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."

Comments

Re:Great

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Another year another multi-100s GB optical disc announced. So is this one going to actually come to market this time?

Will there be any optical drives left in the wild by the time such a beast makes it out of the lab?

That's fine and dandy

[Sparticus789]

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.

Capacity ain't everything.

[danaris]

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

Re:Capacity ain't everything.

[Kjella]

SSDs aren't really what killed home-burned optical media, it was USB sticks in multi-GB size at reasonable cost. For storage a 4TB HDD for $179 beats a stack of optical discs by miles and makes discs unfeasible even as backup, the reason to burn discs was portability but USB sticks mopped up that market. Today either you copy to your stick and bring it (push) or your buddy visits with his stick to bring home (pull), either way you don't need any one-time discs. Or using any online service instead, that too.

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.

Non-connected users

[davidwr]

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.