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Sony & Panasonic Plan Next-Gen 300 GB Optical Discs By the End of 2015
SmartAboutThings writes "If you think optical discs are dead and are a sign of the past, maybe you need to take this into consideration – Sony and Panasonic have just announced in Tokyo that they have signed a basic agreement with the objective of developing the next-generation optical discs that are said to have a recording capacity of at least 300GB. The two companies have even set a deadline for this ambitious project: before the end of 2015."
Another year another multi-100s GB optical disc announced. So is this one going to actually come to market this time?
... it being so completely hidebound by strong DRM, that it'll be completely unusable -- and in due course, completely irrelevant?
SO typical of Sony.
This turkey is DOA.
They need something to store 4k stereoscopic movies.
Can I get a SCSI I interface kit, to update the spindle on my B&W NeXT Cube? :-)
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
If a pricey 50-GB BD disk isn't commonly used for backups why would anyone, consumer or business, want a 300-GB optical disk that may cost $10 or more for a single use when a 500-GB USB 3.0 drive can be had for $50, is many times faster and is, of course, reusable (until it dies).
But what are they going to do about the I/O? It takes me about 20-30 minutes to write a single 5 GB DVD and verify the data on the disc. Now with a 300 GB disc, it will take me a full day to write a disc?
I hope they have a plan to address the bandwidth limitation of these discs, and not just focus on "EHRMAGAWD BIG DISC!" for the consumer shock value.
sudo make me a sandwich
by then everything will be so locked down the only thing able to take up 300gb space will be all the fucking laws we need to follow to be on the internet
Capacity's all very good, but what about speed?
Current-gen optical disks are, as I understand it, dramatically slower than SSDs, which is where a lot of storage is moving these days.
If these new ones aren't significantly faster than the old, I don't really see them catching on in the mainstream.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
Is that... for selling movies on them throughout 21st century ? Youtube won't fit on those disks, go home Sony you're a drunk old man.
I would guess that the same amount of storage on usb flash would be comparably priced by then, if the price of drives and blank media for blu-ray discs when they came out are any indication. of course, forget bringing one of these discs to another computer early on since there won't be a reader for it. what is the target for these? I haven't been impressed with longevity of optical media and I still occasionally get coasters, which doesn't bother me when blank media are $0.50 and less but these likely won't be cheap
Wake me when optical disc capacity exceeds harddisk capacity again... like it used to when the CD was released.
I don't get it. Why do we care about 300GB optical disks, when I can fit a terabyte of data onto something the size of a fingernail? Optical tech is dying.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
....InPhase's tapestry was demonstrably there in 2008, and it was writable, but they went under due to bad management. I'm sure Sony & Panasonic aren't the current IP holders, so whatever they break to market is going to be technologically inferior to boot.
Er, make that 3 platters. It was a long-running show.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I'm done with spinning disk and all their stupid copy protection which keeps half of the movies from even playing. I want all solid state; the technology is here, it's a lot faster, and more reliable.
There are people who don't have fast internet.
There are people who PREFER to view content on non-Internet-connected devices to avoid tracking.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
High speed CDs were barely tolerable with regard to reliability, but DVD-Rs ended it for me. It can take a day to write a disk for all I care. I don't need a useless disc quickly. I don't want to hunt for the right combination of drive and disc though, and a successfully written disc must not have uncorrectable read errors, period.
Will it have equal or less power usage than my SSD, for those of us who like the extended laptop battery life?
Carbon fiber abacus, or ...
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
One of the MAIN reasons I gave up optical discs is because they were not reliable. Sure, the factory pressed discs were okay. But anything burned at home seemed to have a lifespan of 2 years tops before it started to degrade. At one point I was buying expensive DVD-RAM for backups because it was actually business-grade and would last for a long time. But the capacity soon became too low to use anymore, especially considering the cost of the discs. I have heard about the "archive quality" discs but have never put any to the test.
By the end of 2015 USB sticks will probably be twice that capacity and 4 times faster without needing a special drive to write/read them.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
So 300GB of bootleg songs.
Say 4MB/song
300/0.004 => 75,000 songs -> ~ 1/2 a year songs
at $2,250 per song thats $168.75M
at $222,000/24 songs thats $693.750M
I bet wallmart will sell full discs for $50.
