30 Blu-ray Discs In a 1.5TB MiniDisc-Like Cassette 247
MrSeb writes "Hot on the heels of the most successful storage mediums of all time — MiniDisc and Zip disks — Sony has announced the Optical Disc Archive, a system that seems to cram up to 30 Blu-ray discs into a single, one-inch-thick plastic cassette, which will have a capacity of between 300GB and 1.5TB. As far as I can tell, the main selling point of the Optical Disc Archive is, just like MiniDisc, the ruggedness of the cassettes. Optical discs themselves are fairly resistant to changes in temperature and humidity, and the cassettes are dust and water resistant. What is the use case for these 1.5TB MiniDiscs, though? In terms of pure storage capacity, tape drives are still far superior (you can store up to 5TB on a tape!) In terms of speed and flexibility, hard drives are better. If you're looking for ruggedness, flash-based storage is smaller, lighter, and can easily survive a dip in the ocean. The Optical Disc Archive might be good as extensible storage for TV PVRs, like TiVo and Sky+ — but as yet, we don't even know the cost of the system or the cassettes, and I doubt either will be cheap."
Re:Zip discs (Score:5, Funny)
Zip discs one of the most successful storage mediums of all time? Is that a joke?
Yes. And you didn't get it.
Re:The most successful storage mediums of all time (Score:5, Funny)
Hear that woosh? That was the sarcasm going right over your head.
Re:Sony? (Score:5, Funny)
Don't get in his way, he's on a "ranting roll," and once the sony-bashing boulder has started going, there's no stopping it.
Re:Sony? (Score:2, Funny)
Does it have the XCP trojan installed by default? Will they sell you 5 tb and take four of them back with the first "upgrade"?
My guess is it'll be released after 1.5 TB SSDs are widely available, yet somehow cost more. And I'll have to warn my family away from buying it, because they had a good experience with a Sony reel to reel tape player 40 years ago, therefore this must be pretty good too.
I doubt there's a less trustworthy entity on the planet.
Anyone in the .gov, anyone in mass media, anyone in marketing, anyone in finance, GM ... Least trustworthy computer hardware mfgr on the planet, yeah, I think they fairly easily meet that..
Lost me (Score:5, Funny)
You lost me at "Sony".
Re:Sony? (Score:5, Funny)
and possibly the boulder
Re:Sony? (Score:5, Funny)
Strange that Sony would rather sell 30 discs in a cartridge instead of just 1. Not very efficient.
Not strange at all, just Sony doing what Sony does...they just love their proprietary formats. Why sell a disc when you can create a cartridge of discs that only Sony produces hardware capable of reading? Might as well call it Memory Stick 2: Electric Boogaloo...