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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."
Sure, Sony has done plenty to legitimately earn the scorn of its customers. Still, I myself am one of those who would readily spend money for the right Sony product. I've bought exactly four pieces of hardware from Sony. The PS1, PS2, PS3, and PSP. I don't regret any of those purchases, and I fully expect to buy the PS4 when it comes out. I'll probably get the PS Vita eventually as well.
There are two reasons I won't shy away from those purchases. First, I can hardly imagine a feasible scenario where I would withhold money from a company as punishment for a past action. Perhaps in protest an ongoing action such as "I won't buy anything from this company until they stop donating money to terrorist organization X every month." Other than that, I'll take how trustworthy I consider a company into consideration, but ultimately choose the option that provides me the greatest benefit.
There are games exclusive to Sony's system that more than justify buying those gaming consoles in my eyes. It doesn't hurt that I don't believe I've ever actually been harmed by any of Sony's actions, which makes it easier to take a logical rather than emotional approach.
The second reason I'll buy from them is that, whatever laws are in place, I don't consider a corporation a person. Kaz Hirai became the new President and CEO of Sony two weeks ago. What kind of turnover have other executives had? Who was actually responsible for the decisions you loathe, and how many of them even still work for Sony?
You don't even know what you're talking about. Sony was not the only seller of minidisc players and media. It was an excellent format that is still around. The walkman was only discontinued in 2011. That's almost 20 years for MD walkmans and it had no pre-recorded media so I'm certainly not the only one that was buying them.
JVC, Sharp, Pioneer, Panasonic all made MD players. They were all easy to find in the UK too. Apparently they weren't too popular in the US but I guess that just goes to show that people valued Sony's brand more. That's not their fault or a bad thing (for them).
Aside from Betamax and their memory sticks (which should have died straight away) they don't actually have that many proprietary formats. CDs, blu-ray, DVD, and blu-ray have all been developed with at least Phillips. Along with the hardware, minidisc software produced by numerous companies and the the PS3 uses standard hard drives and USB connections unlike the 360 with its over priced proprietary drives.
Sony has done some stupid things, like every other company but people still talk about shit that's not even that true and the fact people still seem to be so butt-hurt over memory sticks just goes to show there isn't actually that many instances of closed formats to complain about.