasn't aware many people did that. Second, the real-world speeds are a little different, I'd be *very* impressed if you could get a sustained hard drive write to a SATA drive going at over 1 gig/sec.

Re:Speed?

[ActionDesignStudios]

Are your posts serious?

Re:Speed?

[SScorpio]

But if you got hit with a voltage spike while burning the TB-BR disk the burner may have been fried. However, any other disk you burned should still be working just fine after you replace the drive.

As for FireWire S8000 being four times faster. Please show me the hard drive that can sustain 400MB writes. It also does really matter that the backup drive is an external. If it's connected it likely has its own power adapter that it's connected to. Lightening can easily kill more than just the computer when you have multiple things connected. You may get lucky and only have the HDD's enclosure's power adapter fry, or even the SATA/USB/Firewire interface getting zapped from the PC so you can just take out the drive and run it. But it's also possible for the HDD's controller board to also be fried. It's true that you might be able to just swap that out, but having optical media allows you to just pop the disk in a new drive.

As for eSATA compatible PCs being in the wild. Where have you been living? It's been over two years since I've seen laptops that have included this functionality. Many motherboards are also coming with them now.

Re:Speed?

[Reality Master 101]

So is everything when a voltage spike hits your computer while you're burning your TB-BR. No medium will protect you from a voltage spike that occurs during backup.

During backup, that's true. But if you walk away from your computer after starting the backup at night (as is typical), it will still be okay if the strike happens after backup completion. The hard drive gets fried all night long. I would also say that it's more typical for people to leave their backup drive attached to their computers, rather than remove it as is typical for optical media.

Re:Speed?

[Vancorps]

I don't think it's meant to be a capital B. 800mbits would be truly impressive for a transfer rate. To achieve that it would have be directly fiber attached to the SAN or over 10gig ethernet. Might it replace the tape library? Over the years I've definitely developed a trust of optical media over magnetic media. Optical media is usually obvious when it's not going to work. With tape capacity stagnant along with transfer mediums in order to get any bandwidth you have to go to high level enterprise systems and of course pay enterprise dollars. This might be a solution for the smaller shops.

I agree that it's not practical for daily backups but I also think most people these days when it comes to daily are doing a disk-to-disk backup with a much smaller window. My window is 5-30 minutes depending on content.

Re:Speed?

[NMerriam]

So is everything when a voltage spike hits your computer while you're burning your TB-BR. No medium will protect you from a voltage spike that occurs during backup.

True, but the discs you burned yesterday and the day before will still be intact, because they're sitting in a closet. The only way that hard drives wind up being cheaper than optical media is if you keep using the same hard drive, in which case something like a surge wipes out your backup at the same time it destroys your primary data. The 1TB optical drive may cost much more than a hard drive of greater capacity, the question is whether or not the media will be cheap enough to make them competitive on a $/GB comparison.

And your external hard drive will be just as fried from a lightning strike or bad spike as an internal drive is. I don't know why you think only an internal drive would be damaged, they're both connected to the computer with metal conductors that go right to the controller board.

Re:Speed?

[audunr]

Our backup software (Retrospect) makes a duplicate of our external backup disk at 1GiB/minute. The duplicate hard disk is used for off-site storage. With 200-300 GiB of data, that's 3-5 hours to make a backup. The disks use Firewire 800. With an 7,5 hour work day, the person responsible has to come to work at a reasonable hour (no meetings at other people's offices in the morning) and stay for at least 3-5 hours before the hard disk can be taken away again. Which is not very flexible... So I totally agree, this could be really useful a lot of people, at least for us. Even if 3 hours might seem like a long time for some people.

Re:Speed?

[Jesus_666]

I tend to disconnect external drives when I'm not using them. No point in keeping them powered all the time - even in standby mode their energy consumption is nonzero.

Re:Speed?

[frosty_tsm]

While media cost would make sense, I doubt archival would be a good use.

All of us should know how fragile and short the lifespan is for DVDs (due to their data density). I imagine this would only be worse...

Re:Speed?

[jimicus]

100MB/sec? Assuming that the capital "B" is the intent, that means it would take close to 3 hours to write a full 1TB disk. Is that fast enough for most backup applications? I mean, obviously it would be fine for archival purposes, but it doesn't seem practical for daily backups.

100MB/sec, assuming it can be sustained, is slightly over the top speed of most hard disks. By the time you throw seek time into the mix, it's dramatically faster.

Re:Speed?

[Charcharodon]

Most people do not need a 1TB Drives

You are absolutely right, they need 5 of them.

My Tv/Movie DVD & MP3 collection has swamped 1.5TB without even trying, my digital photos from the last 10 years take up 35gb of space and I just picked up a new 12mp camera so the rate of growth is going to get worse, raw footage from old family movies from my childhood takes up a good 250gb by itself, and God forbid I get a 720p or 1080p video camera and start chasing the kids around. I've eaten up 2TB total of storage with no backups other than the photographs and the family movies. I'm contemplating adding two more 1TB drives this fall, that should buy me another year or so of empty storage space.

Most people do need multiple TB worth of drive space they just don't know it yet.

Re:Speed?

[Empty Threats]

Can you give an example of a competing technology that is practical for backing up 1TB daily? Short of having your own tape/cd burner farm?

Tape "farms" are cheap. Almost everyone has one. They're called tape libraries.

400G tapes, and libraries to hold them, are very, very affordable. It's the tape drive itself that costs the serious bucks, but that's a fixed cost.

Re:Speed?

