Sony & Panasonic Next-Gen Optical Discs Moving Forward

jones_supa writes "From last summer you might remember the Sony & Panasonic plans to bring next generation optical discs with recording capacity of at least 300GB. Various next-gen optical discs from different companies have been proposed, but this joint effort seems to be still moving forward. The disc is called simply Archival Disc and, roadmap and key specifications are out. First-wave ADs are slated to launch in summer of 2015 and will be able to hold up to 300GB of data. Archival Discs will be double-sided, so this works out to 150GB of data per side. Future versions of the technology will improve storage density, increasing to 500GB (or 250GB per side) and 1TB (500GB per side) as the standard matures."

Comments

What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[BlazingATrail]

whats a disc? I thought our souls were already uploaded to iCloud and Netflix ?

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bandwidth isn't cheap in some areas...

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[RogueyWon]

Ten years ago, I had a pretty large DVD collection. I still do, I guess, though it's archived in big folders now rather than the original cases, for space reasons. I was in no way unusual in that; almost everybody else I knew at the time had a DVD collection.

Today, I actually have a relatively large blu-ray collection. But nobody else I know does. In my case, I have the large blu-ray collection because I watch a lot of anime and support for that on streaming services is patchy (Crunchyroll isn't bad, but older shows do vanish from it with no notice sometimes). But if I wasn't interested in niche stuff, there'd be no practical (as opposed to philosophical) reason to continue to collect physical media.

With a large collection of the movie-buying public having looked at blu-ray and gone "meh", I think the challenge of trying to movies to a new generation of optical media is probably insurmountable.

And the other uses of optical media?

The newly launched games consoles have blu-ray drives - but I suspect they're the last generation to support optical discs. More and more sales are shifting online and that proportion will only grow as broadband speeds improve. Even for online-only refuseniks, Vita-style memory-card distribution may prove more convenient in the long run. I honestly cannot remember the last PC game I bought via a physical copy. Probably the Wrath of the Lich King expansion for World of Warcraft - because I guessed that Blizzard's download servers would die on launch day.

And for data archival? My experience of writable CDs, DVDs and BDs is that they're time-consuming to write to, physically fragile, space-inefficient and unreliable over time. If I want a local backup these days, I pick up an HDD, fill it up and then store it away.

So yeah, this all feels a bit like nugatory effort...

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[i.r.id10t]

But, while broadband speeds increase, broadband penetration may not (probably won't).

So, I have a feeling that Netflix, Gamefly, etc. will still ship physical disks... and console games will too.

I also think that instead of changing standards to increase data density, or using any extra density a new format brings, we'll see things that are more about control (DRM)

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[bob_super]

Funny that in a civilization where it's all about having more and more stuff, more and more people have no issues about having their stuff ephemeral or dematerialized.

I'm gonna go build myself a real stone castle and fill it with antique furniture. When you won't be able to get your pictures off Facebook because your bandwidth is capped at 20Mb except for ComcastView and GooglePlusPlus, I'll have my local storage out of reach of marketers and spooks, and they won't remotely disable my books.

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[sexconker]

whats a disc?

It's something that still works if you loose your internet connection or the DRM server goes down.

If your bluray player's private key is exposed, then publishers can place that key on a blacklist and include that blacklist on future discs.
When your player plays the disc, it will check the blacklist and refuse to play until you get a new key, which will require you to update the firmware on your player.
All bluray players are required to be firmware updatable, either via USB, via a burned disc with the firmware on it, or via the internet. Regardless, the ultimate source of the update will be the internet. If you own prominent bluray player model, you could get lucky and the firmware update may be included on the disc.

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[alen]

they just got clone wars onto netflix so expect star wars soon as well

now that disney owns star wars you can expect more than periodic releases on dvd or blu ray with slightly more content for GL to get more money from you

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[Anonymous Coward]

And for data archival? My experience of writable CDs, DVDs and BDs is that they're time-consuming to write to, physically fragile, space-inefficient and unreliable over time.
Don't use crappy media. I have 12 year-old DVDs that still scan with few PIE and PIO errors. I expect the same will hold true with Blu-Ray.

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[ProzacPatient]

But if I wasn't interested in niche stuff, there'd be no practical (as opposed to philosophical) reason to continue to collect physical media.

I'm the complete opposite. I have some digital stuff but otherwise I continue to collect physical media whenever I can because I'll always have access to it and some big company won't be able to pull the licensing agreement and suddenly the movie/show/game is gone from my collection on Amazon or something because the big company wants more money from Amazon for their 20 year old movie.

When it comes to physical media the first sale doctrine is king so in addition to the already mentioned benefits of always having my media I can also sell or lend my media without interference or limitation.

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[RogueyWon]

I got my first CD-RW drive in 1999. Some of the discs I wrote on it still work perfectly. Others are completely unreadable. There's no pattern to it - no particular manufacturer's media has fared better than another's. I have cheapo 20-for-a-dollar discs that still work and expensive ones that don't - and vice versa. I also have discs written much more recently which have become unreadable. For all I know, the discrepancies are as much down to which disc was stored on the top of the spindle or in the outer-most pockets in the wallet as to anything in their manufacture.

Which means that as a long-term archival solution, optical discs are just too erratic.

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[Ravaldy]

Maybe where you live the ratios have not increased but where I live they have. The government in some countries are getting involved and forcing ISPs to provide a minimum level of service as well as setting limitations on what they can charge overage on. Cheap access to unlimited information normally equals a more educated population and better social awareness.

Companies like Bell have found other ways around charging more for bandwidth. Instead they control content and charge large dollars for it. Same goes with Rogers who not long ago purchased exclusive rights to NHL games in Canada for 5.4 billions.

Generally in my experience users who use more than 1 TB of transfer per month are downloading illegal content. Question is, should the infrastructure be there to support you? Probably not but your online freedom is yours, right? I would debate that if you want freedom online you need to pay for it. ISPs have equipment cost, employee cost and overhead cost. Someone has to pay for it and logically the bigger users should pay a proportional share of the pie and that is why caps are put in place.

But in the case of more users downloading copyright material, paying overage is too much yet they would not pay for the $700 in content they illegally obtained. All this to say that you comment on monopoly greed is only partially justified.

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[Ravaldy]

You know the 80s are over right?

Online content has much value. Is it miss used? Maybe a little but I can tell you it makes my life easier.

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[richtopia]

I don't know about the DRM server bit, even with disks games still require DRM servers.

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[s122604]

There is some usage of disks (be they CD, DVD, or Blu-Ray) in WORM archives.

A previous place I worked at provided an online service for medical data that was supported by a huge, custom built DVD "jukebox"
At some point in the last decade the economics of large hard disk arrays rendered this technology effectively obsolete.

If the dollar per GB economics of these disks were attractive enough, they could, potentially, make a comeback in applications that are willing to put up with the latency of mechanical part of the solution.

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[Anubis IV]

It would be great to get a series on one or two disks instead of these huge boxes.

Who would use them? Serious question.

Netflix likely won't adopt any future disc standards for the disc side of their business. Blu-ray is already an additional charge, and they've made it very clear that they view that side of their business as a dying, legacy one, and they even made an effort to divest themselves of it back when they tried to split it off a few years back. Storefront video rentals are nearly extinct, with Redbox and digital distribution displacing them, and Redbox certainly won't be offering whole series anytime soon, since it makes no sense for them to do so. For movies, blu-rays already serve all of their needs. In other words, there's no market for AD rentals.

I suppose Amazon and other retailers may sell the discs, but who would buy them? Hardcore collectors, sure, but outside that niche? The way I see it, you primarily have two types of folks:
1) The folks already using blu-ray. Theoretically, AD would draw primarily from this group, since they are the ones who would care about any benefits it has to offer, but it seems to me that its primary benefit is easier distribution than blu-ray, which is something that digital distribution already deals with for most people, and it's already being adopted by this group as the next step beyond blu-ray. As for content availability, most people would prefer to purchase a few extra blu-rays during a transitional period to the digital distribution that they've already started adopting, rather than investing in an entirely new format so that their shelves will be a bit tidier.

2) The ones who have to be dragged forward. They're the ones still using DVDs and who will only upgrade when they are forced to do so. Since AD players are likely to be backwards compatible with DVDs, these people will see no reason to purchase anything more expensive than DVDs, which, as is the case today with blu-rays already on the market, will keep the market for DVDs alive and healthy. They'll never upgrade to AD, since AD isn't forcing them to upgrade in the same way that DVD forced them to upgrade from VHS.

Really, the only use I see for these discs is...wait for it...archiving. Assuming they have a decent shelf life, I could see these replacing, or at least supplementing, the backup tapes that are still widely used in business settings.

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[lgw]

Ooh, you mean a hard drive! I've been busy ripping everything I have on disc, as discs are just a pain.

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[Applehu Akbar]

I have really fast broadband over cable, so I signed up for the online backup service Crashplan so I would have an offsite copy of all my data. I ran into two killer problems: notwithstanding my blistering upload capacity, the backup service still plods along at 500kb or less, meaning that my 1T archive disk will take about six months to backup. The cherry on top is that my ISP imposes a usage cap, which prevents me from taking advantage of even that speed. If optical discs of 300G or more become available, I will be all over them like scandal on politicians.

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[Jane Q. Public]

"Bandwidth isn't cheap in some areas..."

It wouldn't matter if it was. Time after time, we have seen problems arise... not because of "online technology", but because of human failure. Failure of the people you're supposed to trust at "the other end".

