Sony & Panasonic Plan Next-Gen 300 GB Optical Discs By the End of 2015 289
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."
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Great (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?
That's fine and dandy (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.
Capacity ain't everything. (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
Non-connected users (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.
Re:Great (Score:5, 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.
Re:Great (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Capacity ain't everything. (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 [newegg.com] 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.
Re:Non-connected users (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:DVD Life Time 2-5 years (Score:4, 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?
Re:Non-connected users (Score:3, Insightful)