[r_jensen11]

Waiting 3 hours to burn a terrabyes to Backup your Backup drive doesn't seem to crazy. Especially when you consider that the read speed for that drive you're backing up is slower than 100MB/s, most likely....

Re:Speed?

[arodland]

100MB/sec? Assuming that the capital "B" is the intent, that means it would take close to 3 hours to write a full 1TB disk. Is that fast enough for most backup applications? I mean, obviously it would be fine for archival purposes, but it doesn't seem practical for daily backups.

Well... that exceeds the maximum sustained read speeds of most hard drives... so I'd say it's not particularly a limitation :)

Re:Speed?

[marnek]

100 MB/sec is quite fast, and in fact is faster than the read speed of most hard drives.

Re:Speed?

[marnek]

Reliability. Not magnetic, no moving parts.

Re:Speed?

[Timmmm]

Burn a CD in 7 seconds? How fast would that have to be spinning?

Re:Speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well you wouldn't have 1TB of data to back up every day in 99% of cases. No, but going from 4.5GB/disc to 25GB/disc is kinda pointless, expecially considering the costs. 1TB will be enough for most places to backup everything _on a single media_ (a new one per backup, obviously).

Give me one of these at a reasonable price and I buy it even for home (some 15GiB to be backed up and counting -- no, not porn, just a lot of digital photos.) I'm using disk at the moment for backup,but having a copy on offline media definitely has its advantages.

Re:Speed?

[ilitirit]

Waiting 3 hours to burn a terabyte *is* crazy if you consider that it might fail at 90%. And just imagine how long data verification would take. And what if verification fails?

Re:Speed?

[jellomizer]

Why do you think burning to optical media is a good backup solution... It is probably cheaper and easer and faster just to keep differential backups on an external drive(s) Burning to Optical Disk offers a more affordable way of distributing information. Burn 1TB Linux ISO KNOPIX Extream!

Re:Speed?

[ilitirit]

Why do you think burning to optical media is a good backup solution... I didn't say I did. But since you asked, optical media is a great backup solution for things like music cd's. Make a 1-1 copy of the original, and shelve it. Only listen to the backup.

Re:Speed?

[CopaceticOpus]

This person is duplicating a an external backup disk to a second external backup disk, and waiting each day for it to finish? There are much better ways to handle this.

1. Since it takes so long each day, it sounds like you are re-copying the entire drive every day. Use rsync instead (it works on any platform) and you will save time and prevent wearing out your drives.

2. Rather than duplicating the drive during the day, simply swap out one external drive for the other. Then schedule a job to run at night and sync to the drive you currently have connected.

Just great

[Devin Jeanpierre]

And I thought I wasted my money buying a HD-DVD writer. Now I've gone and wasted my money on an ordinary Blu-Ray writer.

Alright, I lied. I didn't buy either of those. In fact, I'm not going to buy this "rhodamine-type" enhanced backwards-compatible Blu-Ray drive, because that will soon be surpassed by a Super-deluxe backwards compatible "rhadamine-type" enhanced backwards-compatible Blu-Ray drive. To think I thought the race was over.

Re:Just great

[morgan_greywolf]

And I thought I wasted my money buying a HD-DVD writer. Now I've gone and wasted my money on an ordinary Blu-Ray writer. Alright, I lied. I didn't buy either of those. In fact, I'm not going to buy this "rhodamine-type" enhanced backwards-compatible Blu-Ray drive, because that will soon be surpassed by a Super-deluxe backwards compatible "rhadamine-type" enhanced backwards-compatible Blu-Ray drive. To think I thought the race was over.

I dunno about you, but I'm still waiting for the dust to settle in the floppy disk wars; hence, I'm still doing my backups on 'datasettes'. BTW--anyone know where I can get these on sale? They're getting mighty expensive these days.

Excited...

[denzacar]

Que jokes on being excited by laser beams in 3..2..1...

Re:Excited...

[Hal_Porter]

Que jokes on being excited by laser beams in 3..2..1... Do not fear!

Sharks with lasers are patrolling to keep slashdot cliche free.

Re:Excited...

[morgan_greywolf]

Que jokes on being excited by laser beams in 3..2..1...

Can't. The sharks on strike this week.

Re:Excited...

[geekmansworld]

Que?

Re:Excited...

[Theoboley]

Queue or Spanish for ... WHAT???!!!! *Cue Little Jon or Dave Chappelle*

Re:Excited...

[camperdave]

Que?

Brilliant. I'd mod you up if I had the power.

Re:Excited...

[FurtiveGlancer]

British for "Cue," Spanish for "What." Say what?

Re:Excited...

[quanticle]

No, the British form of cue is still cue. You might be thinking of "queue", which is the British form of "to get in line".

Re:Excited...

[Anonymous Coward]

British for "Cue," Spanish for "What." Say what?

Que?!?!? Not quite.

First of all, the language is known as English, not British.

Queue - a waiting line
Cue - a signal to a performer to begin a specific speech or action
Que - Spanish for "WTF?!?!?"

Don't worry, I have faith that ignorance will cause them all to mean the same thing in another 5 years. Then you won't be wrong.

Re:Excited...

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot the "".

Re:Excited...

[denzacar]

Ah well... English not being my first language, misspelling "CUE" ain't that shameful.

Not noticing Firefox's spellchecker underlining it with that nice, bright, red line as it usually does when my phonetic knowledge of the language helps me stick the proverbial foot in my figurative mouth - now THAT is shameful.

Re:Excited...

[Anonymous Coward]

Manuel!!