PEOPLE at these organizations have repeatedly failed in areas of organizational ability, reliability, and trustworthiness.

Unless and until we have the technology that can replace human trustworthiness (or lack thereof), "cloud" storage will not be ready for prime time. Even if you make it snoop-proof, who's to say it will still exist a week from now?

You can't prove reliability and trustworthiness, you can only prove its opposite. And they have. Many many times now.

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[Jane Q. Public]

You bring up another problem. Bandwidth.

What good does it do to have 1TB optical disks, if the write speed is only 350kB/sec? It would take more than a month of steady writing to fill up a disk.

It will probably be faster than that, but who knows? I checked TFA, and it says absolutely nothing about bandwidth, either read or write.

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[AmiMoJo]

There is a pattern, you just don't see it. Taiyo Yuden discs stored properly and burned with a good drive (Pioneer or LiteOn in a pinch) will last. There are a few other quality brands like Verbatim and TDK, but none are on a par with Taiyo Yuden for CD-Rs and DVD-R/DVD+R.

Everything else is hit and miss, even if stored properly.

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[AmiMoJo]

Some people still like to own their media rather than just streaming or renting DRM laden downloads. As long as you can rip whatever optical format they deliver music and video on there will still be a market I think, and you will always be able to rip.

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[peragrin]

Right hows your VHS collection going then? VHS tapes were still sold often only 10 years ago.

The problem is never if you have the 8mm, 8-track, vinyl, cassette, minidisk, etc.
The problem is if you still have a functioning player for such thing.

There are original Wax cylinders created by Thomas Edison. There wasn't a player for them for 80 years. until someone custom made one at great expense.

digital copy only means you at least get to keep a functioning player as well. By using smart backups and doing so often enough. along with upgrading storage media, and VM's as needed you can play your stuff for at least your lifetime.

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[tepples]

even with disks games still require DRM servers

Since when do games for any PlayStation, Xbox, Wii, or Nintendo DS product require a server for single-player, split-screen, or LAN play?

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[Anubis IV]

I'm actually in the group you're talking about. I rip all of my discs, keep them stored locally on drives at home, and prefer to properly own the films that I plan to re-watch repeatedly, rather than relying on Netflix or the like. But please note that my previous comment uses the term "digital distribution", rather than "streaming", and that renting was only a small portion of what I was discussing. I used that term quite intentionally, because I wanted to include digital purchases made from online-only distributors, and I stand by my comments when understood in that light.

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[boristdog]

I live twenty minutes from a high tech city. A city that even hosts a world-reknowned "interactive" conference (along with a movie and music conference) around this time of year.

The best uncapped bandwidth I can get? About 1.2 Mbps. And it's wireless with intermittent drops in coverage.
The best capped bandwidth I can get? About 9 Mbps, but I'm limited to 12GB/month.

Hundreds of thousands of people live near this same city with similar or worse bandwidth availability. Unless I spend hundreds of thousands of dollars or more to start my own ISP and run some fiber for me and my neighbors, that's what we're stuck with.

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[AmiMoJo]

There are few places you can make digital purchases online, most places only rent you stuff with DRM that can be revoked any time. For example you can't buy ebooks from Amazon, only rent them. You can't buy games from XBOX Live, only a limited time license to use them.

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[LordLimecat]

Why is a disk superior to tape? Tape is
  * Cheap (dont think anything comes close in $ / GB)
  * Fast (sequential speeds ~ 150MB/s)
  * durable (no need to worry about scratches, no dies to degrade)
  * Already has enterprise infrastructure at most places-- autoloaders are not exactly rare

Id actually be astonished if you could get GB / Volume close for these disks. We're coming out with 3TB native / 5+TB compressed LTO tapes soon, so youd need ~15 of these archival disks to match them.

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[aNonnyMouseCowered]

"Some people still like to own their media rather than just streaming or renting DRM laden downloads."

LOL. You mean some people still like to own their own DRM laden media rather than just streaming or renting DRM laden downloads. If you're going to rip your *future* AD collection, why bother? I'm sure there'll always be the usual pirate sources ready to download without the need for some DRM crack or whatnot.

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[petermgreen]

LOL. You mean some people still like to own their own DRM laden media rather than just streaming or renting DRM laden downloads.

The trouble with the term "DRM" is it is used to cover a wide range of technologies with different implications for the users.

The DRM on DVDs, blurays and (for the most part) console games is set up primerally to prevent copying, but you can still play the original media in as many different players as you want and you can still resell the original media when you no longer want it.

The DRM on online sales (and many PC games even when sold on physical media :( ) is typically setup to limit the set of devices on which the media can be used through some form of online activation system. The exact restrictions enforced vary but being blocked from reselling your purchases and being highly reliant on the continued operation of the online service are common trends.

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[Wolfrider]

> You can't buy games from XBOX Live, only a limited time license to use them.

--Umm, bzzzt - wrong. I bought Streets of Rage and Soul Calibur on 360 and they're living on my USB 16GB stick. Not a limited license.

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[Anubis IV]

Why is it that people keep thinking I'm suggesting the people still buying DVDs are cheapskates? Far from it! I think that many of them have a valid reason for doing so, and there's nothing wrong with that (hell, I still do so from time to time, since some stuff hasn't made it to blu-ray). As I described in another post, there's nothing wrong in being smart with your money and spending it in the areas where you'll appreciate the benefit most. And I think that they will continue to choose DVDs until they are forced to do otherwise, simply because it's unlikely that ADs will offer a compelling benefit not already provided by blu-rays. Again, nothing wrong with that. I wasn't making a value judgment, simply a statement of what I believe to be the situation, so I do apologize for any offense I may have offered you, Sir Troll.

I don't know what place your baseless ad hominem attacks or your straw man implication that I called people like you a cheapskate has to do with anything, but that may be because I'm a sheep consumer and hipster doofus who apparently gets bamboozled by all the cool new stuff. Even so, I'm glad you're able to have assembled a decent film collection, and I hope you're able to enjoy it more than I can enjoy my collection (between my day job in software development and the volunteer work I do three nights a week, as well as other typical obligations, it's hard to fit in movie time; and your collection likely is larger than mine, since I don't purchase much, and the one place where I'm referred to as a janitor—a sizable wiki I help admin—doesn't pay at all).

Anyway, sounds like your day got off to a poor start. Or maybe a bad ending. Either way, hope it's going better now. :)

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[Anubis IV]

Ami may have been thinking of the Xbox One, which, as I recall, does require a regular connection to verify the license, though I may be mistaken, and would be very open to correction from anyone with more knowledge on the subject.

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[GauteL]

While I get what you are saying, the difference in quality between Blu-Ray and Netflix/OtherStreamingServices[tm] is quite astounding. I completely agree that Streaming is good enough for most purposes, but if you want to watch a high quality picture on a top quality TV, then the streaming services don't yet cut it. That is a reason to (sometimes) collect physical media.

But the amount of films I'd care enough to have on physical media is severely limited. When Sony fought tooth and nail against HD-DVD to make Blu-Ray the "Standard" optical HD-format, I expect they thought they'd be able to milk that cow a bit longer.

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[MachineShedFred]

Initial outlay is a one time cost, and in the case of modern tape systems, it buys you much higher reliability and efficiency than optical media. If capital equipment cost is the only argument against tape for disaster recovery and business continuity, it's a bad one.

These new optical discs may find use in small business / consumer backup, but the only thing that's going to displace tape is virtual tape, e.g. big dumb hard disk platters in vast power sucking arrays.

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[MachineShedFred]

I was just having this conversation with a coworker. The firmware update feature of BluRay is not to "add features" or somehow make the player work better - it is to protect their shaky botched-together DRM lock system from a modern-day "DVD" Jon Johansen busting it wide open like was done with CSS.

And clearly it's worked so well, what with the high definition rips available on the Internet before you can even buy the damn digital-padlocked disc.

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[drinkypoo]

> You can't buy games from XBOX Live, only a limited time license to use them.

--Umm, bzzzt - wrong. I bought Streets of Rage and Soul Calibur on 360 and they're living on my USB 16GB stick. Not a limited license.

Umm, bzzzt - wrong. You didn't buy those games. You bought a right to play them. If you owned them, you could resell them. If you owned them, you could separate them from the games console. And if you had bought them on an optical disc, you could have done all of those things because you would own the game disc.

You are completely mistaken. You did not buy those games in any sense. You only licensed them.

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[WuphonsReach]

What good does it do to have 1TB optical disks, if the write speed is only 350kB/sec? It would take more than a month of steady writing to fill up a disk.

It will probably be faster than that, but who knows? I checked TFA, and it says absolutely nothing about bandwidth, either read or write.

A safe bet, based on previous CD-R, DVD+-R write times is that it will start at around 1-2 hours per side and slowly decrease to the 10-15 minute range per side. So 150GB across 2 hours is about 21MB/sec, which sounds easy to achieve.

Old DVD-R 1x was around 1.3-1.5 MB/s, these days you can usually get 8x DVD rates of around 11 MB/s.

(All of this is SWAG because until it hits the streets in a buyable form, it's all conjecture and wishful thinking.)

