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30 Blu-ray Discs In a 1.5TB MiniDisc-Like Cassette
MrSeb writes "Hot on the heels of the most successful storage mediums of all time — MiniDisc and Zip disks — Sony has announced the Optical Disc Archive, a system that seems to cram up to 30 Blu-ray discs into a single, one-inch-thick plastic cassette, which will have a capacity of between 300GB and 1.5TB. As far as I can tell, the main selling point of the Optical Disc Archive is, just like MiniDisc, the ruggedness of the cassettes. Optical discs themselves are fairly resistant to changes in temperature and humidity, and the cassettes are dust and water resistant. What is the use case for these 1.5TB MiniDiscs, though? In terms of pure storage capacity, tape drives are still far superior (you can store up to 5TB on a tape!) In terms of speed and flexibility, hard drives are better. If you're looking for ruggedness, flash-based storage is smaller, lighter, and can easily survive a dip in the ocean. The Optical Disc Archive might be good as extensible storage for TV PVRs, like TiVo and Sky+ — but as yet, we don't even know the cost of the system or the cassettes, and I doubt either will be cheap."
Does it have the XCP trojan installed by default? Will they sell you 5 tb and take four of them back with the first "upgrade"?
No, thanks. I'd rather use floppies than buy ANYTHING from Sony. I wish everyone else would stop shoveling money at these evil people as well. I doubt there's a less trustworthy entity on the planet.
Free Martian Whores!
Zip discs one of the most successful storage mediums of all time? Is that a joke?
Better known as 318230.
From TFA:
"I can see the Optical Disc Archive filling two niches: quickly transporting large amounts of video across rough terrain; and providing extensible backup for multimedia devices, such as video cameras and TV PVRs, like TiVo and Sky+. Hard drives fill up pretty quickly, and high-density cassettes make a lot more sense than burning single DVD/Blu-ray discs. Unless Sony can get other companies to make and sell ODA drives, though, it will probably just go the way of the MiniDisc."
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
> we don't even know the cost of the system or the cassettes, and I doubt either will be cheap.
This is Sony, right? The cost will be a sudden change in your ability to use it, or a compromise of your freedom to privacy and/or supporting them in their quest monopolize the market through proprietary standards.
Even if it's good technology, I think I'll find some other way to get my storage done.
Hear that woosh? That was the sarcasm going right over your head.
You didn't get the joke, it seems. Awkwaaaard.
I'm sure a single 2TB SATA hard drive is cheaper than the cassette and I know a cheap eSATA dock will be cheaper than ODA system. If you're worried about water, put the drive in a ziploc bag before transporting.
You lost me at "Sony".
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I think this is just Sony trying once again to replicate its success with the Compact Disc format. It has a long history of making new formats, just to see if they'll catch on. I'm sure it's quite lucrative if one does, but the other aspect of that is the proliferation of bizarre Sony formats that aren't even supported by Sony after some production period. How many versions of the Memory Stick did Sony wind up making? Six? Seven?
Anyway, this is just more of that and I'm sure it will fail and be forgotten soon enough.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Dear Slashdot Editors,
Please edit summaries before they hit the front page. For example, here is TFS with all the bullshit removed. I left the joke in for you, even though Sony didn't create Zip disks... Perhaps the poster meant Memory Stick, Betamax, Magic Gate or one of the other custom Sony formats.
"Hot on the heels of the most successful storage mediums of all time â" MiniDisc and Zip disks â" Sony has announced the Optical Disc Archive, a system that seems to cram up to 30 Blu-ray discs into a single, one-inch-thick plastic cassette, which will have a capacity of between 300GB and 1.5TB. The main selling point of the Optical Disc Archive is, just like MiniDisc, the ruggedness of the cassettes. Optical discs themselves are fairly resistant to changes in temperature and humidity, and the cassettes are dust and water resistant. The article is light on potential uses."
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Please tell me video games are going to come back as cartridges!