4 kinds of lies in the world

[IronChef]

1. Lies
2. Damn lies
3. Statistics
4. Storage products

But seeing Nichia's name in there gives me hope. (Of course, Charlie Brown had hope every time Lucy held the football for him too.)

Re:4 kinds of lies in the world

[kellyb9]

1. Lies
2. Damn lies
3. Statistics
4. Storage products
5. ??????
6. PROFIT!

Re:4 kinds of lies in the world

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot

5. Cake

Re: Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

I, for one, welcome our new 200+-laser beam toting shark overloards.

IO Rate

[Anonymous Coward]

At 100 MB per second that's about 3 hours for a disk, although it is a Terabyte.

Yes!

[geekmansworld]

All right everyone, the old Blu-Ray is obsolete! See how crappy the puny 1080p looks on your pathetic Sony widescreen? It is time for NEW-RAY.

Throw out your entire video library once again and embrace NEW-RAY.

Re:Yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it's time for Blu+Ray which is somewhat compatible with Blu-Ray and will play in some Blu-Ray players (just like real Blu-Ray disks). I'm just waiting for the Blu+/-Ray drives now

Re:Yes!

[geekmansworld]

Well-played, sir.

Re:Yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Long term, it sounds more like Screw-Ray

Re:Yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now with smellovision - STEW-Ray!

Re:Yes!

[craagz]

Toshiba is already working on lobbying for HD-BDD the super PB drive.

I'll wait on Blue-Ray...

[hyperz69]

Isolinear chips are right around the corner. All you early adopters are gonna feel silly!

Re:I'll wait on Blue-Ray...

[Grishnakh]

No, isolinear chips are still waiting on warp technology, since they operate at FTL speeds.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Spare time required;

[hardlyleet]

Storing data on this disk may be useful, because of it's size, but what if your copying data. Or if you take security seriously and back up your data. Unless you REALLY need it, this sounds pretty much a novelty.

No sharks here mister!

[Anonymous Coward]

Refer to the other replies! (yours included, lol)

It's the MEDIA

[mandark1967]

I'm interested in. How reliable and/or affordable will these things become, should the product achieve decent market penetration?

Zip Drive was a high-priced novelty that achieved just enough marketshare to ruin a lot of people's day with the "click-of-death" issue.

It's taken years for CDR/DVDR media to become reliable and cheap enough for commonplace usage.

As has been previously mentioned, reliability is also a major factor to take into account. I want a backup that I can rely on should I need to retrieve information from 10 years ago (at a minimum)

I have some CDRs that I wrote to in the late 90's (around 1998) that are now becoming unreadable due to "whatever". They are not scratched, nor is the aluminum layer at the top flaking off, yet they are simply unreadable now, so I find myself duplicating CDRs that are still readable "just in case"

If reliability ratings for the media can surpass normal CDRs by a significant amount, I may be interested in this format, even if the price tag on media is steeper, once mainstream acceptance is achieved.

Right now though, It's little more than reading a /. blurb and saying, "Hmm...Interesting."

Re:It's the MEDIA

[Anonymous Coward]

Solution to your problem:
1. Buy 500GiB HDD
2. Copy up to 500 CD's to your new HDD
3. Disconnect HDD and store in closet.

Re:It's the MEDIA

[mandark1967]

Not an option.

TFA clearly mentions a 1TB disc. That is the minimum I need for backups/archives.

You offer half that in a bulky, heavy item that is suceptible to moistire or stray magnetic field from the guitar speaker/amp in my closet.

My main box has (2) 1TB drives in RAID 0 so easily managed and reliable backups. I'm not ripping my computer apart to add hard drives to do backups with every week.

Tape? Expensive, slow, and unreliable != an option

Re:It's the MEDIA

[Grishnakh]

I'm interested in. How reliable and/or affordable will these things become, should the product achieve decent market penetration?

Zip Drive was a high-priced novelty that achieved just enough marketshare to ruin a lot of people's day with the "click-of-death" issue.

Affordability is a big issue here.

I'm not sure, but I think the problem with Iomega's stupid Zip drives was that they had patents on it, and used that to keep the media prices artificially very high. This is what kept Zip from ever becoming a true replacement for the 1.44MB floppy, until the Click of Death and the CD-R(W) finally killed it. I imagine there might be patents on the technologies used in CD-Rs and DVD-Rs, but for whatever reason (intelligence?), the companies involved aren't using that to keep media prices ridiculously high.

This new 1TB technology is obviously patented, so I guess we'll have to wait and see if they keep the media prices high or if they have some sense and make the media cheap. Honestly, I'd rather pay more up-front for a drive (assuming it'll last a long time) as long as the media is dirt-cheap. The whole razor-and-blades business plan might work ok for the inkjet printer makers, but as Iomega showed, it doesn't work worth a damn for storage technologies: people mostly ignore it and it never becomes an accepted standard.

Re:It's the MEDIA

[Blimey85]

I have dvd's from just a couple years ago that are no longer readable. If you look at the write side you'll see where some areas are much darker than others. I'm guessing those areas are no longer readable. It's like something inside is bleeding into the surrounding areas but since there is no liquid inside, that doesn't make much sense. Thankfully I just have a few seasons of one tv show that I've found to be unreadable and nothing significant.

Re:It's the MEDIA

[geekoid]

"I want a backup that I can rely on should I need to retrieve information from 10 years ago (at a minimum)"
Burn once and then recover in ten years? not going to happen.
You need to re-archive data periodically.