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[tepples]

The DRM on DVDs, blurays and (for the most part) console games is set up primerally to prevent copying

But the way it happens differs noticeably among these three, particularly with respect to homemade works of authorship. DVD allows anybody with a camcorder to master and burn a disc; in fact, my uncle's Sony camcorder records directly to 80 mm recordable DVD. The game consoles, on the other hand, allow only licensed publishers hand-picked by the console maker to master discs. And the qualifications for licensed developers and publishers are set more for poaching than for nurturing startups, in that a developer or publisher has to have verifiable commercial success on a competitor's platform before it can become licensed. Blu-ray Disc is somewhere in the middle: there's a split between "AV" discs, which anyone can burn but which lack menus, and "MV" discs, which have menus but require the publisher to buy an AACS license.

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[ProzacPatient]

Right hows your VHS collection going then? VHS tapes were still sold often only 10 years ago.

I have hundreds of VHS movies and I still have a VCR.

The problem is never if you have the 8mm, 8-track, vinyl, cassette, minidisk, etc. The problem is if you still have a functioning player for such thing.

I don't think we'll have quiet the same problem with optical media for time to come though because unlike VHS; which was an analog based format designed when computers where in their infancy, DVD's are digital and can be directly read by a common desktop PC and for the foreseeable future we'll only see optical based formats advance further. Just to prove my point how long digital formats live on its still possible to read 3.5" floppy discs if one is determined enough.

I suppose you could run into a problem in 20 years with being able to read a DVD still but you can always run Windows XP in a VM or use one of hundreds of Linux distributions with libdvdcss installed. There are also plenty of other free tools for preserving and converting DVD's Hollywood isn't too fond of that I would imagine will still be around for some time to come.

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[Jane Q. Public]

"Stop treating real world systems like 0th-order mathematical abstractions. You can't prove its opposite. All you can prove is "not 100.0000000000% trustworthy" (for an infinite number of 0s)."

That's pretty hilarious. *I* wasn't treating it mathematically at all, I was just stating a fact. Generally speaking, there is no way to prove that someone hasn't broken your trust. But you can prove that they have.

But YOU were certainly treating it like a mathematics exercise!

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[Bengie]

For home use, it's cheaper just to purchase more optical discs and make more copies than to pony up for a tape drive. There are other optical mediums that are great for archives. They use phase-changing minerals that require significant focused laser heating instead of photosensitive dyes. And they're still cheaper than tape, but not as enterprise friendly or supported. But a great alternative for home users.

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[Bengie]

The UI says "Buy Now", not "License Now". Sounds like bait and switch to me.

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[ProzacPatient]

This is a phenomenon known as "bitrot." It is for this reason tape drive backups are still around but since SATA allows hotplugging and there are SATA docks now some people just buy hard drives and use those for long term storage. Hard drives as a backup medium I imagine would work pretty good as long as you keep them in a dark, dry and cool place mostly safe from any shock like drops or heavy vibrations. In fact I had a computer from the mid-80's once and its hard drive, file system and data was still intact.

I've always wanted to try tape drives mostly for the novelty but they're excessively expensive which is why I think hard drives as a long term storage medium have started to take off but ultimately I don't think they'll displace tapes for storage meant to last a magnitude of half a century or longer.

I suppose if you're daring enough you could try paper as a backup medium.

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[Wolfrider]

--I do see what you're saying, but pretty sure if I buy another 360 I can transfer the thumbdrive over. Might be mistaken tho. Anyone know for sure?

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[gmhowell]

No offense to you or your coworker, but is there any reason to accept your theory just on your say so?

(And your sig is accurate, btw)

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[drinkypoo]

--I do see what you're saying, but pretty sure if I buy another 360 I can transfer the thumbdrive over. Might be mistaken tho. Anyone know for sure?

Hell, if you buy another 360 you can redownload the game... for as long as Microsoft supports your 360. When they stop supporting the 360 on Live, as they have done with the original Xbox, you will be able neither to redownload nor to transfer the game to another console. You can transfer the game files, but you won't be able to transfer the license.

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[Psykechan]

You can transfer them over to another 360 but without either the license key, or having the purchaser's account actively signed into XBL, they will run in demo mode. The 360 will treat them as if they are unlicensed copies of the game. If you've ever purchased a game after playing it in demo mode and it downloads the "full game" practically instantly, it's because it was just downloading the license key.

You can perform a license transfer to a new system which will let you then manually download individual license keys to the new console. The license transfer can only be performed once per four months.

Once Microsoft stops supporting XBL for the 360 then your games will only work on the system with the license keys, and when the console dies (or HDD as the license key cannot be copied to other media), the games will be gone.

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[TheRealLifeboy]

I've had ADSL line problems for more than two months now, which means I have great trouble accessing my cloud based data.

I can tell you one thing: In theory cloud may sound great, but in practice I'd much rather keep local copies even if it may involve a little more work!

Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of?

[vivian]

In the case of optical drives, it is certainly not a one time cost. I hate to think how much I have spent on various CD and DVD drives over the years - at an average $40 a pop, which get only used half a dozen times or so, to burn the occasional bit of data or watch a few movies. I think since the 80's, I have averaged at least one or two per year - and am currently now the owner of none that actually work (though I have a small stack of devices I keep telling myself I am going to harvest the lasers out of one of these days)

I look forward to a future when this abomination of a mechanical-opto-electrical data storage device dies forever and is replaced with solid state technology.

Amazing!

[Anonymous Coward]

More proprietary garbage. Everyone knows they'll try to do the same thing they do with everything else: Infest everything with DRM and secrets to stop 'pirates.'

Re:Amazing!

[houstonbofh]

If it stays just archival storage, something that is desperately needed, then there is no need for DRM, and no barriers to adoption. If they try and make it a video standard and bring content producers on-board, they are doomed. But if not, they stand to make a LOT of money as we are desperately in need of a replacement for tape.

Re:Amazing!

[slaker]

The replacement for tape is different tape. Optical media isn't going to catch up to the data densities or transfer rates that tape has to offer any time soon. The (kinda old) LTO4 changer I use for my personal stuff handles 800GB/tape and only needs about three hours per tape. This new disc format isn't even going to be competitive with an eight year old tape spec.

Re:Amazing!

[suutar]

I've thought about going tape for local backup, but I never felt comfortable with it, because I have the impression that the lifespan of tape is poor. What's your experience in tape lifespan (which I suppose also involves how often/whether you rewrite instead of getting a new tape)?

(Currenly local backup for most of my stuff is "put it on the file server", where it's mirrored, which is of course not perfect. But the file server is also backed up offsite through CrashPlan.)

Re:Amazing!

[houstonbofh]

The replacement for tape is different tape. Optical media isn't going to catch up to the data densities or transfer rates that tape has to offer any time soon. The (kinda old) LTO4 changer I use for my personal stuff handles 800GB/tape and only needs about three hours per tape. This new disc format isn't even going to be competitive with an eight year old tape spec.

Tape may be faster to write for now, (They never said the speed...) a single file restore will not be. Especially if it is towards the end of the tape. THis has alwayse been the limiting factor of tape.

Re:Amazing!

[Joce640k]

If it stays just archival storage, something that is desperately needed....

This is too little, too late.

Anything that requires me to be physically present to swap media during a backup isn't even up for consideration.

300Gb of data per disc means I'd have to swap discs a dozen times to back up my current pile of data data. Not happening.

By the time it reaches 1Tb per disk I'll have even more data to back up. Half a dozen swaps? Still not happening. I want to set the backup going then go to bed while it does its thing.

Re:Amazing!

[rk]

QFA has mitigated this problem for quite some time now. Simplistically, an index is built identifying files and their relative positions on the tape. The tape is loaded and then fast forwarded to that location to restore it. I had a 4-tape capacity "mini-library" nearly 15 years ago that could do this. A small single file could be restored in a minute or two.

Re:Amazing!

[lgw]

First copy is to spare HDD (kept in a box). Tapes are the "just in case". It's just much easier to store tape off-site: mail to a friend, stuff in storage or safe deposit, whatever.

Tape drives are quite expensive, but if you can afford them they rock. If I had the bandwidth, I'd use glacier or whatnot, but since I have DSL I'm saving for tape.

Re:Amazing!

[lgw]

LTO lasts 15+ years (and if you can afford the drive, chances are you won't need to re-use tape too often). Cheap tape was always bad.

However, it's vital to verify tapes as you write them. Non-cheap tape doesn't really "go bad", but can be bad when created (even though the tape drives verify in hardware, I've seen issues). You don't need to verify the whole tape, just verify something on the tape, ideally with a different drive.

Re:Amazing!

[AmiMoJo]

Tape isn't really a good option for consumers who are used to accessing media directly. You will find tape is a hard sell for most people. Also tapes are not actually that robust, they can stretch and warp or get mangled if you do a lot of seeking and stop/start.

Even for us nerds it could be a better option if the media is cheap and it is well supported going forwards. Modern BD drives can read the 32 year old Compact Disc format perfectly, tapes not so much.

Re:Amazing!

[donaldm]

300Gb of data per disc means I'd have to swap discs a dozen times to back up my current pile of data data. Not happening.

Why would you use 300GB disks to backup your data? The reason to use CD's, DVD's or BD's and now this proposed media is to archive specific data that you require access at a latter date. As long as the disk has a device that can read it then your archived data can be read unless the disk is damaged so any archived media needs to be preserved (minimum of two copies) and checked periodically.

It must be noted that there is huge difference between a "backup" and an "archive". If you only use HDD's to "backup" your data you are not really doing a "backup" you are effectively mirroring your data disk(s) at a specific moment in time and you would need multiple HDD's to do this if you are seriously considering any backup strategy which for home use can be expensive. As for "archive" you could consider a HDD to do this however HDD's are much more prone to failure than passive media such as tape, CD, DVD and BD.