I was going to jump on here and point out (along with everyone else so far) that this is a dumb idea. Consumers simply won't care. Then I decided to RTFA... From Sony's website where I saw, "standard for professional-use" and "In recent years, there has been an increasing need for archive capabilities, not only from video production industries, such as motion pictures and broadcasting, but also from cloud data centers that handle increasingly large volumes of data following the evolution in network services."
So this is not intended for general consumers anyway. But I still think it's a dumb ass idea. I have seen too-many ultra high density optical disks schemes come and go over the years, and none have found traction in any sector.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
at a reasonable price
i get it selling game of thrones season by season. but there is no reason why i shouldn't be able to buy an entire TV run of a 20 year old show in one box for $40 or so
First there was VHS vs. Beta, than there was CD vs. MiniDisk, than there was BlueRay vs. HDDVD. Now finally Sony will have the digital media market all to itself. If only anyone would still care.
Seeing as Sony is involved, I'll be passing on it. Sony is permanently blacklisted in my book. End discussion.
If they aren't in your blacklist, why not?
Will make Streaming at peek times hard and off peak push / downloading is better but say 50GB / 100GB an movie is can add up fast.
Great! Now I will only need 27 optical discs to backup my data.
Will it be backwards compatible with Blu-Ray, DVD, & CD, so people only have one optical player collecting dust on the shelf as they stream everything from a local computer or across the internet?
considering how irrelevant both companies are anymore. Sony and Panasonic have lost in the consumer electronics markets, partially because they insist on stuff like this. In an era when everything is moving into the "cloud", Sony and Panasonic are looking to make a new generation of optical disks? Will all their TV's have slots built in to insert these disks in?
I am surprised Sharp and RCA don't join them in their alliance of irrelevancy.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
my newest computer doesn't even have a disc drive...
What's with the second link, to the idiot with the blog? It adds nothing to the discussion at all, throws in some factual errors just for giggles... He specifically says this is going to be for "consumer use" when the Sony press release explicitly says "professional-use" right at the top.
Sony is big into MO discs, as a more expensive alternative to tape for archiving and backup. So I expect this will be just another entrant into that market, still lagging far behind magnetic tape in capacity. They claim insane reliability, but then again, some expensive tape manufacturers will offer insurance that'll pay for data recovery for the next 25 years, just like Sony does with their MO discs.
If they weren't completely proprietary, IT folks might seriously consider MO. But as long as it's Sony-only, with high mark-up and no hope on the horizon of cheaper media and drives coming along in the future, or even hope of being able to source replacements in a couple decades, the market will just keep shrinking. Unless there are strict requirements that perfectly match up with Sony's MO format, using Sony's proprietary gear never enters my mind.
Maybe this will find a market in pre-production, editing, or even digital cinema, instead of shipping those hard drives around, but there's really no interest in another optical disc format in the consumer market, as Blu-ray hasn't even seen wide adoption, and far more convenient alternatives become ever more economical.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
also USB 2.0 IO is not that good also embedded systems may not have alot of cpu power to work usb at a high use rate.
sata is better and less CPU overhead.
80 years as a min wage riaa janitor to work off the fine
It's more about DRM refresh than anything else. BluRay has been completely cracked, same for HDCP. Watch to see a NEW digital video design come out along with this to protect that precious content from all you scumag consumers!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
That's all marketing. We slashdotters know it's only 279.4 gibacocks. All the geek-girls are unimpressed.
We already have PS3 games on blu-ray that have to install to the Hard drive to deal with the seek times and supposedly have the same data in multiple places on the disk. This should be even more of that fun.
If they aren't in your blacklist, why not?
Building the raspberry Pi in the UK. Created the most open commercial Android console 2 years ago. Latest console PS3 making many of the the right moves now. First mainstream waterproof phone.
Film lovers/buffs like me love the extras that often come with optical media - commentary tracks, "making of" videos, interviews, alternate versions, etc.
I haven't seen these available on streaming services yet (granted, I haven't checked all streaming services to see). That, plus lag time for HD video makes me far prefer optical media. Even if connection speeds could handle all of this, I think I'd still prefer to have a physical copy. Just old-fashioned I guess.