Sony: You can keep your crap.
That's ze joke.
But really, I was quite saddened Zips never took off.
Floppies were at an end, and the mess we have from then till now with transplanting hard drives is just as bad.
I can't wait for the SSD age. No more "OH GOD I TOUCHED THE CIRCUIT I RUINED EVERYTHING LIFE OVER" kinds of worrying, or "OOPS I banged it too hard, life over", and various others of the family.
I still cherish my Zip drive. Transferal storage discs that were circuitless was a dream idea. It could easily reach the sizes of hard drives now if more work was put behind it.
And alignment isn't a problem. That is a problem with hard drive designs, not the universe.
You sir are todays winner of "Anal Retentive Nerd of the Day" ...the scary part is that I remember all of those incarnations of the floppy.
Stay tuned for new sig...
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Years ago I got a good deal on a high capacity optical drive for my laptop. It was a time of hard disks in the range of 1GB, so the optical drive not only greatly enhanced my storage space buy also provided a very effective back up solutions. CDs and DVD have never been a good backup solution for me, and hard disks are good for incremental frequent backups, but aren't really any better at long term backups. If someone were able to to produce these drives at a reasonable cost, less than $200, and the disk were not hugely expensive, this would be a good solution for backups. However I fear that the drives will cost $500 and therefore it will suffer the fate of all other optical media not used for entertainment. It will simply be too expensive for widespread adoption. Even with drives that play video, the performance of Blueray is interesting.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
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This looks like it could be a viable alternative for UDO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_Density_Optical. Many organizations that are using UDO are looking for a replacement since the format is essentially dead and their respective Risk/Compliance departments may not like the idea of using a NAS as a replacement. UDO was used extensively by credit unions and other financial institutions for document archival, e.g. loan documents, transactions, with applications like EMC's Application Xtender and Disk Xtender.
Yeah, for an absurd amount of money. The 1.5 LTO-5 drives cost at minimum a grand, and $45 for the cart. The 5TB T10000C tape drive costs $30,000 at CDW!
This could be really cool depending on the price.
What is the use case for these 1.5TB MiniDiscs, though? In terms of pure storage capacity, tape drives are still far superior (you can store up to 5TB on a tape!) In terms of speed and flexibility, hard drives are better. If you're looking for ruggedness, flash-based storage is smaller, lighter, and can easily survive a dip in the ocean.
Maybe it's a good balance of features. Tapes can hold more, but they're generally slow for accessing files because it's all sequential. This would be slower than hard drives, but perhaps more durable(...?). I'd bet that these are cheaper per TB than Flash. Many times, when picking a solution, there isn't one option that's clearly superior in every way. Instead, you have to pick a solution where the advantages/disadvantages are balanced to meet your needs.
I would guess this will be sold as an archival format, similar to how you might use tape, but more convenient to access a specific file without spooling through a whole tape.
Stil, a lot of money!
Honestly, that one was puzzling me, too. Maybe I would've had an easier job getting the joke if both named technologies were Sony's work. Instead of one Sony and one Iomega for some reason. I mean, the MiniDisc part was obvious, as it's another in the line of failing Sony storage formats, but where'd the Zip Disk comparison come from? Seriously, they couldn't have gone with "MiniDisc and UMD"? Do any of the editors have even the slightest concept of the flow of a joke?
"Ha ha, remember that one Sony technology and that one Iomega technology? Well, um, Sony's making another thing! They're... no, it's not in conjunction with Iomega, they're making this... no, Iomega doesn't have anything to do with this at all, they... look, no, all I'm saying is Iomega made this one format that didn't take over the world, so it's funny! And Sony's making this... LOOK GODDAMNIT I MENTIONED IOMEGA'S STORAGE MEDIA OF FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, THAT'S THE JOKE. Except with Sony. And Sony made this other thing, and they're making this new thing that... wait, where are you going?"
You're joking, right? ..does anybody actually think about this shit before approving the story?