Re:It's the MEDIA

[A_Non_Moose]

I have some CDRs that I wrote to in the late 90's (around 1998) that are now becoming unreadable due to "whatever". They are not scratched, nor is the aluminum layer at the top flaking off, yet they are simply unreadable now, so I find myself duplicating CDRs that are still readable "just in case"

Same here around 1995: Bought 650M media for $10 each (the cheap ones) burned on a Phillips CDD521 upgraded rom to 2X speed and a whopping 256K of cache.

Put in a Memorex 16X DVDRW and some never read at all...humm, odd. Put in my son's Lite-on DVDROM and wallah! Reads fine.

Could be the reader, or even stranger the Memorex replaced an 8X Lite-on that read/wrote +/-RWs fine, but not CDR(W) on most occasions, even those it created.

Go figure.

I actually had to break out an old IBM CDRW to read my slipstreamed XPSP2 disk before putting the DVDROM in there. Frustrating.

Reminds me of the mid/late 90's problems with laptops' drives and R's and RW's because the low power of the laser and less reflective surface of the media. A bit of pain and anguish, that was.

Can't always blame the media...just sayin'.

Re:It's the MEDIA

[mr_3ntropy]

My main box has (2) 1TB drives in RAID 0 so easily managed and reliable backups. uhh..umm...I can't put my finger on it, but something there...

Re:It's the MEDIA

[mandark1967]

What's so hard to understand? I'm not interested in maintaining 99.999999999999999999999999999% uptime. I am not a web hosting facility. RAID 0 is for speed, therefore, I need reliable backups in case the raid goes to hell.

Almost there...

[johosaphats]

Finally, I have somewhere than I can store 0.0001% of all the internet's pr0n!!!

Great, Just Great!

[FurtiveGlancer]

My users don't need MORE justification for never deleting anything!

not investing in media (or players)

[contrapunctus]

I give up. Things are going to change too fast. I can't see myself buying any movies on any physical media. About the only think I see of use anymore is storage media and only if it's cheap (very important).
I don't even burn CDs/DVDs to give large files (all legal) to people anymore (unless it's to mail). I let them borrow one of many flash drives.

Yeah I'm not (as just a consumer) investing in $400+ players (or burners) that are going to be superseded in 6 months.

Re:not investing in media (or players)

[Grishnakh]

You don't have to spend $400 on a burner. As I recall, I only spent around $50-60 each for my CD-RW and then DVD+-RW burners. As long as the companies holding the patents here don't jack up the prices too much, a similar trend should follow for this technology. It'll start around around $500 for the burner, and then within a year they'll be selling for $50.

Just like with every other new technology, the best advice is: "Don't be an early adopter". Wait a year or so for all the other schmucks to buy it at a ridiculous profit margin to make up the R&D cost, then jump in when the prices have stabilized at a low level and everyone else is jumping on board.

Re:not investing in media (or players)

[contrapunctus]

You don't have to spend $400 on a burner. As I recall, I only spent around $50-60 each for my CD-RW and then DVD+-RW burners. I was talking about blu ray player/burner.
~ $50 is reasonable, anything more is not

Re:not investing in media (or players)

[Grishnakh]

Yep, the BD burners and media are still overpriced. Give it a little time, and hopefully it'll come down. If not, some patent holders (Sony) are trying to milk it too much, and we should wait for something better and cheaper.

Re:not investing in media (or players)

[Cypher04]

like HD-DVD? oh wait...Sony just paid off everybody to ignore an equal and cheaper format.

Downloaded media will be the downfall of Blu-ray

Re:not investing in media (or players)

[Grishnakh]

Downloaded media isn't very useful for people looking for a storage format for backup.

No, HD-DVD is dead, but it looks like we may have 1TB optical discs in a couple of years. So, Sony might keep the BD crap overpriced, and we'll just have to leapfrog BD's pathetic 36GB size and jump straight to 1TB. Or, this 1TB stuff will be overpriced, but it'll still force BD prices down.

Why would a Burned DVD stop working?

[9InchRails]

Why would a burned DVD stop working? I thought a laser etched marks onto aluminum... do these wear out? I have a serious investment in burned DVD's, and I'd love to get my hands on TB sized medium!

Re:Why would a Burned DVD stop working?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope.

For a pressed DVD, a master is etched, and is then used to physically press the pits into the substrate. The depth of these pits (1/4 wavelength) causes destructive interference when the beam hits a pit, and constructive interference when it hits a land. (1/4 wavelength in + 1/4 wavelength out = 1/2 wavelength out of phase with the rest of the beam reflecting off the surrounding substrate)
This is pretty much permanent, provided your media doesn't disintegrate.

For a burned DVD, a photosensitive dye is activated by the writing laser. This activated dye simply absorbs the beam that hits a "pit", while the unactivated dye allows the beam to reflect off the substrate behind, when it hits a "land".
Over time, this dye can degrade such that the unactivated dye slowly activates (either spontaneously or in reaction to ambient light), or that the activated dye slowly deactivates for the same reason (much like a photo left in the sun).

One of the reasons that "archive quality" disks are more expensive is that they use a higher quality dye which takes longer to degrade.

Market Research gone wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

1TB? Who needs that much porn?

Re:Market Research gone wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

you don't know what's the internet for?
do you happen to know also that there is never enough in or libraries?

WE store more pr0n than any other stuff. I also have some collection from the late 90's *just in case*.

why? because the internet is for... you know what I mean.

Let's stop focusing on mechanical items PLEASE!!

