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."

Comments

Re:Sony?

[spire3661]

Ahem....you do know the 3.5" floppy standard design was referenced from the Sony design right?

Dear Slashdot Editors

[AmiMoJo]

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."

Re:Zip discs

[Dahamma]

Ah, the click of death... especially impressive when a bad Zip disk could misalign the drive heads badly enough to screw up any other disks inserted. Probably the first widespread example of a computer *hardware* virus...

Re:Zip discs

[Ucklak]

Every business that needed to store anything over 5MB had a Zip drive. and that's every business I consulted for in the late 90s.

So maybe not every desktop but every office or 1 out of 5 computers had them.

Re:Sony?

[cpu6502]

VCR? Nope. It's JVC technology.
Laserdisc player? Nope. Philips.
Cassette player? Nope. Philips again.
DVR? Nope.
CD? Yep.
DVD? Nope.

Re:Sony?

[cpu6502]

>>>the result of JVC ripping off Sony's plans for Betamax

Uh. No. Sony's Betamax used U-loading whereas JVC followed a different route called M-loading. The M loading also proved better for camcorders, which is why JVC was able to shrink it to palmsize (VHS-C). Sony could not make recordable Betamax units, so they had to make a separate standard called Video8 which was incompatible with home VCRs.

Also JVC was smart enough to make their tapes 2 hours standard, so they could record a whole movie, instead of just half (like the 1 hour Beta tapes). That time choice is why VHS was more attractive to consumers, and VHS had essentially "won" the war as early as 1980.