- Tim
time warner doesn't have a bandwidth cap
Maybe. But as a TWC customer, when using their service means you get stuck behind peers with well established shitty performance for months and months and months, the distinction between poor bandwidth and poor peering may be irrelevant to your perspective.
https://www.google.com/search?q=twc+slow+youtube
An optical disc will outlive a hard drive by decades.
Only ones you purchase pre-recorded, not ones you write which have a lifetime of 2-5 years. Even then while hard drives may fail it is easy to keep a RAID array up and they are very easy to copy the data to and from. So in 10 years time when the 8TB solid state memory stick or 1000+-year lifetime quartz technology drive is available you can easily copy all the files over to it...unlike your optical discs which you will have to load into the machine individually to copy the data over a speeds well below that of a hard drive.
Fuck, those companies REALLY do live in the past.
I bet they think they can also "sell" movies to us again.
Anyway, it's gonna be hilarious! XD
The downside to HDDs (and for that matter SSDs) is that they need babysitting, the one thing I'd like optical media for is if they can promise me high-capacity discs I can put in a drawer (or more likely a safety deposit box), forget for 20-100 years and still read fine. Wouldn't even need to be a home burner, as long as I could have a home reader - I'd upload a disc image to some burning service, they'd ship the finished disc in the mail. There's a lot of static data I'd like to keep without having to copy from HDD to HDD regularly in order to keep it alive.
No current inexpensive optical media is likely to last more than about a decade (and some cheap stuff lasts a lot less long than that). There exist archival-quality optical disks, but they are much more expensive and hard to find than the regular stuff.
Just because you can put an optical disk in a safe deposit box and not have it suffer from magnetic degradation doesn't mean it's not going to suffer from any degradation over time. (IIRC, the dye used in burnable optical disks degrades over time, so after X years, the whole disk looks like it's been burned, and is utterly unreadable.)
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
What the hell ad you people doing to get coasters all the time? The times I get coasters is if the laser is flaking out (or in the case of the very expensive Ricoh drive I had years ago, inadequate lubrication on the optical sled. I went through five drives under warranty then when warranty ran out I fixed it for good with lithium grease), or if the software doesn't detect I put a CD instead of a DVD in and tries to write a DVD-sized data image to disk. Other than that, no problems- and I have discs from 1995 that are still readable - and back then I bought the cheapest media I could find. The design itself isn't the problem, and aside from rare equipment failures, the implementation isn't either.
So, what the hell are you all doing to make optical media so problematic?
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
said no one.
1) but it's a big box and
2) it's only $40 or so if that's the price the rights-holders sell it for. If they think they can make more money by pricing it higher, they will. If they want to price it higher for any other reason - say, to protect another offering that's already priced higher - they will.
It's not 20 years old yet but Stargate SG-1 is available in a large box, for well north of $100.
What I want is smaller boxes. For stuff that was originally recorded in a way that makes "DVD-quality" as good as you are going to get, I'd rather buy "collections" on Blue-Ray disks in a smaller box than DVDs in a box 2-3 times as big. Give me a 100GB or 300GB disk and I can fit more stuff on my bookshelf. Yes, I am one of those luddites that doesn't want to rely ONLY on spinning metal or silicon to hold my stuff.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If your older disks won't work in newer players, you MAY have a consumer-fraud action against the seller of the disk, depending on what country you live.
That's in theory.
In practice, either the company will be nice and let you swap for a newer "compatible" disk so they'll look nice, or if they don't care about looking nice, they'll dare you to sue and their lawyers will squash you and your lawyers like a bug.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
So 300GB which is just barely enough (in comparison to other storage media). And the other *REALLY BIG* problem is the cost of media. If the disks run between .01 and .05 each, then I would be interested. If they are like the fscking blu-ray at $25 per disk, its completely uneconomic. You can buy a rewritable, faster (both reading and writing), more cost effective SSD at a much cheaper price than buying the stupid media. Disks of spinning rust are even cheaper. Do the math: $25 for 25GB vs $129.99 for 3TB if you are using disks of spinning rust (Barracuda SATA III w/ 64MB Cache --retail), so the people who want to extort money from blu-ray media want $1/GB even though its slow and single use, and that doesn't include the read/write hardware, and in contrast you can buy the media and the read/write hardware --and its faster-- for 4.3 cents/GB. And since the cost of the read/write hardware isn't included with Blu-Ray, its even less cost competitive (blu-ray isn't 25x more expensive, its more like 50x more expensive for the first 25 disks, then only 25x more expensive for every disk after that). I would look at disk storage again if it was within 10% of solid media. I would look at 5 cents per GB. 300GB disk? I will pay $15, and no more if I were an early adopter, and later in its life I would want to look at $1 for 300GB.