[gsgriffin]

We keep having excitement about great advancements in mechanical storage. WHY?!?!?! If developers could stop leading us in the wrong direction because it excites some by huge numbers, perhaps we could focus more on faster static memory and get a 1TB on a chip...that won't were out...that won't die when scratched...that can have high transfer speeds... Anyone else out there tired of looking at last decades technology getting bigger and faster and want to head down smaller, cheaper, faster, stronger, less mechnical...

More organic dyes...

[CompMD]

...so more of the same crap? I have tapes the size of my face that still work flawlessly, and actually get used every once in a while for retrieval of archived data. All my server backups are on tape, and all of my cluster backups are on tape. After three years of constantly writing and swapping tapes, I haven't had a single DDS4 tape go bad on me. The number of CD and DVD coasters on the other hand...

Re:More organic dyes...

[Grishnakh]

Right, and how much does one of these tapes, and the drive needed for it, cost? How much does a DVD burner and media cost?

Let me know when these tape drives are $50 and the tapes are less than $1.

Re:More organic dyes...

[evilviper]

After three years of constantly writing and swapping tapes, I haven't had a single DDS4 tape go bad on me. The number of CD and DVD coasters on the other hand...

There are plenty of people out there that can claim the exact OPPOSITE experience as yours...

Besides that, if you get dirt cheap crap DVD-Burners, you can expect plenty of coasters. But your DDS4 tape drive sure wasn't dirt cheap by as stretch of the imagination, now was it? Try a fair comparison. Besides that, Blu-Ray is bringing Sony's professional MO technology to the masses as well, so things are getting better, not worse.

Re:More organic dyes...

[CompMD]

And let me know when your company data or your livelihood can be trusted to a flaky DVD-R.

When it comes to reliability, you get what you pay for with a $50 DVD burner and $1 DVD-R media. Most companies laugh at the lack of reliability of optical media, and all will happily pay for tapes and tape drives so they can know years from now they still have their data.

Re:More organic dyes...

[CompMD]

You're right, but there are also plenty of people who buy spindles of CDs and have 10-25% record failure rates on bad spindles. That is completely unacceptable.

No, the DDS4 drive wasn't cheap, but the value of the data it stores is worth millions, and is therefore quite worthwhile.

I miss MO drives. Its too bad they didn't make it. At home I have a Fujitsu 120MB drive and an Olympus Deltis 230MB drive that still work. But what does Blu-Ray use from MO technology? Blu-Ray is a pure optical format.

Re:More organic dyes...

[evilviper]

but there are also plenty of people who buy spindles of CDs and have 10-25% record failure rates on bad spindles.

That's pretty much exclusively a result of idiots buying dirt cheap, no-name CD-Rs. After a decade of buying thousands of TDK and Maxell CD-Rs, I can't recall a single defective disc.

No, the DDS4 drive wasn't cheap, but the value of the data it stores is worth millions, and is therefore quite worthwhile.

Yes, but if you spent a fraction as much on a professional CD/DVD burner (and good blank discs) you'd see MUCH, MUCH improved reliability. Right now, you're basing your CD/DVD burner experience on $40 re-branded Lite-on crap drives. Get the cheapest crap tape drive you can find, and see what kind of reliability you get there...

But what does Blu-Ray use from MO technology? Blu-Ray is a pure optical format.

RWs were the first disc type available, because Sony based Blu-ray on their pro MO disc tech. The pressed and R discs actually came later.

How often do you replace the heads

[Black Art]

Having a liquid filled lens in a dry environment seems like a plan for frequent drive replacement. How long are these drives expected to last? At what humidity?

I used to live in a place that approached 0% humidity in the winter. Static electricity was bad enough. Having to maintain optimal humidity so your backup media can be read is going to be an even bigger pain.

Re:How often do you replace the heads

[Jesus_666]

I would assume that the lens is sealed. When you use a tiny bit of water as a high-precision lens you don't really want it to come in contact with the outside world.

Re:How often do you replace the heads

[Fumus]

Yet another reason to buy water cooling for your PC.
Or just seal the case with duct tape and fill it with water.

This May Be Great But...

[Nom du Keyboard]

This may be great, but I'm rather certain I won't reasonably be able to afford the drive and media for my home system in the next 5 years, making it of no use, and hence no real interest to me now.

It's like being told that the next Rolls Royce will be by far the best one ever, but I'm never going to be able to afford the Rolls.

Holy storage, Batman!

[xpuppykickerx]

Think of all the dirty movies you can put on one of these bad boys!

great for Backup

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd love these for Back ups, I work in visual effects and DVDs are way to small now. 1 shot can sometimes fill up a few discs when you have layers and layers of 2k-4k cineons (that can be anywhere from 12-54MB+ per frame).

  my only concern is that 1 disc will cost $200 or something rediculous. If a DVDr is about 25 cents and adding one more layer puts it up to about $3+/- then adding 200 layers must make it worth, I don't know, 1 meellion dollars!

If they charged a reasonable price I'm sure everyone would just become pirates or something.. Arrrr!

Trouble is

[thewils]

You'll probably need one of these to install Windows 7 with all the eye candy.

Re:Let's stop focusing on mechanical items PLEASE!

[quanticle]

The nice thing about "mechanical" storage (since when was optical storage "mechanical") is that it is cheap. The amount of storage space on a hard drive has more than outpaced Moore's Law. Optical media hasn't quite kept up with that sort of spectacular growth, but there have been significant advances there too. In my eyes, anything that promises cheaper (in terms of $/GB) storage can only be a GOOD THING.

