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

Sony?

[mcgrew]

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.

Re:Sony?

[spire3661]

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

Re:Sony?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish everyone else would stop shoveling money at these evil people

They are, and in increasing numbers
Sony posts its worst loss ever
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-04-10/japan-sony-earnings/54144022/1

says it all really, treat your customers with contempt and they will make sure you cease to exist, one way or another

Re:Sony?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't get in his way, he's on a "ranting roll," and once the sony-bashing boulder has started going, there's no stopping it.

Re:Sony?

[AngryDeuce]

Anyone buying a Sony product these days should have their head examined. I'm not going to bother listing the numerous ways they've fucked over their customers over the last decade (at least), but it's enough for me to greet every new product of theirs with a great, big middle finger.

Then again, it seems there's always someone ready to throw money at Sony for their newest piece of fucking shit that doesn't do what it's goddamned supposed to.

Re:Sony?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have any idea how many things nowadays you use which were created by Sony, contributed to by Sony, or derived from Sony tech? No?

Seriously, this shit is getting old. Judge technology by its merits, not by what one single tiny division of a megacorporation may have done to irritate you.

Re:Sony?

[SomePgmr]

once the sony-bashing boulder has started going, there's no stopping it

True enough, but Sony built the hill.

Re:Sony?

[mcgrew]

You do realize that the 3.5 inch floppy came AFTER the 5 inch floppy, which came after the eight inch floppy, right? And that I didn't say a 3.5 inch floppy?

The earliest floppy disks, developed in the late 1960s, were 8 inches (200 mm) in diameter;[1] they became commercially available in 1971.[2] These disks and associated drives were produced and improved upon by IBM and other companies such as Memorex, Shugart Associates, and Burroughs Corporation.[3] The term "floppy disk" appeared in print as early as 1970,[4] and although in 1973 IBM announced its first media as "Type 1 Diskette" the industry continued to use the terms "floppy disk" or "floppy".

In 1976, Shugart Associates introduced the first 5 1â4-inch FDD. By 1978 there were more than 10 manufacturers producing such FDDs. There were competing floppy disk formats, with hard and soft sector versions and encoding schemes such as FM, MFM and GCR. The 5 1/4 inch format displaced the 8-inch one for most applications, and the hard sectored disk format disappeared. In 1984, IBM introduced the 1.2 MB dual sided floppy disk along with its AT model. IBM started using the 720 kB double density 3.5" microfloppy disk on its Convertible laptop computer and the 1.44 MB high density version with the PS/2 line in 1986. These disk drives could be added to older PC models. In 1988 IBM introduced a drive for 2.88 MB "DSED" diskettes in its top-of-the-line PS/2 models but this was a commercial failure.

A variant on the Sony design, introduced in 1982 by a large number of manufacturers, was then rapidly adopted; by 1988 the 3 1â2-inch was outselling the 5 1â4-inch.[6]

Maybe I should say something about my lawn here... BTW, mods, you moderate an almost incorrect statement as "informative"?

Re:Sony?

[i_ate_god]

and possibly the boulder

Re:Sony?

[arth1]

Anyone buying a Sony product these days should have their head examined. I'm not going to bother listing the numerous ways they've fucked over their customers over the last decade (at least), but it's enough for me to greet every new product of theirs with a great, big middle finger.

I am willing to give them a new chance now that they're rid of Howard Stringer and are restructuring.

Sony used to stand for quality and functionality, and it can go there again even if it's far from it right now.

Re:Sony?

[cpu6502]

I have to assume the summary was being sarcastic: "...the most successful storage mediums of all time â" MiniDisc and Zip disks." Minidisc is a bit like the Betamax of our generation, and Zip was prone to data loss.

1.5 TB divided by 30 discs == 50 gig each. Why? Another company has already developed a Bluray disc that can hold 1 terabyte all by itself (100 GB per layer times 10 layers). Strange that Sony would rather sell 30 discs in a cartridge instead of just 1. Not very efficient.

Re:Sony?

[mcgrew]

Buying computer hardware from a company that has deliberately installed malware on their paying customers' computers is brain-dead stupid.

Re:Sony?

[houghi]

But look on the plus side. You can buy your movie collection again.

Re:Sony?

[BStroms]

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?

Re:Sony?

[AngryDeuce]

Strange that Sony would rather sell 30 discs in a cartridge instead of just 1. Not very efficient.

Not strange at all, just Sony doing what Sony does...they just love their proprietary formats. Why sell a disc when you can create a cartridge of discs that only Sony produces hardware capable of reading? Might as well call it Memory Stick 2: Electric Boogaloo...

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?

[zeugma-amp]

you can still buy a box of floppies?

Re:Sony?

[Dogtanian]

and i just got rid of my 8 track...

Speaking of MiniDisc, couldn't that be described as an "ATRAC cartridge"?

Re:Sony?

[Ihmhi]

If they built the boulder it would fall apart halfway down the hill and only roll in a country it was region-locked to.

