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Sony & Panasonic Plan Next-Gen 300 GB Optical Discs By the End of 2015

Posted by samzenpus on from the building-it-better dept.

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."

22 of 289 comments (clear)

  1. Who'll bet against... by benjfowler · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... 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.

    1. Re:Who'll bet against... by localman57 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      By making all the writers that they license to use the technology incorporate anti-piracy detection software in the driver? Then use some kind of unlocking scheme so that the hardware will only write when using their drivers? That sounds about right.

    2. Re:Who'll bet against... by nabsltd · · Score: 5, Informative

      I would actually be interested in Blu-Ray if it were open and not DRM'ed to death. 50 GB per disk with a $1 cost per disk in an unlocked format would have its followers but instead they would rather keep it locked up.

      Writable Blu-Ray discs don't have any kind of DRM. If you have a Blu-Ray writer and software, you can write whatever you want on the disc. There is free and libre software available that runs on a variety of operating systems.

    3. Re:Who'll bet against... by h4rr4r · · Score: 3, Informative

      300GB is expensive to store?
      What year do you live in?

      You can get 3TB drives for $115. Building a Raid out of these is cheap and easy. Besides by the time these come out you will be able to likely transcode the video to a better type and save lots of space. As we do now with transcoding dvds to h264.

  2. Re:Great by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  3. That's fine and dandy by Sparticus789 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:That's fine and dandy by CastrTroy · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Speaking of I/O, there's the problem of the actual HDMI/Displayport connection. Many 4k TVs only have a 30 Hz refresh rate at full resolution. Basically, the bandwidth of existing cables isn't enough to handle a 4k movie at a higher refresh rate. They're going to have to come up with a whole to cable standard just to deal with the increased resolution.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    2. Re:That's fine and dandy by Sparticus789 · · Score: 4, Informative

      You obviously do not understand I/O. My DVD drive is SATA 6 GB/s, but the disc cannot spin fast enough to be read at 6 GB/s. Hence the reason it takes 30 minutes to write/verify a disc. The bottleneck is not the interface, but the mechanical spin of the disc.

      --
      sudo make me a sandwich
  4. Capacity ain't everything. by danaris · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Capacity ain't everything. by Kjella · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  5. Too little, too late by swilver · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Wake me when optical disc capacity exceeds harddisk capacity again... like it used to when the CD was released.

  6. Non-connected users by davidwr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Non-connected users by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 5, Informative

      BluRay players require "updates" for DRM, and those are typically done via being Internet Connected (optionally USB Stick). The new DRM will most likely require Connectivity at some point as well. Some of my older BluRay discs no longer work in new players, even with updates. Broken ... by design.

      --
      Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
    2. Re:Non-connected users by poetmatt · · Score: 5, Informative

      welcome to the definition of why people torrent. Torrent a bluray/rip it, and you'll never have to deal with random restrictions of rights which exist on Bluray players, etc. #1 cause of alleged piracy aka copyright infringement right there.

    3. Re:Non-connected users by Mordok-DestroyerOfWo · · Score: 3, Informative

      Really? Take a burned DVD over 5 years and try to read it. When I was in grad school I had a professor lose years of data because the disc decayed so badly. Granted the humidity and heat of Texas probably had something to do with it as well, but the discs themselves were in a dark place. You may be right regarding pressed optical media, but the consumer grade stuff will simply not outlast a decent hard drive.

      --
      "Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
    4. Re:Non-connected users by Gr8Apes · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'd agree - because when I buy a disk I 1) don't want to wait 5 minutes for it to start up 2) don't want to be pestered by the MPAA advert (don't copy this or you will be given life in prison) for 20s nor the 25 trailers that on some disks you can't even skip through, much less go directly to the menu, or a host of other issues. I bought this, I'd like to cut out all the other crap and just access the movie please. I'd say anyone that's seen a HTPC in action will quickly lose patience with a BD player.

      --
      The cesspool just got a check and balance.
  7. Re:Great by jedidiah · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  8. i hope they sell TV runs in one box by alen · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

  9. Re:Great by dgatwood · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Now that everything is 'streaming' and 'cloud' i wonder what their intended market is.

    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.

  10. Re:Check out my optical dick by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    That's all marketing. We slashdotters know it's only 279.4 gibacocks. All the geek-girls are unimpressed.

  11. DVD Life Time 2-5 years by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:DVD Life Time 2-5 years by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If a drive in a RAID fails, the others are probably close to failure. Plus, they have to work harder to make up for the bad one until it's replaced.

      When one drive fails it has no implications for the others - drives fail at random times. As the drive ages failures become more frequent at some point but one failure does not imply that the disk next to it is about to die as well. Plus there is no write overhead increase per disk for operating in fail mode and, unless you have a mirrored RAID configuration, practically no increase in read overhead.

      The reason RAID is a not backup solution is because there is no "oops I should not have deleted those files" protection i.e. there is no history of changes. However if you just need reliable storage there is nothing wrong with a RAID for that.

      I've heard that "2-5 year" nonsense before. I've got discs much older than that, that still read fine.

      Anecdotes are not evidence. I also have disks older than that which read fine...but I also have a few which do not. Given that a backup medium has to be extremely reliable I am sure that the 2-5 year limit quoted is probably based on something like a 95+% probability of recovering your data. This means that the large majority of disks will probably be fine after 5 years. However suppose you used those disks to backup your family photos. After 10 years there may be a 10% chance that some, or all, are gone - do you want to take that risk?