One important thing to consider when archiving is to decide what data you really need to archive and in nearly all cases it is personal data which you would consider irreplaceable and a video collection while inconvenient does not fall into that category.

Re:Amazing!

[LordLimecat]

Can you clarify what you mean by "proprietary"?

Re:Amazing!

[LordLimecat]

Tape may be faster to write for now, (They never said the speed...) a single file restore will not be. Especially if it is towards the end of the tape

With archival formats that really doesnt matter, and generally youre not restoring half of a backup.

If you want really good access speed AND high density you go HDD.

Re:Amazing!

[viperidaenz]

But you can only read the entire tape 200 times before it's dead, according to Imation. It takes 56 passes to write the full 800GB to an LTO4 tape.

With LTO6, you've got 2.5TG per tape, but the speed has only gone up from 120MB/s to 160MB/s. It'll take 5 hours per tape.

Re:Amazing!

[viperidaenz]

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Pionee...
100 DVD changer for $300

http://www.kintronics.com/HITs... stores 560 blu-ray discs with 8 internal drives.

There have always been automated CD/DVD/etc changers around.

Re:Amazing!

[mjwx]

The replacement for tape is different tape. Optical media isn't going to catch up to the data densities or transfer rates that tape has to offer any time soon. The (kinda old) LTO4 changer I use for my personal stuff handles 800GB/tape and only needs about three hours per tape. This new disc format isn't even going to be competitive with an eight year old tape spec.

Tape may be faster to write for now, (They never said the speed...) a single file restore will not be. Especially if it is towards the end of the tape. THis has alwayse been the limiting factor of tape.

Tape is great for backups and archives but for anything that needs to be written once and accessed semi-frequently or portable optical disc is still superior to tape. Its a lot easier and cheaper to overnight a few DVD's to a remote office than it is to send a flash drive, SD card, hard drive or tape.

Re:Amazing!

[jones_supa]

Do you have to back up that much, or can some of that data be archived? Is your working set really over 300GB?

Re:Amazing!

[MachineShedFred]

One of the biggest concerns with archival storage or incremental backup, is the throughput in writing to the media. Not too long ago one of our datacenter tape libraries was writing to tapes 22 out of 24 hours in a day until we added another drive into the robot. All the servers would back up to a hard disk pool at their appointed time, and then the backup server would bleed that scratch space out to tape via fiber channel over the course of the day.

This, of course, included tapes written in duplicate for off-site storage.

Re:Amazing!

[lgw]

A regular HDD left sitting for 5 years is unlikely to spin up. Drop one and its odds are poor. Ship one to storage on a truck and you take your chances. LTO is good as long as you don't shatter the cartridge (and even then, that's the cheapest kind of data recovery).

Sure, "store it in a cool dry place" as the song goes, but that's true of anything you want to keep.

Re:Amazing!

[jp10558]

We can regularly recover data from 20 year old tapes. The harder part is keeping a working tape drive that can talk to a relatively modern computer. Of course, if you have a small enough number of tapes, you can probably copy them over to newer tape drives and media when the external bus changes enough (i.e. SCSI to SAS)...

Great: Bonus Content

[gatfirls]

500gigs of it now.

Nothing about shelf-life.

[0xG]

Bitrot is the enemy, especially when you call it "Archival".

Re:Nothing about shelf-life.

[mcrbids]

Not only that, but the size advantage of optical media is simply gone.

When CDs first came out, they easily held several times the capacity of a standard HDD. DVDs were much the same way. Then, a few decades go by, and little changes. BlueRay holds much less than a stock HDD, and was that way when it finally won the format wars.

Now, they have a format that doesn't even come close to a stock HD. (My laptop has a 250 GB SSD, my desktop computer has twin 2 TB drives) This new format would just *barely* cover my laptop, and would be a pain to archive my desktop on.

Re:Nothing about shelf-life.

[Anubis IV]

Bit rot actually does mean what he thinks it means. And it means what you think it means too. Both uses for the term are correct.

Re:Nothing about shelf-life.

[JDG1980]

Hopefully they will be using something similar to the M-Disc technology to make this archival format more reliable. Organic dyes don't seem to have quite enough staying power (though I just went through some 10-15 year old CD-Rs the other day and they were still readable).

Re:Nothing about shelf-life.

[AmiMoJo]

These will not be like CD-R or DVD-R, they will be more like BD-R I expect. BD-R writers melt a layer of plastic and magnetically re-align reflective particles in it. There is no chemical process like the older discs and as such they are much less prone to bit-rot. They are essentially magneto-optical, and time has proven how robust and long lived MO formats are.

Actually there are two types of BD-R discs, the newer type being more like the old CD/DVD writable formats and thus not suitable for archival. A good quality proper BD-R disc is suitable for long term archival, and presumably the same technology is going to be used here.

Here come the flippers

[meerling]

People hate flippers, and if you 'double-side' the drives to avoid that, you'll be about doubling their costs, and that's not popular either.

Re:Here come the flippers

[Zero__Kelvin]

"People hate flippers"

That's simply not true!

Re:Here come the flippers

[tedgyz]

That reminds me of a Kenwood CD drive I bought for my computer. It used a multi-beam technology called TrueX to parellelize reading. It cost more than most readers at the time, but only about 20% more. The technology worked well if you were ripping the whole disc.

Re:Here come the flippers

[TheGavster]

This. Every optical standard has had a double-sided variety, and every time it has failed to be adopted. The closest they got was with DVDs where there were different films or different aspect ratios on the two sides (so you still would never flip).

Also, the jump in capacity here just seems to be a plateau from previous optical technology:

0.6 GB => 9.4 GB => 50GB => 150GB

We were supposed to have 150GB/side blu-rays, for crying out loud (whatever happened to 5-layer discs anyway?).

Re:Here come the flippers

[TheGavster]

I saw these at the time, and wondered if they actually did show speed improvements for a long sequential read. Since CD tracks are laid out in a spiral, wouldn't you only read 7 new tracks at a time for the first revolution, then each track would be re-read 6 times?

Re:Here come the flippers

[tedgyz]

I don't recall all the details. You can read the linked article for insight. I see your point about the spiral, so now I too am wondering exactly how it worked. The bottom line is it was faster, but not 7x faster. It was a good idea at the time since CD rotational speeds had been maxxed out.

Re:Here come the flippers

[petermgreen]

I presume that when they started encountering sectors they had read before they would move the head outwards.

Re:Here come the flippers

[MachineShedFred]

It's like when we used to do a disaster recovery test - the business didn't like the idea of buying a tape library for the DR site that would sit there gathering dust, so when we did a quarterly test, we always had a "tape monkey" on the team who would sit there jamming tapes into the LTO drives for hours on end.

Re:Here come the flippers

[MachineShedFred]

I think I've got an old DVD5 copy of a ~3 hour movie that did have an intermission / disc flip due to the capacity constraints at the time, since the Hollywood distributor was too fucking cheap to use a multi-layer DVD back in the day. This was in like 1999 in the golden age of DVD.

Re:Compared to 4TB?

[Reapman]

Glad you weren't making the decision back when floppy disks were 1.44M and my Hard Drive was 250M...

Without knowing the specifics, this could be a great form of backup, which judging by the name, is exactly what this is for.

Re:Compared to 4TB?

[Snuusnuu]

Because optical media fares better for long term storage compared to mechanical drives.

Re:Not intended for consumers

[QuantumLeaper]

The problem is cost for Blu-ray XL, at about $50 a disk, most people or companies won't use them.

Re:Compared to 4TB?

[JoeMerchant]

This way they can charge you $10 a pop for the blanks that cost pennies to make (after up front costs), > 50% of which will be wasted on bad recording sessions or discs that didn't get filled. They can also charge you more for the burner/player than that 4TB hard drive costs, and sell "premium" machines with the differentiator being that the lower line models only have BluRay burners....

I won a notebook that came with a BluRay burner, I think I played one BluRay movie in it, one time just to see that it worked. I've burned a few dozen DVDs in it, though most of them would have been fine on a 700Meg CD, never burned the "sample" blank BluRay that came with it - never had a need.

I think this new generation of Disc burners is akin to the tape drives of 20 years ago - a way to get data off the live system and put it in a closet somewhere. "Sure, we can restore that at any time" - with about 50% success when put to an actual real-world test. In the early 1990s, we tried shipping data cross-country on tape cartridges - we ended up with a system where we made triplicate tapes, ship 2, keep 1 and confirm successful restoration on the other end before wiping the source.

Re:Great: Bonus Content

[JoeMerchant]

I'm thinking the movie you want to see is encrypted and buried in such a sea of garbage that it becomes impractical to extract it without the master key....

Re:Compared to 4TB?

[houstonbofh]

For one, hard drives are a tad fragile to mail... And as backup device left unpowered, they have known reliability problems.

Re:Compared to 4TB?

[Ichijo]

When you've used up the 4TB, you'll be able to get a 40TB drive and copy over your old data so you won't need to have two drives always on.

Rewritable?

[mattack2]

Will there be a rewritable variant? (Skimmed the article linked to and I didn't see it mentioned.)

While I realize people mostly picked on this, I like(d) using DVD-RW and DVD-RAM for video archiving. Yeah, now I mostly just download (non-copy-protected) things to a computer, but it was much handier having it built into the recorder.

