30 Blu-ray Discs In a 1.5TB MiniDisc-Like Cassette

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:Sony?

[spire3661]

Ahem....you do know the 3.5" floppy standard design was referenced from the Sony design right?

Dear Slashdot Editors

[AmiMoJo]

Dear Slashdot Editors,

Please edit summaries before they hit the front page. For example, here is TFS with all the bullshit removed. I left the joke in for you, even though Sony didn't create Zip disks... Perhaps the poster meant Memory Stick, Betamax, Magic Gate or one of the other custom Sony formats.

"Hot on the heels of the most successful storage mediums of all time â" MiniDisc and Zip disks â" 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. 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. The article is light on potential uses."

Re:Sony?

[mcgrew]

You do realize that the 3.5 inch floppy came AFTER the 5 inch floppy, which came after the eight inch floppy, right? And that I didn't say a 3.5 inch floppy?

The earliest floppy disks, developed in the late 1960s, were 8 inches (200 mm) in diameter;[1] they became commercially available in 1971.[2] These disks and associated drives were produced and improved upon by IBM and other companies such as Memorex, Shugart Associates, and Burroughs Corporation.[3] The term "floppy disk" appeared in print as early as 1970,[4] and although in 1973 IBM announced its first media as "Type 1 Diskette" the industry continued to use the terms "floppy disk" or "floppy".

In 1976, Shugart Associates introduced the first 5 1â4-inch FDD. By 1978 there were more than 10 manufacturers producing such FDDs. There were competing floppy disk formats, with hard and soft sector versions and encoding schemes such as FM, MFM and GCR. The 5 1/4 inch format displaced the 8-inch one for most applications, and the hard sectored disk format disappeared. In 1984, IBM introduced the 1.2 MB dual sided floppy disk along with its AT model. IBM started using the 720 kB double density 3.5" microfloppy disk on its Convertible laptop computer and the 1.44 MB high density version with the PS/2 line in 1986. These disk drives could be added to older PC models. In 1988 IBM introduced a drive for 2.88 MB "DSED" diskettes in its top-of-the-line PS/2 models but this was a commercial failure.

A variant on the Sony design, introduced in 1982 by a large number of manufacturers, was then rapidly adopted; by 1988 the 3 1â2-inch was outselling the 5 1â4-inch.[6]

Maybe I should say something about my lawn here... BTW, mods, you moderate an almost incorrect statement as "informative"?

Re:Zip discs

[Dahamma]

Ah, the click of death... especially impressive when a bad Zip disk could misalign the drive heads badly enough to screw up any other disks inserted. Probably the first widespread example of a computer *hardware* virus...

Re:Zip discs

[Ucklak]

Every business that needed to store anything over 5MB had a Zip drive. and that's every business I consulted for in the late 90s.

So maybe not every desktop but every office or 1 out of 5 computers had them.

Re:Sony?

[cpu6502]

VCR? Nope. It's JVC technology.
Laserdisc player? Nope. Philips.
Cassette player? Nope. Philips again.
DVR? Nope.
CD? Yep.
DVD? Nope.

Re:Sony?

[cpu6502]

>>>the result of JVC ripping off Sony's plans for Betamax

Uh. No. Sony's Betamax used U-loading whereas JVC followed a different route called M-loading. The M loading also proved better for camcorders, which is why JVC was able to shrink it to palmsize (VHS-C). Sony could not make recordable Betamax units, so they had to make a separate standard called Video8 which was incompatible with home VCRs.

Also JVC was smart enough to make their tapes 2 hours standard, so they could record a whole movie, instead of just half (like the 1 hour Beta tapes). That time choice is why VHS was more attractive to consumers, and VHS had essentially "won" the war as early as 1980.