$6.4 Billion in losses last year, with ideas like this they will top that next year easily. Go Sony, just hope it doesn't take too long to go broke.
Why does Sony keep coming out with "Storage solutions", when the other arm of Sony doesn't want us to save *anything*?
I mean, come on Sony... have you ever considered that those evil pirates are downloading your music/movies because you're giving them the tech to save a billion terrabytes of stuff? What do you think they are going to fill up all that space with?
If computers were only 16mb of ram and a 40mb hard drive, they couldn't save a 4gb movie, now could they? Come-on man, think!
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
"I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone. " - Jack Valenti, 1982
So, given that according to wiki, a VHS tape is "In modern-day digital terminology, VHS is roughly equivalent to 333x480 pixels luma and 40x480 chroma resolutions (333x480 pixels=159,840 pixels or 0.16MP (1/6 of a MegaPixel))" times 4 hours, how many Boston Stranglers is this medium?
""Hot on the heels of the most successful storage mediums of all time — MiniDisc and Zip disks"
Don't forget about Memory Sticks. The world is holding it's breath for another proprietary storage medium from Sony.
"Basically, there’s somewhere between 3 and 30 discs in a single cassette."
Yes, sure there is.
30 discs, I don't think so, it's not thick enough to fit 30 discs in it. What does he mean exactly? An unknown number of discs which have more than 25GB capacity each, but definitely not 30? Talk about shoddy journalism.
It's from Sony.
1) Better random access than tape
2) Less fragile than hard drives, designed to be removable
3) Cheaper per-byte than flash
Optical is more expensive than hard drive, so if you're comparing it against removable hard drives, or an HD "toaster" setup (a box in which you can plug raw SATA drives) then the question is one of durability. If that's not an issue, go with plugable hard drives.
Tape is still cheapest, so if random access is not an issue, go with tape.
If cost isn't an issue, go with flash.
The problem as I remember with Minidisc is that the cost per byte for data storage didn't pencil out, and the sample rate wasn't conducive to high fidelity audio, which left it a solution that didn't address any particular problem. It'll be interesting to see if they've come up with a set of specs that have meaning now. I strongly suspect Sony will come up with a good solid implementation and then price it out of market.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
They really screwed up with the minidisk; the nice thing about them was that they would fit in a shirt pocket, and they held (iirc) 250 mb, which is 250 floppies worth of data in the same sized medium as a floppy. You could easily fit a couple of CDs worth of music if compressed to MP3 or Ogg on one. Their problem was they wouldn't work in a slot-based CD player, like in a car where they would have been incredibly handy (car MP3 players hadn't taken off yet).
Of course, I stopped using them after Somy rooted my computer when my daughter played a music CD in it. I'm not stupid enough to buy computer gear from a company that would deliberately install malware on their paying customers' machines.
Free Martian Whores!
"These are not the storage devices you are looking for. Move along. Move along."
No. No, we really don't. This is Yet Another Proprietary Storage Format (YAPSF) from Sony. Why would anybody care about that?
Browsed the aisles of a store the other day and noticed that the PS Vita uses yet another media type. As did PSP. So, if you're upgrading (?) from PSP to PS Vita you're up for a format change and more $$$ to go to everyone's favourite company....
I'm not sure if you're saying that the Minidisc couldn't be slot loaded - it could- or that it didn't take off in cars. Minidiscs were used heavily by the theater and pro audio industries for years (2010 is when I saw the last Minidisc player in theater racks) because they were so much tougher than a CD and could be edited on the player itself. CD Players and CDs can't take much abuse. Most of the pro audio playback is now solid state devices (for people who can afford it) or laptops (for lower budget minded folks).
Back before USB flash drives were widely and cheaply available, the only way to easily move around more than a few floppy's worth of data was the Zip drive.