Re:Rewritable?

[compro01]

This isn't going to be for you. This is basically a replacement for Ultra Density Optical.

Re:Dead on Arrival

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to be saying that you're stupid, rather than the people you stupidly claim are stupid.

You got a crappy hand-me-down Blu-Ray player, and this led you to derp about the format being the problem rather than your miserly nature.

Re:Compared to 4TB?

[bobbied]

So, what do I need a 300GB, when I can go to Fry's and get 4TB drive and just plug it in?

And when you run out of space, you just buy another unit and plug it in? Why have a unit always on just for an archive? Sucking up power just for a day that you might need the archive.

Most drives can easily spin down when not in use. Then there is a small delay as the platters spin back up but the power consumed when a drive is not spinning is quite minimal.

Re:Compared to 4TB?

[Jeremy Erwin]

Pretty much.
CD-Roms first became popular when 80 meg hard drives were considered large.
Now, you can buy few terabytes of space for $100--$200. Parceling out your data in 25 GB chunks, at a dollar a disk doesn't seem all that thrifty, unless you distribute large amounts of data to people who don't have high speed connections.

I know, it's slightly cheaper as a backup option-- if your time isn't worth much.

Re:it's dirty cheap actually

[scuzzlebutt]

just only for greedy tele-cos who like to rape the masses

FTFY: just only for greedy tele-cos who like to rape them asses

Re:Not intended for consumers

[sexconker]

Like Blu-ray XL, consumers will not see these discs. Get ready to stream 90 GB 4K movies?

Amazon says they will, if they're willing to pony up the dough.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ...

I've owned a BluRay burner for years and have yet to burn a BluRay. This week will be my first attempt, and I have very low hopes.
Luckily, I got a 3 pack for $7.

Re:Great: Bonus Content

[suutar]

No worries. Get the master key, decrypt it, extract the parts you want. Isn't that how they handle blurays now?

Re:Compared to 4TB?

[sexconker]

Because optical media fares better for long term storage compared to mechanical drives.

Not recordable optical media. It turns to useless shit very rapidly. Pressed discs fare much better, but you won't be pressing discs unless you're distributing thousands of copies of the same data.

Re:Dead on Arrival

[TheGratefulNet]

sigh.

"looks like I'll have to buy the White Album all over again."

one of the best movie quotes I can remember hearing. really sums up the media 'upgrade!' wars.

(and yes, I think I did have the white album on vinyl, 8-track and cassette; and when cd came out, yes, I bought the white album all over again. I won't buy it any more. well, I don't think I will, lol)

Will it support iPhone?

[fluor2]

I sure hope so. Or at least the iPad.

White Album

[zooker]

Now I'll have to buy that damned white album again!

Two possible uses...

[pla]

I see two possible uses for this.

First, taking the name as indicative of the intended purpose, for backups. In that regard, I consider these DOA, since anyone who can fit their entire life in 300GB can use the cloud easily enough, and those of us who rip everthing we own to a home file server would already require literally dozens of these to store a complete backup. Sorry, boys, but even Grandma has a 2TB drive these days (whether or not she's used more than 2% of it).

Second, and more likely - 4k video. I don't really know where I stand on that one, because on the one hand, even BluRay has more or less flopped (it has made good ground in "replacing" DVDs, but for the most part people won't pay more for BD content); on the other hand, 4k finally represents a serious increase in quality over 480p. I still don't know if people would pay more for it, but having seen a few examples of 4k content on a 4k monitor... Just wow.

Still, if the blanks don't cost $5 each and if the DRM doesn't make these virtually worthless for anything but playing in a standalone player, I suppose these count as a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, with Sony involved, we can pretty much take it as given that they'll blow both those constraints without hesitation.

Re:Two possible uses...

[tepples]

anyone who can fit their entire life in 300GB can use the cloud easily enough

How so? iCloud only goes up to 55 GB, and that tier costs $100 per year. Besides, with ISPs capping uploads and downloads per month, some rawther severely (5 GB/mo for LTE or 10 GB/mo for satellite), it can take several months to get data in and out of the cloud.

Re:Two possible uses...

[MtViewGuy]

The most obvious use is to store Ultra HD video. By using HEVC or Google's VP9 codecs, they could probably fit a two-hour Ultra HD movie onto a single-sided 150 GB disc, which means we can watch 3840 x 2160 resolution movies played back from an optical disc.

Re:Two possible uses...

[A Friendly Troll]

First, taking the name as indicative of the intended purpose, for backups. In that regard, I consider these DOA, since anyone who can fit their entire life in 300GB can use the cloud easily enough

I have 100 KB/s upload (used to be 30 KB/s), and that won't go any higher.

To store 300 GB in the cloud, it would take over 35 days of non-stop upload.

and those of us who rip everthing we own to a home file server would already require literally dozens of these to store a complete backup

On the other hand, I would only need 2 of these discs to store my data (roughly 500 GB).

DropBox wants $50 per month for 500 GB. I'm down $50 before I even got my data up to the cloud. And it's not really a backup; it could be a delayed single snapshot.

Re:Dead on Arrival

[sexconker]

You got a hand-me-down DVD player and it glitched out, what a shocker

Buy yourself a decent BluRay player that has LAN access and the ability to either decode video itself or can pick up an XBMC server and then boosh you have all your videos on your TV

I bought an LG a few years ago that can play most of my videos right off a network share or use my Plex Media Server and it still does BluRay and DVD

So yeah, disc media may be declared dying but having a cheap ($200) cross media player in your living room is pretty goddamn handy

Do not count on using your BluRay player as a player for any ripped content.
They all have (or will soon have) Cinavia DRM built in, which will trigger on any ripped content that has that watermark. There is currently no known way to detect and remove the Cinavia watermark.

I rip all my shit and play it via an old Windows box using CCCP http://cccp-project.net/ (and it all works even in Windows Media Player if you disable the media foundation thing). All HD audio formats are bitstreamed to my receiver, and you get full control over whateverthefuck you want. A PC is the ONLY true solution to playing content, because it's the only one you have any real control over. The only real drawback is the space / power requirements. You're not going to compete with those small media player boxes or the shit built into your TV, but they're come with DRM, compatibility issues (or future compatibility issues), and more often tan not a shitty interface.

Re:Dead on Arrival

[tedgyz]

That is too funny. I just watched MiB with my son last weekend. I laughed when I heard that line because it was so long ago, but people still keep doing the same thing.

At least with physical media you have control. If you bought it on itunes you are locked into the Apple-verse for life.

Translation: Where is the consumer solution?

[aussersterne]

I can't find any data on MSRP now, but back in the day it seems to me that there were storage choices that were not so cost-prohibitive for consumers.

4mm and 8mm drives with multi-gigabyte capacities that compared favorably with hard drives of the time could be had for $hundreds to $a thousand or two, with media costs in the $10-$25 per tape range. At the time, there were also MO drives that had significant capacities in similar ranges, with slightly higher media costs.

Back then, the capacity of one removable cartridge/disk was much closer to the capacity of consumer market hard drives. You might have to go through 1-4 tapes or cartridges to back up all of your data, but that meant less than $100 for each additional complete backup set.

Now current consumer drive sizes are in the multi-terabyte range, while capacities of removable storage are such that you'll need 10-15 instances of media to back up your collection, and each media item is $50-$100. I have 18TB online right now. This means with a 300GB storage capacity, I'll need 30-45 instances of blank media for a single backup set. Back in the day, I had an Archive Python autoloader that used 4 DDS tapes and had a capacity of 96GB compressed, with a total online storage capacity of something like 40GB. In short, I had _excess_ capacity for less than $100 per backup set in a single operation.

At this level, it makes much more sense to just by a pile of multi-terabyte hard drives (4TB drives are currently less than $150 street price) and use them. Faster, cheaper, and without the up-front cost of the mechanism (backup drive) to pay for.

For consumers, dedicated backup technologies seem to have gone the way of the dodo.

Re:Translation: Where is the consumer solution?

[anybody_out_there]

I can't find any data on MSRP now, but back in the day it seems to me that there were storage choices that were not so cost-prohibitive for consumers.

Not so cost-prohibitive? "Back in the day", I remember a particular consumer 20MB (not a typo) HDD went for about $1500. A tape backup system was similarly priced (from memory).

I shudder to think what an educational institution paid for the massive *5MB* networked drive hooked up to the old Apple IIs. Ya know, back in the day.

Now get off of my lawn! :-)

Re:Translation: Where is the consumer solution?

[swb]

For some reason this has me wondering what the cost breakdown is between the mechanical part of a hard disk and the controller portion.

Is there ever a use case for a cartridge-style drive that basically houses the controller and all you insert is the platter container?

Could they devise a cheaper disk cabinet that plugged just platters in and used a common controller?

Re:Translation: Where is the consumer solution?

[tepples]

Could they devise a cheaper disk cabinet that plugged just platters in and used a common controller?

SyQuest did this, as did Iomega with the Jaz drive. CD-R and DVD+R ran them out of business.

Re:Translation: Where is the consumer solution?

[petermgreen]

Various variants of that idea have been tried over the years. There are a few issues

1: While I don't have figures for the various components of a hard drive I would expect the head mechanism is a significat portion of the cost, if they put the heads mechanism in the disk unit (as rev did) then they lose some of the cost benefits over using one peice hard drives, if they put the head mechanism in the drive unit (as jaz did) then the seal is broken every time a disk is inserted bringing reliability issues.
2: They can't upgrade to new technology too often as each time they do so they disenfranchise existing users. That means they will always be technologically behind the one peice soloutions.
3: The drives never achieved more than a niche presence and were always vendor specific so you were very limited in who you could share disks with.