Re:Sony?

[hairyfeet]

What is sad is once upon a time, before Sony became one of the media cartels, Sony products were once the height of quality. If the OLD Sony were to be the one offering this? i'd jump on in a heartbeat as we really do need a nice long term storage for consumers to replace DVDs. But this is the NEW Sony which means it will be filled to the brim with DRM crap that will make it crippled and buggy. No thanks Sony.

Re:Sony?

[Dogtanian]

I am willing to give them a new chance now that they're rid of Howard Stringer and are restructuring.

Bear in mind that Stringer became CEO in 2005, and from what I understand Sony's perceived decline (in Slashdotters' view) began during the 1990s, so I doubt he's solely to blame.

Also bear in mind that- as others pointed out in the recent Sony jobs cut thread- the bits of Sony where the "evil" is occurring are actually doing quite well so this is "not Sony getting what _should_ be coming to them".

Sorry, but this is another example of Slashdotters' tunnel vision, forgetting that though such issues might matter to them, they're a much smaller and less influential (if somewhat atypical) part of the market than they'd like to think, and the great unwashed in general really do not give a toss about rootkit CDs, the loss of Linux on the PS3, and other such behaviours- even if they ought to.

Re:Sony?

[thetoadwarrior]

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.

Re:Sony?

[vlm]

This is Sony... remember "memory sticks" where they cost 5 times as much as CF or SD, simply because... they could?

"Special Sony BDR media" will almost certainly be the only kind that will work in the caddy and will cost at least $25 per disk... I would be shocked if Sony allowed its victims to use commodity products instead of Sony brand BDR.

Re:Sony?

[griffjon]

I would at least consider buying it, if Sony would promise not to sue me if I actually used it.

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.

Re:Sony?

[arth1]

Bear in mind that Stringer became CEO in 2005, and from what I understand Sony's perceived decline (in Slashdotters' view) began during the 1990s, so I doubt he's solely to blame.

I'd say the end of the 90s, when Sony's former leader, Norio Oga, stepped down and made two WTF choices - Udei to lead the bigger Sony conglomerate, and Stringer to lead the US division. Oga had risen in the ranks from the floor to the top, and led Sony from good to great, with a focus on quality. His successors, on the other hand, were pure suits with a focus on short term profits.

I still have hope that Sony can get back to its roots as a company led by those who know the business from the ground up, and see longer term than the next shareholders' meeting and own stock options. There are still an awful lot of talented people working for Sony.

Re:Sony?

[dexotaku]

My turn to be pedantic.

You mention the positives of several of Sony's [sometimes co-developed] formats but seem to be skipping over a few facts in terms of proprietariness [nice word?]. Or I've misinterpreted sarcasm. In any case,

CD: Co-developed, proprietary [between partners], and licensable. 20+ years later, Sony themselves extended DRM onto it with rootkits.

DVD: Co-developed, proprietary [between partners], and licensable, yes - but arguably [with Sony's involvement and blessing] the first widely available and used consumer digital format [for anything] to use encrypted DRM nonsense. Cracked in the best interests of humankind.

BluRay: Co-developed, proprietary [between partners], and licensable, yes - but the same as with DVD. Also cracked, though with "required" firmware updates for newer titles it's somewhat of a moving target. It's not rendered useless by its DRM, but it is rendered cumbersome and inconvenient even for the average end-user.

MD: Proprietary and licensable. Forced use of SCMS was the only DRM [besides low-level spec obscurity]. Had plenty of pre-recorded [stamped using them same process as CD] media. It never really took off as a consumer product in North America, though its use for location recording for radio was widespread. By the end of the 90s MD was ubiquitous with broadcasters [in Canada at least].
It was fairly popular in the UK and extremely popular in Japan, where the recordable media made for a huge trading scene for small musical acts. A sizable Japanese indy music scene both depended on and exploited the format. The physical cassette and slip cases were also popular for enabling elaborate custom cover art.
DRM didn't exactly cripple it, because it wasn't used in the way we use media now.

NetMD: standard MD plus USB-writable, utterly crippled by DRM [SCMS least of all]. MD media were writable over an encrypted USB connection with Sony's [or Sharp's, or whoever made the specific player's] software only. Discs could not be read with consumer equipment via USB at all, whether the recordings had been put there by USB or recorded on the unit itself [analogue or digital]. Sony's online music store which sold ATRAC-encoded music for NetMD and other Walkmans was highly restrictive, using a check-in, check-out system for all tracks including those ripped by end users themselves. Their software was also a total abomination, and Windows-only. Their insistence on using their own encoding format wasn't a misstep in the mid-to-late 90s [before mp3 was popularised] but it became a serious liability to the format post-Napster [I just said post-Napster. I feel dirty.].