Is governator now a Scientator?

[failedlogic]

"developed by Call/Recall in partnership" == Total Recall ??!!

Re: As opposed to what?

[mpapet]

Tape, WORM, another hard drive. I could go on.

The point is a CD-RW is NOT designed for long-term storage. The now old-fashioned audio CD is not either despite media conglomerates claims made loong ago.

Do us all a favor then and don't whine when you can't get your photos off the CDRW you made 10 years ago.

If you feel like I feel, baby...

[Anonymous Coward]

gives off light when excited by a laser beam The only issue being reported is the faint sound of Let's Get It On playing from within the disc tray.

Don't scratch Grandma, kids!

[goombah99]

Dear Mr, Smith,
What is the value of information?

Does the value of information (per bit) decline as we gain the ability to store more information?

If not then presumably one of these disks ought to be worth a fortune if a Floppy was worth anything. Should they have scratch proof containers?

since this is not the case, one assumes the value of information to humans is declining with time?

Does this mean what a given person knows is also declining in value, or are we discarding information from our brains that has less value. If so then why do you still remembers that Speed Racer's little brother's name.

Eventually we will be able to store the neural state of any human. At that point if someone were to invent a method of reading out this state it could be recorded onto a Disk and preserved after death. Like Cryonics this disk would then await a time in the distanct future when the neural state could be restored from the disk to clone or simulated human.

Actually, that was just the long winded way of explaining to you Mr Smith that when we were restoring you from your disk we noticed a small scratch on made by an heir you stiffed in your will. We're pretty sure the amount of information loss is small however, though were not sure what it might have been.

Sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for selecting TotalRecall. Your bill will be in the ether.

Re:Don't scratch Grandma, kids!

[vegiVamp]

Unless we revert to a primitive, violence-based, no-world-beyond-the-moat society, the value of information can only go up. What is going down, and will keep doing so, is the price of storage.

Re:Don't scratch Grandma, kids!

[goombah99]

if the value of the information on a floppy was at least equal to the value of the floppy disk, then we can say that 1megbyte of information = $1. Note that is not the storage cost per se. I'm just using the storage cost to estimate the minimum value of information.

now if as you say that information is not declining in value that 1 terrabyte information is worth $1 million dollars at a minimum.

Since that's probably not true, it means were storing less and less valuable information. That is the value of stored information is declining.

If we apply the same argument then to the terrabyte disk and assum it's process at say $100 and not $1million, then the value of information is now one thousanth of one cent per megabyte. (since if it was worth less one would not bother to store it on something that cost more)

Re:Don't scratch Grandma, kids!

[skyshard]

I would argue that the value of information isn't declining. Rather, the ability of humans to store less valuable information is increasing

Using image resolution as a metaphor: before, we couldn't store all those pixels. Now, we can.

Certainly, the change in benefit of going from say.. 32px by 32px to 128px by 128px is more than the change from a 10Mpixel image to 11Mpixel image. This is because we're storing less valuable/more redundant information. However, this does not mean information in general is declining in value, just that we're throwing less of it away

There's a distinction to be made here:
whereas the average value per bit of stored information may be going down, the average value per bit of information (that may or may not be stored) is not

Re:Don't scratch Grandma, kids!

[goombah99]

I would argue that the value of information isn't declining. Rather, the ability of humans to store less valuable information is increasing

Using image resolution as a metaphor: before, we couldn't store all those pixels. Now, we can.

Certainly, the change in benefit of going from say.. 32px by 32px to 128px by 128px is more than the change from a 10Mpixel image to 11Mpixel image. This is because we're storing less valuable/more redundant information. However, this does not mean information in general is declining in value, just that we're throwing less of it away

There's a distinction to be made here:
  whereas the average value per bit of stored information may be going down, the average value per bit of information (that may or may not be stored) is not

Is information that is not stored information?

I'd argue no it's not. only things that are stored are informative.
Hypothetical data that can never be retrieved and whose existence in unknown is not information.

That is if it is not stored it does not exist. It may be stored in your brain or the the floppy or in someone elses brain.

So to compute the average value of a bit, you need to see what is stored. If we are storing less and less valuable bits then the average value of information is declining.

One could imagine a lawsuit where the jury had to put a price on the erasure of 100K of information just in an abstract sense not in reference to a specific kind of information. You'd get a different answer in 1960 and 2008 or 3010.

As a rough estimate, information needs to have a value greater than the media it is written on (on average)

Re:Don't scratch Grandma, kids!

[vegiVamp]

Your first assumption is already wrong: there is no link whatsoever between the value of the medium and the value of the information it contains.

How many VISA card numbers could you fit on a single floppy? A rough calculation says about 30.000, if you include CCV and 30 places for the name. I'd say that's worth slightly more than the medium.

Additionally, the worth of information does't only depend on it's actual content, but also on who gets it in their hands. If I were to give said floppy to my grandmother, it'd be nothing more than an ornamental piece of plastic. Find yourself a phisher, and he'll readily pay rude amounts for it.

No, the value of information is not going down, although I will admit that, due to our storing larger and more complex sets of data, the value of a given amount of bytes of information has gone down.

Re:Let's stop focusing on mechanical items PLEASE!

[Grishnakh]

Um... hello? 1TB on a chip will always be far more expensive than 1TB on some kind of disc. Chips require multi-billion-dollar fabs to make; DVD-Rs and other discs can be made in cheap factories in Taiwan. You might as well suggest just using 1TB hard drives instead of this.