Re:Translation: Where is the consumer solution?

[swb]

Syquest 44s and 88s were too much of niche product -- I only remember them being big in the nascent desktop publishing biz. SCSI interfaces only and expensive.

It seems to me that the iomega Zip disk replaced the Syquest units and that Syquest went out flailing with other business problems about the time they released the Sparq, which was also unreliable.

Even the first "blue" PowerMacs had Zip drives as an internal option and Jaz followed not long after, although I don't remember an IDE option although there must have been one.

In retrospect those early units seemed to suffer because they either offered slow PC connectivity (parallel port!), internal-only (IDE) or the more expensive and less common SCSI interface on PCs.

Now that PCs have USB3 and the speed issue doesn't matter, I find myself longing for a high-capacity cartridge solution less clunky than using an entire SATA disk in one of those vertical-insert controllers (which of course I still have).

Re:Translation: Where is the consumer solution?

[drinkypoo]

Syquest 44s and 88s were too much of niche product -- I only remember them being big in the nascent desktop publishing biz. SCSI interfaces only and expensive.

Yes, but now we're talking about the Syquests that competed with the Zip, like the SQ135, and not about the 44s and 88s.

the first "blue" PowerMacs had Zip drives as an internal option and Jaz followed not long after, although I don't remember an IDE option although there must have been one.

Zips of all sizes were available as both IDE and SCSI. Only later Syquests (135 and 270) were available as ATA. These units were directly cost-competitive with Zip drives (100 and 250 respectively) and offered dramatically higher speeds, but Zip had already proliferated and they lost. I got a 135 on sale, it was a decent drive. Used it as my OS volume on my Amiga.

Re:it's dirty cheap actually

[Iniamyen]

what's a tele-co?

Re:Compared to 4TB?

[ColdWetDog]

Tape backups aren't really the target. This is intended to replace UDO disks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... which were mostly used in jukeboxes for paper work heavy businesses such as financial institutions storing loan documents.

Yes, for some reason all of our CT scans are stored on MO even though we use an online PACS for everyday use. We have a whole roomful of the stupid things and they only hold 500 MB a piece. We have to store them for 20 years (in the case of a minor patient) or at least 7 (Statute of Limitations). A 300 GB system is a big enough upgrade for us to consider it.

If it ever ships.

Of course, I'm waiting for holographic storage, but I'm a patient kind of guy.

Re:Compared to 4TB?

[Quila]

I was doing CD-ROMs in 1993. It required a very special full-height SCSI 1 GB hard drive that did not recalibrate itself from time to time, and a $3,000 1x SCSI writer. Turn off all services, screensavers, etc., hit write, and don't breathe for the next hour or so. Underrun buffer? What's that?

Not Archival

[Sir Holo]

They don't mention the materials used for fabrication, so the "archival" claim is not supported.

More importantly, a disk-based storage medium is not likely to be useful as "archival" due to both format rot, and the inevitable loss of accessibility as the market moves to other devices. Can you read your MO or Bernoulli disks today?

This (US Patent 8,085,304) is a truly archival technology. One that a naive user with a flatbed scanner and computer could find and read. Say, for example a government in 300 years, or an archaeologist. Sure, quick calculations show that it could hold only 5 GB (if encoded in 4-bit) for the same weight as a CD, but it is the only truly archival idea out there.

Re:Not Archival

[Dadoo]

Can you read your MO or Bernoulli disks today

Yes, in fact, I can read my MO disks, today. Sure, my MO drive is more than 10 years old, but it still works, and the disks are still readable.

750MB Zip Drive

[SrLnclt]

Reminds me of zip drives... hey - we've got a new 750MB model! By that time the market had already moved on to CDs and USB flash drives.

Pretty much all of my audio, pictures, and video lives on my NAS. It almost seems quaint when I have to fire up the DVD player.

Re:750MB Zip Drive

[Dadoo]

Reminds me of zip drives

It was obvious to anyone who was paying attention that Zip drives were a flash in the pan. I'm still amazed that so many people wasted their money on them, when they didn't even outlast the floppies they were supposed to replace.

Re:750MB Zip Drive

[drinkypoo]

It was obvious to anyone who was paying attention that Zip drives were a flash in the pan. I'm still amazed that so many people wasted their money on them, when they didn't even outlast the floppies they were supposed to replace.

Back when internet speeds were universally low, zip (And syquest, and bernoulli, and MO) drives fulfilled a necessary function: they let you take relatively large files places and exchange them with others on a reasonable time scale. It's called history, account for it.

Yes, yes, yes.

[aussersterne]

I paid $600 at one point for a used full-height hard drive that was made out of a solid hunk of alloy for the first hard drive for my PC.

So?

Way to let the point fly over your head.

By the time we were mid-'90s, we could get backup solutions that were—yes—$1,000 to $3,000 for the mechanism and $15-$30 for each piece of media.

But they:

- Would cover the space of most consumer drives at the time within 1-4 cartridges
- Would thus backup your entire consumer data library for $50-$150 per complete backup

This can't be done any longer. Not even close.

My point wasn't to get into a "history" pissing match. Sheesh, yes, also back in the day there were no such things as digital computers or hard drives or printing presses or even written script and everything had to be passed along as oral tradition, which meant that the cost of a backup was the cost of a human life.

As I said, this misses the point entirely. One might have hoped that in the process of getting here from the mid '90s we'd have gone forward rather than backward on the ability to make backups on removable storage media.

Re:Yes, yes, yes.

[MachineShedFred]

Well, it can be, somewhat. You can find SAS-attached LTO-4 drives for around $200, the tapes are around $20 and can carry 800GB before compression. Granted, you have to have a SAS controller, but you can throw one of those to the bill of materials for $50.

So, $250 for the solution, and call it $20 per TB with low compression for tapes. It's not ideal, but it's way better than optical for having a complete backup set.

Re:Yes, yes, yes.

[jp10558]

What software do you use to go to Tape? At work we use Symantec Netbackup, but a) I run Windows b) it costs $$$$

Telco defined

[tepples]

Typo for "telco", or telecommunications company.

External DVD drives

[tepples]

So you might have access to that media, but eventually it will be like it is today trying to run down a way to read an old 8 1/2 inch floppy disk.

How "eventually" are you talking about? I don't see external USB CD, DVD, and BD readers going away at least in the next decade.

Re: External DVD drives

[clickclickdrone]

Really? If give it 3 to 5 years tops. I haven't used an optical drive in 3+ years or a floppy in 5+. In fact my last 2 PCs had no floppy dive and I didn't even notice.

Re: External DVD drives

[tepples]

Let me guess: you haven't had to make a mix CD as a favor for an elderly relative who lacks the time to learn how to use an MP3 player.

Re: External DVD drives

[jones_supa]

Optical disc is one of the best ways to archive data.

Re:External DVD drives

[MachineShedFred]

When Apple first binned the floppy in 1999 with the original iMac, most people thought they were crazy.

Who has touched a floppy disk in the last 8+ years?

Re: External DVD drives

[clickclickdrone]

Yeah, right. They never go bad. Archival grade ones kept in the dark, maybe. Most just give up after a few years.

Re:External DVD drives

[toddestan]

Actually, Apple was crazy. The original iMac didn't come with a CD burner, USB thumbdrives didn't exist and even if you found one the OS didn't support it, and as far as networking was concerned most people were still on dial-up. So to get data off the machine you either had to have a second computer with an ethernet interface which most people didn't have, upload it at dial-up speeds, or buy a USB floppy drive. So pretty much everyone who bought an iMac ended up buying a floppy drive anyway. To add to the hilarity, most cheap USB floppy drives would only read DOS-formatted disks so your old Apple floppies were still unreadable.

Ishtar skipped DVD

[tepples]

[Cheapskates] will see no reason to purchase anything more expensive than DVDs

Until movie distributors start skipping DVD and going straight to BD, AD, or whatever for new releases. The film Ishtar, for instance, skipped DVD.

Re:Ishtar skipped DVD

[Anubis IV]

"Cheapskates" and "people who don't care about the benefits offered" are not synonymous terms. And small wonder that a film that only appeals to niche collectors would be released using the format that appeals to niche collectors.

Re:Ishtar skipped DVD

[fox171171]

Until movie distributors start skipping DVD and going straight to BD, AD, or whatever for new releases. The film Ishtar, for instance, skipped DVD.

And everyone should skip Ishtar. (And not because it skipped DVD!)

Re:Ishtar skipped DVD

[Dadoo]

And everyone should skip Ishtar.

Agreed.

My wife and I argue, occasionally, about which movie was worse: Ishtar or StarTrek III.

Re:Ishtar skipped DVD

[MachineShedFred]

Augment your argument. Star Trek III was a masterpiece in cinema in comparison to Star Trek V.

Wasting their time.

[AbRASiON]

Double sided? Only 150gb at the moment, at best 500gb?
Nope and nope, it's not going to catch on, you can buy a portable 1TB HDD now for $65

If they can do single sided, 1TB, at least 50MB/s and blank discs under $15 a pop? You've got some small potential to maybe oust DVD / BR - otherwise, forget it. It's unlikely to catch on even then though.

