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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.
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.
Wake me when optical disc capacity exceeds harddisk capacity again... like it used to when the CD was released.
....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.
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.
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.
> Why do we care about 300GB optical disks, when I can fit a terabyte of data onto something the size of a fingernail?
Do you have one of those? How much did it cost you?
How does that compare to the bulk unit price of stamped optical media or even BDR blanks?
The real truth of the matter is that you can't fit a terabyte onto something the size of a fingernail. Even if you could, you would never be able to afford it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
If you can stamp the disk in the press and have 300 GB of data, its a very useful for a distribution media (downloading 300 GB is still a slow process). I only get about 3 MBit/sec on my cable service, so 300 GByte is very slow download (over 9 days).
The ability for consumer level recording is much less important to the promoters of large optical formats.
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.
So you dont buy any BluRay discs then.... Because BluRay is 100% sony.
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.
> Why do we care about 300GB optical disks, when I can fit a terabyte of data onto something the size of a fingernail?
Do you have one of those? How much did it cost you?
maybe the dude just has gigantically big fingers.
sony doesn't even own the largest share of blu ray patents
over 300 companies in that patent pool
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.
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.
all the discs I still have (only a handful) from 1995 are still readable. . .
The only time I ever get coasters is if the laser in a drive is flaking out, or the software doesn't detect the disc type properly and starts burning a DVD onto DVD media and runs out of space (in the former, it's equipment failure, and the latter, luser error).
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
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.
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
You hit the nail on the head. There is a sweet spot for backups. For example, Blu-Ray disks were not worth the trouble until the 25 gig versions ended up within the same range as DVD media.
Here is what I want to see with a new type of optical media:
1: At a decent price point. Too expensive, it won't catch on. For media in a case/caddy, I don't mind paying up to $45. For a bare disk, $5-$10 each.
2: Very good storage life. It would be nice for the dye, if exposed to oxygen somehow, wouldn't rot over the years.
Now here is where things branch. If the optical format is to replace Blu-Ray (and be compatible with it, CDs, and DVDs), that is one thing. If it is going to be all new optical media in a format starting from scratch, maybe it would be nice to see some additional items:
1: I'd like a case/caddy. That way, if the media is dropped, I'm not worried about scratches. This also protects against dust.
2: A decent size. Something like a 3.5" disk would be a good size, although 5 inches would be tolerable. Any bigger, the media gets unwieldy.
3: The read/write lasers are on both sides. No having to flip media as you had to do with some older optical disks.
4: Some resistance to bit rot in the dye, so oxygen getting between the glued layers doesn't render the disk unreadable in a few years.
5: Onboard encryption. Not DRM. Encryption, similar to LTO-4 and newer's SPIN/SPOUT SCSI commands. That way, I can set a password on a silo, and the media encryption would be transparant, or if I wanted a more elaborate encryption scheme (with each media piece having its own key), that would be doable. This would be part of the standard, not an optional add-on.
6: The ability to add as much ECC as the disk can hold. It will slow down writes, but as a whole, would help archive life overall.
7: Another dye layer so labels can done via a Lightscribe or Disk T@2 process. It would be nice if this could be automated, perhaps with a barcode, or if the disk is stored in a case/caddy, perhaps some type of inexpensive e-Ink mechanism. That way, labels are handled the "right" way, and not with a Sharpie, or with barcode stickers. For rewritable media, this would also allow the media to be re-labelled instantly.
8: A way of allowing the media to have an El-Torito like RAM image, or at least some method.
9: A case/caddy that is designed for a jukebox, where the media can be gripped, moved, unloaded, reloaded, shuffled, etc. for many thousands of tries with low probably of error or the media getting dropped. LTO silos are pretty reliable, and this media likely would be smaller than that.
10: Ideally the drive would have the ability to store an image of the data being burned before the burning process starts. That way, the computer's I/O is not the bottleneck when burning media, nor is there any chance of buffer underruns.
You clearly don't have small children.