1TB on a chip is fine if you want fast, reusable storage. For cheap archiving, it doesn't make any sense at all.

Try not to scratch that disc...

[Taibhsear]

If there is 1TB on that disc in 200 layers I would imagine one good scratch would seriously bork a good chunk of the data. Although they were lame when they first came out, those "trays" you used to have to put CD's into for the first optical drives would be beneficial here. Maybe narrow them down to slim jewel case size. I could really use one of these though. I have just over the amount of space that a DL-DVD holds in photos that I have to backup. Unfortunately I've not had a single disc work properly over multiple systems yet. So they are basically a waste of money for me. I can backup to multiple DVDs but it is quite annoying. Not to mention being able to take all my dvd collection and toss it on to one Uber-ray disc would save a crapload of shelf space. (I watch my movies off my computer hooked to my tv) Being able to fit over 200 DVDs on one disc... That's pretty damn cool.

Re: As opposed to what?

[CowboyNealOption]

If I am backing things up properly, the only time I would even think about looking at a ten year old backup is if the other 119 full monthly backups made after it were all bad. Though chances are I would have destroyed the media anyway, because I doubt I would trust ten year old backups on any media that I could afford.

I forsee a BIG problem in two years

[way2trivial]

where do you get the light from when the Laser just doesn't 'do it' for the medium any more?

Buy where?

[tepples]

Taiyo-Yuden makes high-quality recordable DVD media that should last you at least a couple of decades if kept in reasonable environments I looked at a locally owned computer store, and I didn't see any Taiyo Yuden or Mitsui media. Where do you recommend buying quality CD-R and DVD-R media?

Re:Buy where?

[pomakis]

http://www.supermediastore.com/ sells them. I use Taiyo Yuden DVD-Rs for all of my important backups and archives.

Re:Buy where?

[arodland]

Ah, but you don't know for sure. Some of it is in the stores, just rebranded. I recall that at one point it was pretty easy to find TY CDRs at retail as Fuji discs, Their DVDs show up as well, although it's a real guessing game. On the other hand, they're very easy to find online. Search Google or Amazon or Newegg or whoever you like. :)

Re:Buy where?

[Schmiggy_JK]

http://www.rima.com/ is my choice for bulk high quality TY media. I have a couple spindles of 52x CD-Rs and a few DVD spindles as well. Besides reliability, one of the best things about their product is the fact that it will often burn at higher than advertised rates.

I'll believe it when I see it.

[Jason Levine]

The article estimates a 2010/2011 launch date. So we're at least 2 years off from an actual product. Meanwhile, I've heard many times of huge CD/DVD-style discs which would hold tremendous amounts of data. Inevitably, the company making the announcement either vanishes entirely or makes a few more announcements before postponing the release date and *then* vanishing entirely. I'd be happy to see a 1TB "DVD-R"-style disc, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

Re:I'll believe it when I see it.

[SpookyFish]

I was thinking the same thing, but this one may not be a flash in the pan.

Call/Recall has been around for 20+ years, and the co-founder / CTO is Dr. Peter Rentzepis, former head of Bell Labs and by all accounts a brilliant optical scientist.

Nichia is a huge chemical manufacturer that specializes in LED and laser technology and currently supplies over 2 million lasers for Blu-Ray per month.

Lossy

[tepples]

Ex: a 700mb movie file is slightly edited, it does not recopy the whole movie file, just the diff. How well does delta copying work on lossy-coded files such as many 700 MB movie files?

Re:Lossy

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

How well does delta copying work on lossy-coded files such as many 700 MB movie files? Well enough I'd expect. Lossy content usually has key-frames every few seconds which contain the full frame data (to allow for seeking, streamed data loss, etc.) so if you only edited one frame you'd have maybe 10 seconds of data that's actually changed.

Of course editing lossy content is a bad idea in general anyway...

Wow...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's probably the best sharks/"laser beam" posts on this site to date! I almost had an LCD with frickin coffee on its screen.

Re: As opposed to what?

[mpapet]

the only time I would even think about looking at a ten year old backup is if the other 119 full monthly backups made after it were all bad

That sir puts you in the teeniest tiniest minority that has given backing up your data more than 32 minutes of effort.

You insensitive clod...

[Anonymous Coward]

I just upgraded my 8-Track collection to cassette tapes. It will be another 25 years before I trust the CD technology and another 25 beyond that before I try DVD. I'll be lucky to get to do "Blue Ray" before I'm dead and now you're telling me there's something BEYOND Blue Ray???!
Sigh...

Signed,
Disco Stu
(ps: my Captcha is "debacle")

Smell my mule.

[Anonymous Coward]

Kitty Malone sat on a mule
Was riding in style
When suddenly, like the sound of a buzzard's breaking
Kity felt laser beams being fired at her head
She said, "I hate laser beams
And you never done see me askin'
For a UFO
In Tomahawk County"

Well she kicked the mule
And it walked the path
And the aliens fired from behind
Till she stopped the mule
And she kicked the rump
And the big old mule took a big old dump

Scent of a mule, you better watch out where you go
Take your laser beams away
Scent of a mule, you better watch out where you go
You better stop that laser game
Or you'll smell my mule.

Thanks,
Mike

Release more formats!

[Cypher04]

The big question is how many more format wars will it take to bankrupt Sony?

I for one will sit back and enjoy the downfall of a failed company which sort of won the last format war.

Bleak outlook for optical formats

[heroine]

Well, 1 TB holographic drives have been available for 1 year & look how far those have gone. No expectations for this one either.