Re:Wasting their time.

[mjwx]

Double sided? Only 150gb at the moment, at best 500gb?
Nope and nope, it's not going to catch on, you can buy a portable 1TB HDD now for $65

If they can do single sided, 1TB, at least 50MB/s and blank discs under $15 a pop? You've got some small potential to maybe oust DVD / BR - otherwise, forget it. It's unlikely to catch on even then though.

I need to send 70 GB to Scunthorpe by tomorrow.

Do you want to buy a $50 HDD, $10 USB caddy + padded box for transport or a $5 optical disc + CD package for postage.

Good luck selling that to the boss.

Re:Wasting their time.

[AbRASiON]

So 2 DS blu rays then?
Corporate / business internet links are also an option. I used to dial in to the local newspaper and upload them a 2 or 3mb PDF file over 14.4 modem at my first job.
I have no idea where you are, I'm going to assume you've got at least 12 hours until the deadline, quite a few business links could easily handle 70gb in 12 hours.

Also, only 60$ for a HDD which can be sent back and forth between the client? Seems feasible to me.

Re:Wasting their time.

[mjwx]

Also, only 60$ for a HDD which can be sent back and forth between the client? Seems feasible to me.

Client... send things back?

What colour is the sky on your planet?

Even if you included a pre-paid postage bag or consignment note, you'd still have at best a 50/50 chance that they would.

Corporate / business internet links are also an option. I used to dial in to the local newspaper and upload them a 2 or 3mb PDF file over 14.4 modem at my first job.
I have no idea where you are, I'm going to assume you've got at least 12 hours until the deadline, quite a few business links could easily handle 70gb in 12 hours.

LoL, 70 GB in 12 hours. Are you high?

From my location you'd be lucky to get 70 GB done in 4 days if both sides had enterprise grade fibre. From Perth, Australia (which is as far as you can get from Scuthorpe, England and still have regular internet access), I can overnight physical storage there. From London, England I could get it there within the day (hell, you could do the same from Boston).

So 2 DS blu rays then?

Now you're getting it.

Another thing you have to remember is that a HDD or a large flash drive is considered an asset by accounting. They will need to keep track of them and wont let you send them all around the world. An optical disc is considered a consumable and doesn't garner much attention.

Re:Compared to 4TB?

[Kjella]

I know, it's slightly cheaper as a backup option-- if your time isn't worth much.

Don't think so, a 4TB drive is 1200 NOK and cheapest 100-pack 4.7GB DVD-R spindle I can find 204 NOK - clearly more bang for the buck than BD-R or dual layer. Still 4000/(4.7*100) ~= 8.5 spindles means 8.5*204 = 1736 NOK for 4TB so almost a 50% premium and that does not include the DVD writer. And I did check tape drives but while the media is cheap - but not that cheap - the tape drive itself sinks the entire budget. And the other killer is the memory stick, if I wanted to move 10GB around offline I'd rather use that. A lot more pocket friendly, reusable and no need for an optical drive. They still need a medium for 4K movies though, not everyone can download 100GB easily but they'll have to come up with something revolutionary to make it a preferred archival media.

Caps

[tepples]

Get ready to stream 90 GB 4K movies?

Not as long as ISPs continue to impose caps even on premium tiers of home Internet service. And I see discs remaining popular in rural areas where the best available ISP is satellite, which has a cap well below 10 GB/mo.

Pointless

[gnu-sucks]

With the exception of some "write-once, read-only" backup schemes, this will fail at the $300/disk level.

Meanwhile, go google "1TB USB Flash" and see the $1200 USB flash drives. These will cost a lot less ($100 each in two years I bet) in a few years, just in time for the first of these already-failed optical disks. Plus you don't need anything special to use a USB flash drive...

Pinball wizard

[tepples]

I was expecting you to link to Tommy .

Re:Pinball wizard

[Zero__Kelvin]

Which is exactly why I linked to Flipper :-)

Re:Compared to 4TB?

[ducomputergeek]

But that's not even as big of deal as it was a few years ago when most homes had 1 computer. Today our home has 8 computers, two tablets, and two smart phones. And right now it's just me and my wife. (I do IT stuff and she's a geeky lawyer who likes tech stuff)

If one of our machines are doing a back up, chances are we just go to another room and use a different one.

That being said, I installed a 16TB FreeNAS system on the home network last year and that's now how we keep track of most things these days.

Re:Compared to 4TB?

[AmiMoJo]

You have to understand how most consumers "back up". They go on holiday and take some photos, shoot some video. Then they get back and save their stuff to disc for viewing and safe keeping, and that's it.

For that point of view an archival grade disc is attractive. You can watch the video or look at the photos on your TV any time with a player, and you don't have to worry about the disc degrading over time if you look after it. Make two copies if it matters that much.

That's the level of sophistication that most consumers operate on. They want a machine that puts their home videos on disc and a disc that lasts forever.

Trial balloon fever

[tepples]

"Cheapskates" and "people who don't care about the benefits offered" are not synonymous terms.

I apologize. I was confused by some Slashdot users who have called me a cheapskate for not caring about the benefits offered by, say, a smartphone with a $35/mo data plan over a dumbphone with a $7/mo voice-only plan.

And small wonder that a film that only appeals to niche collectors would be released using the format that appeals to niche collectors.

I saw it more as a trial balloon for eventually dropping DVD and its weaker DRM, just as the home video distributors had dropped VHS.

Re:Trial balloon fever

[Anubis IV]

I apologize. I was confused by some Slashdot users who have called me a cheapskate for not caring about the benefits offered by, say, a smartphone with a $35/mo data plan over a dumbphone with a $7/mo voice-only plan.

No worries, and fair points all around. I was overly dismissive of your point about Ishtar, and I should have made a comment saying so since I regretted it immediately. Not sure why I didn't.

As for cheapskates, I see no reason to throw away good money on benefits or features that either don't matter or aren't worth it. That's just being smart with your money, after all. Not only that, but I find that I enjoy my purchases more when I have a clear reason for why I got the model I did and not the next one up, since when a friend inevitably gets $my_model+1, the security I have in my decision allows me to be genuinely happy for them. A cheapskate is the one who knows they have every reason to get the next model up, but refuses to do so over a negligible cost. $7 vs $35 is not a negligible cost, and the benefits of smartphones are not worth the same to everyone. If they're not worth it to you, I can definitely respect that and wouldn't fault you for it in the least.

Re:Compared to 4TB?

[Jeremy Erwin]

Amazon sells BRD-Rs in 25 packs for 22.97. Buy 7 packs (for $160) and you have as much storage as a 180 buck 4TB hard drive, assuming that you have the recorder.

http://www.myce.com/news/breakthrough-on-removal-o

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.myce.com/news/breakthrough-on-removal-of-cinavia-blu-ray-copy-protection-reported-69629/

Re:Compared to 4TB?

[LifesABeach]

Hay, i didn't even think of a thumb drive, I can go to Fry's and buy a 128GB.

Re:Cost?

[TheRealMindChild]

I can buy a 2TB disk which is rewriteable for $69 including the interface.

No, you can't. Spot pricing on pricewatch or google shopping or whatever, the lowest prices are $80 for a drive from a company that will hold your order forever as "pending" because they never had any is stock to begin with. You will pay $100 at least after shipping

sunlight? (Windows = lost data)

[raymorris]

Just as with operating systems, with optical disks, windows destroy data. The sunlight slowly "burns" all the bits if a disk is stored when sunlight beams in. That's one pattern of failure that someone might not identify, but it is a known pattern you can avoid.

Re:sunlight? (Windows = lost data)

[SuricouRaven]

That's why I stored all my old optical archive discs in light-tight steel cans. Didn't stop half of them failing. I used to burn each disc with 4GB of useful data and 400MB of PAR2 files for use in recovering the data once it inevitably started developing holes.

Re:Compared to 4TB?

[bloodhawk]

I am struggling to see how a disc format which is orders of magnitude smaller and slower than current disk sizes (not to mention what disk sizes will be in 2 years when this is available) and also significantly smaller than current backup technologies is expected to take off. If you need to backup large amounts of data you use Tape which this new format doesn't have anywhere near the capacity of or you use disk (i.e. HDD's) which are fast and cheap. optical media is going the way of the Dodo, it simply hasn't been able to keep pace with size requirements.

every optical disk writes full disk in three minut

[raymorris]

CD, DVD, and Blu Ray have all been writable at about 16x, meaning you can burn a disk in two - three minutes. The write speed has scaled with capacity. I see no reason to think the next generation will be any different.

Re:Compared to 4TB?

[LordLimecat]

Optical format has always been awful for backup. It has all the bad parts of tape and none of the good ones; its only benefit is that its ubiquitous and pretty cheap. Reliability, speed, cost/GB, all suck.

Re:Compared to 4TB?

[LordLimecat]

Optical media tends to degrade even if you stick it in a vault. Magnetic media does not.

Re:Compared to 4TB?

[LordLimecat]

Keeping your backup drive plugged in 24/7 is a good way to getting it fried by the first nasty electrical event.

Re:Compared to 4TB?

[LordLimecat]

Compared to a $25 LTO5 tape which holds nearly 3TB, and is a lot easier to verify.

Wow what a bargain.

Re:Compared to 4TB?

[mjwx]

Pretty much.
CD-Roms first became popular when 80 meg hard drives were considered large.
Now, you can buy few terabytes of space for $100--$200. Parceling out your data in 25 GB chunks, at a dollar a disk doesn't seem all that thrifty, unless you distribute large amounts of data to people who don't have high speed connections.