HiMD: Proprietary through-and-through, but licensable like MD [almost no one did, you do see Buffalo branded/rebadged units around]. Seemed to change things a bit on the surface; a new, 1GB disc [compared to the original ~310MB], uncompressed PCM recording, and the ability to copy recordings made on the unit via USB showed promise.
Almost all the DRM goodness was still there, though. SCMS - yes. Check-in, check-out for purchased music via USB - yes. Copying recordings made via the digital in - disallowed. Direct access to analogue recordings was finally allowed but everything had to be done through the latest iteration of their software abomination and it wouldn't allow copying original MD format disks at all.
A fair number of recordists bought into the format knowing all the disadvantages in advance. I personally bought in because I'd used MD for years [doing all copying of self-made recordings in real time via analogue] and at the time it came out, it was the only format to offer PCM recording, USB transfer [albeit painfully slow due to the physical limitations of the medium itself], and it cost an order of magnitude less than other portable digital equipment like the flash audio recorders which were only just beginning to come out at the same time.
Miraculously [for Sony], some of us users managed to communicate actual needs t

What's the use case?

[TheCouchPotatoFamine]

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."

Re:What's the use case?

[Master Moose]

From TFA:

"Unless Sony can get other companies to make and sell ODA drives, though, it will probably just go the way of the MiniDisc."

Hugely popular in Asia?

Re:What's the use case?

[vlm]

From TFA:

"Unless Sony can get other companies to make and sell ODA drives, though, it will probably just go the way of the MiniDisc."

Hugely popular in Asia?

This is true. Got rid of my father's minidisc hardware and discs, all to .jp and local asian sounding names. Crazy popular little things over there, locally no one wants them.

Somehow, I was never quite certain how, their encoding and/or internal design was so much more energy efficient than early mp3 players, that you'd get like 4 times the playtime, despite the storage technology being a rotating disk.

Re:Zip discs

[bigredradio]

Zip discs one of the most successful storage mediums of all time? Is that a joke?

Yes. And you didn't get it.

Re:The most successful storage mediums of all time

[HFShadow]

Hear that woosh? That was the sarcasm going right over your head.

Lost me

[TheSpoom]

You lost me at "Sony".

Yawn. Sony wants another media format.

[slaker]

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.

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...

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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.

The many headed dragon of Sony

[tekrat]

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!

give it up sony

[Simulant]

""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.

Re:Zip discs

[davros74]

At the time (mid-to-late 90s), the computer labs at college were full of ZIP drives. For a brief time, they became the best way to transfer word docs and homework from dorm computer to lab computer and back. But very short lived (2 years maybe?)

Being a /. member, I was early adopter, so naturally I already had a SCSI controller to support those new CDROM thingies that showed up in the early 90s, so it was naturally to get the SCSI/parallel port version of the ZIP drive. On my computer, SCSI speeds (40MB/sec), but parallel port compatibility with everyone else (external drive naturally). Using a DB25 connector. One problem. Iomega decided to not use a DIP switch to control the modes, but instead auto-detect the SCSI bus or parallel port. Except they screwed up the termination on the SCSI bus. So the only *approved* method of using the external device was as the SINGLE and ONLY device on the SCSI host bus adapter. Seriously? My SCSI bus was notorious for parity errors and data corruption issues with the Iomega ZIP drive. I ultimately decided my data integrity was more important (several SCSI HDDs and a CDROM burner and tape drive), and the ZIP was then dead to me.

So it wasn't just the click of death that killed it. The Parallel/SCSI combo version had potential, but that too was foobar'd.

Zip disks filled a gap reasonably well...

[langelgjm]

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 :-)

Re:Zip discs

[Anaerin]

It was much more successful than it's competitor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LS120 - The very fact that you've heard of it makes it MUCH more successful than that boondoggle ever was.

Re:Zip discs

[rrohbeck]

All the marketing folks used them to store their humongous PPT files. And nothing of value was lost.

Re:Zip discs

[thetoadwarrior]

Early CD-R drives could be problematic too. In fact my zip drive gave me zero problems and my first CD-R produced a few duds. In either case the problems weren't wide spread.

zip drives, imo, were better because they were smaller and better protected (thus better for carrying around) but it's main problem was iomega controlled them so prices just weren't going to drop where as CD-R speeds and reliability went up while prices went down. Had the zip disk been an open format it possibly would be around now. It was a good format.

Re:Zip discs

[mlts]

Sounds crazy, but ZIP disks offered two other advantages:

1: The ability to be set read-only with a password. This was useful back in the day if one wanted a FTP server that an intruder couldn't trash the distributed files on, especially if a SCSI ZIP drive was used which had decent performance at the time.

2: The ability to use a password for protecting data which was hardware enforced. The ZIP 100 was bypassable by the hardware sleep trick, but the ZIP 250 and 750 were not, so other than LEOs with drives which ignored that bit, it was a pretty secure mechanism, especially when combined with a backup utility that did encryption.

ZIP drives were useful... of course, their time is since long gone since a USB flash drive is far more reliable and cheaper for small capacities.

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