The key is archive life. Tapes are rated and warrantied to store data for many years (although something warrantied for 10 years may not mean anything there is readable a decade later... but you get a free tape if it isn't.)
Oddly enough, I have had very good luck with optical disks for long term storage. I recently restored a ten year old multi-CD archive of an old MMO client I used to play just for kicks, and had no issues. Other people have had complete collections go bad on them. I don't know if it is the way media is stored (I use CD pocket binders, and store the media vertically), or if I got lucky with the right dye batches.
The downside of optical is that I get lazy. Even with a decent utility that can toss a folder full of stuff onto multiple pieces of media, it does take time to scribble out a date, what the stuff was, etc., and repeat every time the drawer of the burner opens. Then, there is the fact there are no programs that can index data CDs/DVDs/Blu-Rays (plenty of music/movie indexers, but try to find a simple utility that can tell you that file "x" is on DVD "y" just doesn't exist outside of a proprietary backup utility.)
I'm in the same camp. Especially when doing a monthly backup, I don't really care how long it takes to write. I just want to make sure when it comes time to read it that it works. The only success I ever had was with DVD-RAM, especially the ones in the caddy cartridges. Of course, 4GB just won't cut it today. Off the shelf DVD-R was a joke. Sometimes the discs would work for a few weeks before developing errors, even if stored in a jewel case in a dark, cool room, with no humidity.
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.
The real truth of the matter is that you can't fit a terabyte onto something the size of a fingernail. Even if you could, you would never be able to afford it.
Let's hop a time machine back to 2009. Oh look: Terabytes of storage on something smaller than a fingernail being prototyped. In other news, the microSD working group updated their specifications to include 2 TB storage in that form-factor. That same year, someone got the idea to stitch a bunch of microSD cards together to create a 1 TB drive that would fit on a finger. And earlier this year, Kingston released a 1 TB thumb drive, which is, as you might expect, the side of your thumb.
So the 'real truth' of the matter is that this technology is only a few years away. And by the looks of things, it won't just be affordable: It'll be competitively priced with current solutions.
So I will ask the question again: Why are we continuing to invest in a technology that's many times that size and many fractions of that in terms of storage capacity by volume, dimensions, mass, or any other unit of measurement you care to throw out there? The answer is obvious: DRM. Optical media has been the medium of choice for DRM schemes since the first CD was released. That's its only relevance in the marketplace today.
The technology we have today greatly exceeds optical media storage, and there's been no breakthroughs in optics that suggest it can ever match solid state media for information density. It's dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. So what if I can't fit a terabyte on my fingernail right now, that it has to be the size of my thumb instead? That's still a helluva better than this latest optical media format! And it's available now.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
DVD+R is (marginally) better. But yeah, I swore off optical media for good almost a decade ago now. The minute you could buy reasonably priced external USB hard drives, I stopped buying CD/DVD+/-Rs (and I used to buy a LOT of them). Faster, more robust and more reliable.
Hard drives don't last forever, but provided you keep multiple backups and move data to new drives every 5 years or so, you should be fine.
check back in 50 years to see how well-preserved the data on your fingernail-sized media is, compared with the data on the optical disks
There are SDXC cards with lifetime warranties, advertised as shockproof, X-ray-proof and waterproof. Although I find most SD cards a little flimsy for heavy use (when I'm working, mine are swapped between my camera and my laptop dozens of times in a day) I'd expect them to work reasonably well for archival. And the SDXC spec scales to 2TB... but as with optical, the real problem is being able to keep track of where you put a particular file, on which card or disc.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Compare the cost of a pressed disc versus the equivalent storage in a thumb drive, and you'll see DRM isn't the only reason. Also, people already have systems for managing discs (shelves for home storage, delivery methods in the supply chain, machinery at the plants, etc.), so it's not as straight forward as you seem to imagine it to be.
Is that 279.4 gibacocks buffed or unbuffed?
Saw a guild name the other night called '6 inches unbuffed', and it made me chuckle