Later... much!

[Anonymous Coward]

If this progresses like the current Blu-ray did, we'll finally see this new technology on store shelves alongside cheap 100 TB disk drives. In other words... bfd.

200+ Layers?

[ArghBlarg]

.. might as well start calling it for what it is... 3D storage. if they could eliminate the spinning disc aspect, we'd have data crystals like in Babylon 5. Cool.

No, no. You didn't get it.

[DrYak]

They aren't preparing this discs for *you* in mind.

They creating them so *Microsoft* will have a solution to hold Windows 7 onto one single installation media.

Re:No, no. You didn't get it.

[FilterMapReduce]

They aren't preparing this discs for *you* in mind. They creating them so *Microsoft* will have a solution to hold Windows 7 onto one single installation media. Until Service Pack 1.

Are you Kidding??

[More_Cowbell]

I have not read TFA to check your facts, but are you seriously saying that a backup rate of ~ 333GB/hr is too slow for daily use? Just what exactly are you expecting to back up?

Another example:: (50GB) / (100 (MB/s)) = 8.53333333 minutes - Am I incorrect to think that is not so bad?

Redundant?

[denzacar]

After all these comments?

Someone obviously got up late and with a sore sense of humor.

One word condensation

[protobion]

recording medium that gives off light when excited by a laser beam Did you just mean "fluorescent medium" and tune that down for us simple-minded folks here?

Cool

[Nonillion]

However I can't help but wonder if the RIAA / MPAA's executives hemroids maybe flaring up like never before with the announcement of this news.

Cheap, Fast, Reliable

[BeaverCleaver]

Pick any two.

Re:Let's stop focusing on mechanical items PLEASE!

[gsgriffin]

Well, I'm glad that people 50 years ago didn't think that way or you would be replacing the tubes in your calculator right now and not have a transitor. Just because it requires expensive machines today doesn't mean that newer technology can't do it faster and cheaper tomorrow. It wasn't long ago that the static chip became something you could purchase and use in things like a digital camera. You're thinking is exactly what I'm suggesting we not continue to do, and that is give up and assume that what we have and they way things are made is the only way it ever will be. Do you expect that 50 years from now we'll still be using CD and DVD or HDD? I would hope not!!! I'm just suggesting more time, energy, and innovation be put into non-mechanical, prone to fail, slow, high energy consumption and fragil devices. Anyone else out there??????

Re:Let's stop focusing on mechanical items PLEASE!

[gsgriffin]

The mechanical that I refer to is the gears, motor, bearings, spinning and churning away with relatively large power consumption compared to memory. It is fragil and slow. It is only cheap today because everyone grabbed hold of it and stopped thining alternatives. Much the same thinking is going into drives as Microsoft OS. ust because we started there doesn't mean we should always head in that direction.

Re:Let's stop focusing on mechanical items PLEASE!

[Grishnakh]

Obviously you know nothing about the economics of semiconductor production. While inexpensive 1TB flash memories will probably be commonplace 50 years from now, you can forget about it within the next 5 years or so, maybe even 10. During that time, people are going to want higher capacity disposable/inexpensive storage than the 4.4GB DVD-Rs we currently have, and the only feasible way of achieving it is with optical technologies like this, not semiconductor technologies. Besides, the limits of miniaturization are close to being reached with current process technology, and making circuits denser is probably going to require a shift to something exotic like nanotubes, which again will take more than 10 years to become commonplace.

You seem to be proposing that no "next step" technologies ever be developed because they'll eventually be eclipsed by something better. If people listened to you, we never would have had hybrid cars, because someone would have said they'll eventually be made obsolete by full-electric vehicles. If people had listened to you, we never would have had DVD-Rs because someone would have said they'll be made obsolete by Blu-Rays or 4GB flash drives.

Maybe you should leave the decisions about what to invest time, energy, and innovation into to the people who actually work in these industries and are competent to make such decisions.

How long will it take to burn a disk?

[fatp]

It seems risky for me to burn a disk for several days.

Re: As opposed to what?

[bkr1_2k]

None of these are particularly reliable either. Hard drives fail, WORM fails, tapes warp and stretch through use (causing failure) etc etc.

My point was that there is no "failure proof" back up mechanism other than regular backups to multiple types of media. Statistically, CDs and DVDs fail more regularly than hard drives I'm sure, but that doesn't imply that non-optical media are somehow bullet proof, which is what the GP seemed to be implying.

Re:Let's stop focusing on mechanical items PLEASE!

[OneLeggedNinja]

That was my initial reaction as well. Then I talked to our storage guys and they told me how good the latest generation of *tapes* are. When it comes to archiving large amounts of data where speed is not an issue, but cost and longevity are, old cheap tech is usually the winner.

Re: As opposed to what?

[petermgreen]

sure if you are doing a monthly full backup it is not a problem. But for many people a full backup to optical media on anything like a regular basis just isn't practical. The cost both in terms of media and time of backing up a full modern hard drive to DVD R (either variety) regularlly would be pretty damn high. As for rewritable optical media i've never found that very reliable.

many people (and i'm guilty of this myself) copy a file to optical media once and assume it is backed up. When thier hard drive fails they go back to the optical media only to discover they either can't find what they want or there are disk read issues.

This is why my preffered means of backup is to keep copies on multiple computers, if those computers are physically seperate so much the better. if one of the computers dies it will be noticed and replaced quickly and the data copied back from other machines.

It bears mentioning

[thatwouldbeme]

That the drive would be Blu-Ray compatible, not the disc