Slashdot Mirror
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."
... 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.
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?
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.
Even streaming BluRay quality movies is difficult on most home connections. Sure, Netflix has "HD" content, but it's nowhere near the quality level of BluRay. And even if they did have the same quality, I don't want to be transferring 25 GB over my connection every time I want to watch a movie. At least not with the caps most ISPs enforce. There's going to have to be some kind of new media format if they ever want to start selling 4K TVs. The only alternative is to have people plug portable hard drives into kiosks in order to rent a movie. Like redbox, but bring your own disk. This would work better for renting, but wouldn't work so well for buying. multiple 300 GB movies would fill up even large capacity hard disks pretty fast.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
Streaming hasn't even caught up to the current set of legacy consumer media.
So there's still a problem of content delivery. Networks generally aren't fast enough and they also tend to be owned by competing media companies. Do you really think that Time Warner is going to let someone else stream 4K media to you?
Good luck with that bandwidth cap.
Just the monopoly aspects of the situation make it likely that there will continue to be a need for a consumer media format.
Like with virtual DVD jukeboxes, the problem isn't the tech but all of the companies actively trying to hold the tech back.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
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
Great! Now I will only need 27 optical discs to backup my data.
People who want 4K video in their homes, for one. Or even decent high-def. I've watched streaming video, and the picture quality just doesn't cut it for me even on a laptop screen, much less on my widescreen TV.
At the core of the problem is the poor quality of Internet service. I'm in the heart of the Silicon Valley, and the fastest Internet service available to me is 3Mbps. If I change ISPs and add channel bonding, I can push it up to the high single digits. If I want to watch a Blu-Ray-quality movie, even with the newer codecs, that means I would need to download at least 15 gigabytes of data. That translates to 11.3 hours of saturating the connection just to watch a single movie.
Move to 4K, and the download time balloons unimaginably—about a hundred gigabytes for a two-hour movie. At that rate, I could download one every few days. That's just plain insane.
The fact of the matter is that for many Americans, "the cloud" is just plain not able to keep up. Call me when every home in the U.S. has fiber. Until then, we still need optical media for content delivery.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
It's possible to use a lot less than that. Pirates generally fit a 720p movie in 4.4GB, or a 1080p in 8GB. Quality isn't quite blu-ray, but it's not far off.
Meanwhile the USB flash drives are quickly growing in capacity - already there are 512GB USB Sticks on the market. (OK, expensive, but considering the fact that they are getting cheaper all the time it's not a big deal, and when the optical disks comes out they may be obsolete already)
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
That's all marketing. We slashdotters know it's only 279.4 gibacocks. All the geek-girls are unimpressed.
Neither do most of mine. I do have a blu-ray burner in one PC, but have never used it to burn, and only used it to read a Bluray once. That Bluray failed to play in 3D, and was then played on my PS3.
I think I'm done with optical on a PC unless they come up with a 5TB disc that writes quickly to be used as a backup medium. Hard drives are just too large and low-cost for optical to make sense in most use cases.
And every time you change the disc, they'll show you 20 minutes of unskippable ads.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Not multi-100 GB, but I do have a BDXL drive on the desktop which can do 100 gig disks at 4x, using Nero.
Optical may be pedestrian as a media system (especially compared to SSDs), but there is a sweet spot in price that makes it worth using as a long term backup/archival media, especially when combined with fault-tolerant archiving [1]. Nothing is 100%, but I have found when restoring, I have had better luck pulling from CDs, DVDs, or Blu-Ray media than I have had with older HDDs.
As for time burning media, since I have a machine that acts as a file/backup server, I can fire off a backup, switch out media every so often, and call it done.
[1]: It may not be elegant, but WinRAR using volume archives combined with recovery records and recovery volumes (I try to use one extra disk for every 4-5) has done a good job so far. I have learned to avoid backup programs that write to optical drives in their own format... because there is a good chance that one glitch on a disk can render the whole archive unusable.
BluRay 1x speeds are 36mbps; however, most drives run at 2x or faster to provide the necessary 54Mbps data transfer rate for BDRom movies. The upper limit of the drive (which has been pretty standard for all optical drives, including CD-ROM and DVD, so I don't expect that to change) - is around 10,000 RPM - which comes out to approximately 12x the "base" transfer rate of BluRay, or just over 400Mbps.
So... assuming these new drives run at max speed all the time and it can magically maintain that rate for the entire copy, that gives us a perfect transfer rate of 54MBps (432Mbps). That means it would take a little over 1.5 hours to read all the data off one of these new 300GB discs. More likely, the drives will release (assuming it ever makes to market) with a far lower rate (2x-4x BluRay speeds is my guess) to prevent excessive noise, heat and wear, and transfer speeds are never perfect so a full-disk copy will require about 10 hours. And that doesn't even get into the time needed for /write-speeds/. And that's just for /one/ disc; you would need 7 discs to match the capacity of an average 2TB hard-drive.
So, yeah, the bandwidth problem is a bit of a concern for me too. I'm sure there may be some specialized needs for equipment like this, but - given the competition from TODAY's hard-drives it's hard to see these making any sort of headway on the general market. And by the time these discs were available (assuming they ever are) hard-drives will probably have ten times more capacity and tripled their speed, making this technology look even more ineffective.
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.
You wouldn't. This is intended for professional use.
Sony and Panasonic both have thriving business units producing equipment for the television and film industry. Things like pro cameras, that sort of stuff.
The equipment used is quite often rather different to what's available to the consumer, simply because the requirements are quite different.
By the time they release it I will probably be able to buy a 256GB USB stick from micro center for about $25. And then in another year or so I should be able to get a 512GB one for the same price. For removable storage it is getting pretty hard to beat USB sticks for cost or robustness. Granted they may not be the fastest but for that there are HDDs and SDDs.
Time to offend someone