Sony can't wait to flash you its enormous disc ... a 1TB Blu-ray spinner Sony has laid out plans to ramp up the capacity of its Blu-ray disc format in the coming years. The company said that its joint effort with Panasonic, first outlined in July of last year, was on track to boost capacity of the optical storage discs from 30GB to 300GB by 2015, though no specific plans for new appliances were …
If history repeats, hard disks will be cheaper than 1TB blu ray disks for a few years. By the time blu ray becomes cost effective, a typical backup will require a stack of disks and an auto changer to chew through them over the weekend. I would bet on write-once flash being practical before 1TB blu ray.
From Flocke Kroes:
I would bet on write-once flash being practical before 1TB blu ray.
Everything old is new again. Isn't "write-once flash" just EPROM?
Seriously, if all you're doing is writing once and never changing, they should be able to knock off a terabyte EPROM "drive" for under a hundred, USD or quid. Allow a "master rewrite" pulse that blanks everything if you have to reset and restart, with everything on the drive getting written in one shot only.
And that should be able to set records for durability and output speed.
No reason to suspect life.
I have tried to setup backup to BR ~ 10 times over the last 5 years and I have abandoned it every time for one simple reason - too unreliable. The write out dies on a regular basis after which you have only one choice - to hit the reset button on the machine. Totally unusable for the supposedly one and only remaining role of optical - reliable long term backup.
I've never even got that far. Every now and then I look online to see if the price of blank Blu-Ray media has fallen to sane levels, find that it's still ridiculously overpriced, and shelve the idea for another six months. I've been doing that for a few years now.
Of course this is for personal use - just backing up my home computer and such, but it's an absurd amount to pay over the cost of blank DVDs. When I bought my Blu-ray drive ages back, I paid a (very) little extra for burning capability. Never got any use out of that. At this rate, I never will.
"I've never even got that far. Every now and then I look online to see if the price of blank Blu-Ray media has fallen to sane levels ..."
Me too, I expected that BDXL would be the answer to home backup, but the cost of the media is crazy - and no, I don't trust the cloud, even if my internet connection had the bandwidth to support it.
Buying blank media from the usual online sources, I'm now finding that a spindle of good quality blank BD-Rs is slightly cheaper per GB than a spindle of comparable quality DVD media. Even in the days when the cost/GB was in favour of DVDs, there were other benefits of backing up to BD-R - being able to back up files >4.7GB without needing to split them across multiple discs, and the significant reduction in physical space required to store the discs.
300 GB is nothing now, and I am done with spinning disks that skip, rot, have protection that keep me from reading them, try to force install spyware rootkits, etc. I'm all solid state on storage, and digital files for any would-be media, like movies.
Kiss off Sony, you are behind the curve.
I would wait to see what actually transpires.
Past Sony Storage road maps have not come to be:
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SAIT Technology Roadmap Extends to SAIT-4
SAIT technology utilizes a half-inch, single-reel cartridge to provide more than twice the uncompressed capacity of the nearest linear half-inch tape drive, according to Sony. The first generation of SAIT tape drives (SAIT-1) provides up to 1.3 terabytes of compressed capacity (500 gigabytes uncompressed) and a transfer rate of up to 78 megabytes per second compressed (30 MB/sec uncompressed).
Sony's SAIT roadmap extends to a fourth generation, with the aim of doubling capacity and performance from generation to generation. SAIT-4 technology is expected to feature up to 4 TB of native capacity in a single cartridge (10.4 TB compressed). Sony also intends to maintain backward read/write media compatibility with at least the previous generation of SAIT drives.
Sony had a roadmap past Blu-ray yonks ago. Then it vaporized as Blu-ray fizzled and sputtered. Now we have another roadmap, and not much of anyone cares.
Q: What new diaboliical layers of DRM (digital rights manglement) and user surveillance will Sony perpetrate this time, I wonder.
Q: Will the initial price of the new tech be as exorbitant as Blu-ray was?
Q: Does this mean that Blu-ray burn discs will drop in price sufficiently enough to actually become genuinely popular?
Sony is currently run by a marketing guy. Expect the worst.
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