Consumer data storage always comes after the optical tech is used commercially. CDs were for music. DVDs are for standard def movies and Blu-Ray are for HD movies. This new tech will be for super HD 4K movies.
Optical disks have never been suitable for long term storage. They're for content consumption and consumers eventually get a burner that can use some portion of the available space.
Work Safe Porn
They don't have any 128GB Quadlayer BluRay discs for sale yet and they are already moving onto the 'next big thing'
(Largest Available is Triple Layer 100GB)
The CD was created by PHILIPS.
Idiot.
I'm highly confident if I turn off "autorun" then no software will be executed from a CD or DVD if I pop it into the drive.
With a thumb drive I'm pretty sure that is NOT the case, at least in Microsoft Windows.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I'm pretty sure if I turn off autorun and autoplay, any auto-run-on-insert code on a CD or DVD will not get executed.
I'm pretty sure there are other ways to get code on a USB to auto-run and I'm not knowledgeable enough about Microsoft Windows to turn them all off.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It's actually more than 30 000 years at a 20k yearly salary, which is more than what minimum wage at 40 hours/week gets you. If a murder is a 30 year sentence on average, 300gb of piracy in your pocket is then equivalent to 1000 murders in terms of time. But yeah, it all makes sense, them there optical media are dangerous.
For me, if it's a choice between one 3TB hard drive versus 10 300GB optical disks to store my backups, I would go with the hard drive.
I'm guessing it would probably cost $120 for the hard drive, versus at least $50 for 10 disks. If that's the case, then the convenience of not having to swap 10 disks in and out would totally be worth the extra money to me.
Also, since it's Sony, I'm guessing the burner will cost like $800 the first year, and could take 10 years to get down to $200. And by the time they do hit $200, you'll probably be able to buy a 8TB hard drive for $100. At that point, the cost+speed+convenience tradeoff will be overwhelmingly tilted in favor of hard drives as a backup solution.
anyone know what the "masters" are made of. some stuff was obviously shot on real film rolls -aka- real analog holographics and stored in climate controlled areas. on what are modern movies stored, like the ones that are advertised as digital in the movie theater? or for that matter, whats the master for a movie like "toys" which a computer generated movie? ... who knows ... maybe the future is with macros ... like the movie is just a computer game "engine" with a macro to render the scenes and action and plot?
oh laserdisk ye old analog.
By the time this even becomes a viable product, heat assisted write technology hard disks will become available. At the same time ReRAM tech appears to have the potential to take solid state disks to mind boggling speed and storage densities before the end of this decade. It is hard to see any optical storage system being relevant for much longer.
I don't see a need beyond 300GB disks. For one, size may not be near reaching its limit but speed certainly is, at least during cost-effective research. The second reason is that everyone is moving to the net, meaning direct downloads, rather than physical copies. This certainly cannot apply to nations too poor to afford good internet, but by 2025, that's most likely to change. In the event that it doesn't, is 300Gb sufficient enough? Granted, it won't support 4k (and above) 3D displays, or holographic videos (hey, it's the future!), but shouldn't 300gb be sufficient for most things that aren't that? I presume it would take a lot of effort, to make a disk spin fast enough to process enough data for 4k/4k3d data. I'd assume a blackhole would be created in this effort, but who knows?
So I'm gonna have to start my DVD...nay...my BluRay collection YET again...
Weren't there already people who figured out how to get 100 GB on a Blu-ray? Is 3x that really that big of a step up?
Is that 279.4 gibacocks buffed or unbuffed?
Saw a guild name the other night called '6 inches unbuffed', and it made me chuckle