100 MB was a lot back then. Even though the drive itself was not ubiquitous, the parallel port model could be easily transported, and it was supported on multiple operating systems. Macs were supported with SCSI. In some institutional environments, you'd find internal IDE zip drives. My local library branch had computers with internal drives, and for a few years it was the primary way I was able to download anything more than about 20 MB off the internet (hi-speed internet unavailable at home).
CD writers were expensive (my original 2X writer was $300), and came with all the problems of read-only media. Of course Zip had its problems - the drive itself wasn't very cheap, nor the disks, and of course there was the click of death... but all in all, it was IMO the most versatile portable storage medium we had between floppy disks and USB flash drives. Lugging around an IDE drive and opening up whatever you wanted to attach it to wasn't always an option :-)
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
All I know is if I go with a yearly loss, I'm living on the street. Yet these companies post losses after losses every year, and for some reason still exist. How the hell does this happen? What am I missing?
Shiny discs in 2012? No thanks.
If you set up some sort of system where all discs are read/written to simultaneously, striped in a sort of RAID-0 for bluray discs, I bet you could get some decent throughput out of something like this. Seeking wouldn't be as good for harddrives, but it might have use in high def and 3D video recording and playback.
Just a thought.
Tapes are magnetically sensitive; and don't allow quick random access.
Optical disks are fine around magnets/transmitters/EMPs/etc; they have random access.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
the problem is from what little we know LTO beats it.. now if it can match LTO and give you good random access (equivalent to Optical media) then they may have something.. but even then given their track record and the target market that would be in interested in the device, and have the money to pay for it, will want to see the standard opened up so that more than just Sony can manufacture it and the media.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Flash drives have a short life when powered off measured in months.
Thanks to rabid fanboys like these, Sony can still keep going - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDk-4cc_WkU
ahem...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc
capacity: 6TB
release dates: a number announced, all since passed...
If it works as well as my last Sony CD disc changer, I'm not holding my breath.
I've never met a sane person who would declare MiniDisc to be "one of the most successful storage mediums of all time". Most expensive, perhaps. Most blatant example of an answer searching for a question, almost certainly. Most proprietary and frustrating, for sure. Most successful? Not really.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
That's one of the better AC posts I've seen around here in a while, really.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Sony released a similar device already for the same purpose, close to 10 years ago, with blu-ray discs
I was excited until Sony popped in the picture.
Yea we all hate sony for one reason or another, but you got to be god damned stupid to buy into their propitiatory bullshit media
just like all their other media formats, it will be the shit for about a year, die in the market and the only place to find it is in niche markets, just like every other sony media ever made, including minidisk
I remember when the blue ray player came out hearing that with 3D laser there would be a multiple numbers of layers one could use.
With DVDs we reached dual layers and with blue ray we reached at an astronomical price for two layers as well.
I remember hearing that dual layer is but an artificial ceiling and that layer depth possibility is much higher.
Dual layer is only the beginning I heard. But I am still waiting.
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I was proud to sport my Yellow weather resistant walkman now I'd rather get a bad case of haemorrhoids than to own anything Sony.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
and this story is a big joke.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Agreed - but being Sony - i'm not keeping my hopes up.. especially if they don't open up/licence the spec for someone else to manufacture
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Hmmm, learn something new every day. Not much use any more, though, since we have thumb drives.
Free Martian Whores!
Smaller than a 3.5" HDD?
Not a chance, if it's a 1" thick and based on bluray!
That's a 5" drive bay, so it's automatically going to be both thicker and wider.
From looking at prices, it's probably cheaper than a standard HDD, though
Another example of no points /., you listening out there?
+1 informative.
Hey
... IO-Mega has sinced replaced ZIP with the REV drive, but it is similar tech, to be sure.
Yeah, similar in that it was still possible to have a disk corrupt somehow and break the drive. Then break any other disk that was inserted into the drive and break any other drive used to attempt recovery of data from the broken disk. As a previous comment said, like a hardware virus. May be why you can't get REV bits here in UK any more.