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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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. :-)

Ironic

[Anita Coney]

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

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.

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?

[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.

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

[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

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!

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.