I know, it's slightly cheaper as a backup option-- if your time isn't worth much.

CD writers didn't become popular in the home until 2 GB drives were commonplace. Optical media has always lagged behind hard disk. It's the advent of USB storage and greater bandwidth that has diminished the use of optical media.

Despite that, optical media still has it's uses and wont be going anywhere for some time. A DVD that costs $0.10 is easier to post than a flash drive that costs $5 and is considerably less fragile.

Re:every optical disk writes full disk in three mi

[Altanar]

Just nitpicking, but the write speed of a dual-layer Blu-Ray disc is nearly 12 minutes at 16x. What I'm mainly worried about is that the spin rate of a plastic disc has a definite RPM speed limit. I think we've all seen the videos of what happens to discs that are spun too fast (and if you haven't, there's some neat videos of it on YouTube). Will these archival discs be made of a different core material to facilitate faster spin speeds?

yeah l, filament tape (fiberglass strings) strong

[raymorris]

Rotational speed is an engineering problem, but I bet there's an easy solution. One thing that comes to mind is the difference in strength between regular plastic packing tape vs filament tape, the plastic tape with a few strings of fiberglass on it. That little bit of glass string sure makes the tape a lot stronger, and it isn't too expensive. Current disks are just plastic. Adding three cents of fiberglass should make them about ten times stronger, so they can spin much faster.

Re:Compared to 4TB?

[Nyder]

So, what do I need a 300GB, when I can go to Fry's and get 4TB drive and just plug it in?

storing stuff on hard drives is NOT backing up.

It's playing Russian roulette with your data.

Re:Compared to 4TB?

[jones_supa]

+1

Re:every optical disk writes full disk in three mi

[tragedy]

Faster spin speeds are needed for faster random access on spinning media. If you want to be able to write to them faster, is it better to do a whole lot more engineering on both the drive and the discs to make them spin 10% faster, or to just find a way to squeeze in another write head?

What I want to know is

[Chrisq]

What I want to know is who's bringing out the obligatory "rival format", just to add confusion to the market and make people wary of adopting. Ideally this should have slightly less powerful backers but some slight technical advantage - just to make sure its not a foregone confusion which one is adopted.

Re:Dead on Arrival

[drinkypoo]

You got a crappy hand-me-down Blu-Ray player, and this led you to derp about the format being the problem rather than your miserly nature.

A crappy hand-me-down DVD player would fucking work, and further it would play the disc in a reasonable time frame. But my crappy hand-me-down BluRay player is a Sony BDP-S300 and sure it plays discs, eventually. After about a minute of thinking about it. And why should I need a newer player just to watch a movie? Only a total asshole would suggest that someone is an idiot for expecting a movie player to play a movie without crashing.

Two things needed before optical goes away

[tepples]

For a particular physical media format to go away, there have to be a superior format and a migration path. By the time the iMac came out, other physical media to replace the internal floppy drive were ready, namely Floptical, Zip, and LS-120. Over the next few years, external CD-RW drives and USB flash drives provided other alternatives. USB floppy drives provided a migration path, and even a decade and a half later, I can still buy a USB 3.5" floppy drive. I'll grant that the 5.25" and 8" floppy drives aren't widely available in USB, and USB floppy drives may have trouble reading non-high-density floppies, because unlike with high-density 3.5" floppies, PC manufacturers never could agree on a modulation for those. But it's still possible to skip a few generations at a time when format shifting.

If you're talking about an alternative to using physical media at all as a method of distributing copies of motion pictures to the public, that won't happen until there's a replacement. Both of these need to happen:

1. 1. Movies and TV series need to be made available through streaming rental within a few months after they complete their run and stay available for decades.
2. 2. Rural areas need home Internet connections with at least 100 GB per month cap, not the 10 GB per month cap that satellite plans tend to have. Customers in these areas tend to buy optical discs to supplement the free-to-air TV that they do get.

I don't see how Disney is likely to agree to #1 given its "vault" practices, and I don't see how #2 will be achieved with the crony capitalism prevalent among United States telcos.

Rental for the life of the platform

[tepples]

A purchase over "digital distribution", such as a movie or a console game, isn't a true purchase as much as a rental for the life of the platform as determined by the platform's gatekeeper. Look what happened to "purchases" made in the Windows PlaysForSure platform when the various stores went EOL. That and as drinkypoo pointed out, resale is forbidden.

Re:Rental for the life of the platform

[Anubis IV]

I'll certainly grant that most places engage in that sort of practice, but there are others that do not and that provide copies that are either entirely free of DRM (e.g. GOG.com) or are free of any ties to the life of the service from which the product was purchased (e.g. iTunes music).

Either way, these issues are not unique to digital distribution, they're simply more common with it. Even when you buy a game on physical media, it's still locked down with DRM the vast majority of the time, and the lawyers will be quick to point out that while you may own the disc, you in most cases merely possess a revocable license to the content on the disc. Likewise, films on blu-ray come with DRM in many cases, and your ability to play blu-rays, assuming you're not circumventing the DRM, is tied to the life of the servers that are providing updates to your blu-ray player, since without those updates, you may be incapable of playing your legally purchased blu-ray disc that is protected using a version of BD+ that wasn't in use at the time that your blu-ray player was manufactured.

Long story short, the issues we're discussing here are independent of the distribution method, and though they do affect digital distribution more than physical distribution, that's only because digital distribution got a head start on it, not because it's a technologically necessary component of the distribution method. The problem we're discussing here is a growing trend affecting all distribution methods. Buying on physical media is no longer the panacea it once was.

Does this mean we can buy a LOTR set again?

[axl917]

Yay!

Re:http://www.myce.com/news/breakthrough-on-remova

[MachineShedFred]

Wait, a crap broken-by-design DRM scheme that completely relied on security by obscurity has been cracked before fully implemented; and cracked in an irreparable fashion?

Just like every DRM scheme that has preceded it. And likely every scheme that succeeds it.

Re:Dead on Arrival

[MachineShedFred]

And by "life" you mean "not at all" because of the DRM-free music sales they've been doing since 2009?

The Ishtar bunny

[tepples]

Answer me this: Is Ishtar worse than Hop?

Re:Compared to 4TB?

[bobbied]

There is that, which is why my NAS has two USB backup drives that get connected to dump to offline backup. I have two backup drives so I can keep one in my desk at work and one at home.

But There also are things known as UPS's which both provided uninterrupted power as well as surge protection. I'm good short, of a lighting strike or EMP.

Not big enough when 4TB drives are so cheap

[DJRikki]

... for general data use. I remember when people had 420mb hard drives and CDRs came out with 650mb of space for a few quid each! Instant full backups for cheap. Would need 27 of these new discs per 4TB drive for the same scenario today.

Re:Compared to 4TB?

[LordLimecat]

You know what they say about assumptions. What happens when the UPS malfunctions? Or the surge creeps in over another piece of copper (RJ45, for example)? And as you say-- lightning strikes can do some nasty things.

UPS is a good start, but USB drives are notoriously fragile, and I wouldnt trust one as your only backup.

Re:every optical disk writes full disk in three mi

[Jane Q. Public]

"The write speed has scaled with capacity. I see no reason to think the next generation will be any different."

Nor do we have any reason to think it won't.

I was just raising the question. It is a bit strange that they didn't mention the write speed at all, since it's one of the most important metrics for high-volume media.

Re:Compared to 4TB?

[bobbied]

UPS is a good start, but USB drives are notoriously fragile, and I wouldnt trust one as your only backup.

The UPS is totally unnecessary, it just is more convenient than having to rebuild the NAS should the power fail at the wrong time. I have two complete historical copies of my data at all times, even when running a backup.

The USB drives I have are laptop drives internally. They are not indestructible, but tough enough to bounce around my desk drawer without too much of an issue. Plus I have two backup drives, one off site, one local that get rotated regularly.

Not to mention that I run a RAID 5 array with hot spare in the NAS, so I really have 4 copies of everything. All this for my personal data, which rarely changes anyway.

I'm covered better than most IT departments.

Re:every optical disk writes full disk in three mi

[Belial6]

Add an extra laser and you double the read/write speed. Add three extra lasers and you have a 4x speed increase.

4K is weaksauce compared to 1080p

[Mr_Wisenheimer]

4K offers 4 times the resolution increase over 1080p whereas 1080p in 16:9 offered a nearly 7 times resolution increase over 480p. Do the math.

It should also be noted that most HD video is in 720p native resolution. Even a lot of modern Video game systems (Wii U, PS4, Xbox 1) internally render games in less than 1080p despite the fact that they all support 4K native output.

Other than PC gaming and films shot with equipment that is pretty uncommon today, 4K is really lacking in any serious type of content. Heck, other than bluray movies and a few high-res broadcasts, so is 1080p.

And, existing content does not benefit that much from the increase in resolution. In theory, the effective resolution of well preserved film is probably pretty similar to 4K, so if you do a lot of work to actually get old movies and maybe even some TV shows up to snuff, it could look better, but that is really the extent of it. And we have already seen that, other than major Hollywood movies and a handful of old TV shows, there has not been a lot of interest in converting old film into 1080p content, and there will probably be even less interest in converting it into 4K. Add to that the fact that, the way a lot of stuff is filmed, only a small part of the actual film gets used, so the effective resolution is even lower.