Sony Announces It's 'Gradually' Stopping Production of Recordable Blu-Ray Discs (techspot.com) 122
A report from TechSpot:
For home videographers and data hoarders who still rely on optical discs for archiving, some bad news just dropped: Sony is winding down production of recordable Blu-ray media... In an interview Sony gave to AV Watch recently, the company admitted it's going to "gradually end development and production" of recordable Blu-rays and other optical disc formats at its Tagajo City plants in Miyagi Prefecture, Japan. Essentially, 25GB BD-REs, 50GB BD-RE DLs, 100GB BD-RE XLs, or 128GB BD-R XLs will soon not be available to consumers. Professional discs for video production and optical archives for data storage are also being discontinued. Sony says it's pulling the plug because the cold storage market never really took off like they hoped, and the overall storage media business has been operating in the red for years...
It's not all bad news, though. The commercial Blu-ray discs you buy movies and games on will still be produced, so there's no need to panic about the death of physical media just yet.
Share your thoughts and reactions in the comments. (Long-time Slashdot reader storkus wonders if it's possible there are still other companies, possibly Chinese, that are still making the disks?)
It's not all bad news, though. The commercial Blu-ray discs you buy movies and games on will still be produced, so there's no need to panic about the death of physical media just yet.
Share your thoughts and reactions in the comments. (Long-time Slashdot reader storkus wonders if it's possible there are still other companies, possibly Chinese, that are still making the disks?)
Actually surprised (Score:3)
Re:Actually surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
Er... not sure what rock you live under but its nearly impossible to justify the hassle and PITA of dealing with disks when you can buy SSD or MicroSD storage for around $50 / TB and under. It is simply not worth dealing with BD, even if you do like to archive at home.
I just don't think of disk drives (Score:2, Insightful)
That might all have changed and it might be perfectly safe to use
Re: (Score:2)
Bit rot is not a problem anymore thanks to checksumming filesystems like Btrfs, HAMMER, ReFS, and ZFS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
I got to admit the old man in me just doesn't want to trust anything to a hard disk or flash storage. If it works it works though but if I had something I wanted to save for a long period of time I'd still want archival quality discs...
Re: (Score:2)
Nowadays, people just buy a NAS and store everything on it.
I used to burn CDs and DVDs, but years after I realized some of them didn't age that well. With hard disks/SSDs, checksums, and backups, you can know you data is still intact.
But SSD will soon replace hard disks for data storage IMO given the price of current non shingled models.
Re: (Score:2)
A NAS is probably a good solution, but that isn't the be-all and end-all. You really need a NAS, a NAS that handles the first NAS's backups, and a third place for data that is offline, perhaps another that is offsite, so you can get 3-2-1-1-0 tier backups. This way, if one's house burns down, the data is still available. Every 5-10 years, replace the primary and backup NAS because hard disks are mechanical items and will die, and SSDs are not yet proven for long term archiving.
What would be ideal would b
Re: I just don't think of disk drives (Score:2)
You don't need all of that.
All you need is a single NAS with raid, and an extra blank. Once a month you rotate one of the drives out and move it to a fire safe, or off site if ultra paranoid. Scale solution to appropriate drive number depending on RAID. There is no need to do anything more than this
Re: (Score:2)
This is totally incorrect.
RAID is NOT a backup.
Rotating a drive does nothing other than degrade the RAID array for a bit.
You need to have the ENTIRE NAS backked up to a drive separate from itself. You cant use its own discs as they are NOT COPIES and are NOT SWAPPABLE.
RAID is a method to use multiple discs to avoid a single discs death wiping all the data. It does nothing to stop the NAS from dyeing nor will swapping a disc around do anything to save a NAS. Thats why you, if you are doing it right, have
Re: (Score:3)
NAS help mitigate HDD failure, but unless you have a second NAS to backup the first you can end up with an unreadable collection of discs thanks to the death of the NAS PSU or motherboard.
Luckily many NAS use Linux so would be using MD for the RAID so if you cross your fingers a collection of drives from a dead NAS should work in a Linux PC or another NAS.
I have my live data on external USB HDD's. These are backed up to the NAS. If a HDD fails, the NAS has the files. If the NAS fails, I get another and c
Re: (Score:2)
And the older and more worn out it is, the faster that happens.
A flash chip that is badly worn can lose data within days.
Also simply plugging in a SSD or flash drive, SD card etc isnt enough as many devices are not programmed with firmware that will "auto refresh" discharging cells. Instead they will try to use error correction when they encounter a bad cell and then will re-write the recovered data to a fresh cell and mark the old one for erasure, or at least add it to the pool of cells to be re-used. If
Re: (Score:2)
Bit rot is definitely a problem. Even using a checksumming filesystem, you can tell if your data is gone... but the data is still gone. If you want to go on an archive basis, you can use WinRAR or PAR2 with recovery records, which might be able to repair damage, provided the ECC records can cover it. However, when flash media goes, it tends to hard-fail, unlike hard drives where you can recover around bad sectors.
Flash media also is unknown for long term storage. Once enough electrons leave the NAND gat
Re: (Score:2)
To store and forget, yes bit rot is still a problem.
I should have clarified how: with drives in current use (in a computer or a NAS) and with backups. Then a regular scrub finds any bit rot and allows correcting it from the backup.
I do use PAR2 for archive files (which I use to reduce the number of files) as those have a higher chance of getting corrupt.
10 or 20 years is plenty if you have migration (Score:3)
... if you were expecting to relive some family moments in your '50s or '60s you're probably going to come back and find bit rot has destroyed those. There are archival quality burnable discs that should theoretically last decades and decades. And I've got stuff from 20 years ago on cheap CDR that reads just fine ...
10 or 20 years is plenty if you have a migration plan. Some variations on:
diskette => HD => QIC-80 => CD-R => DVD-R => BD-R.
Plus its on an exernal HD and flash drives. Multiple copies on multiple media for safety. Losing optical increases risks.
Re: (Score:2)
if storage was increasing it monumental rates I don't think I'd care about having to go back and move everything around every 10 years because I'd be moving it to increasingly smaller storage mediums that were easier and faster to use but that just doesn't seem to happen anymore. A four terabyte SSD is going to set you back $250 dollars. But if you're a videographer I'm willing to bet you're
Super 8 film for archival purposes (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Well it's a proven medium. Still preserving culture in valuts to this day!
Although I'd say go for 35mm or 16mm.
Re: 10 or 20 years is plenty if you have migration (Score:2)
I have some DDS-4 tapes from the late 1990s that I can still read perfectly fine over 25 years later. Same for the older DDS-2. The capacities are small by today's standards, though . 20GB for DDS-4. But I don't think anything comes close to tape for long term storage, still.
Unfortunately, the price of current tape drives and tapes is so high that they are no longer in use in homes and probably small businesses either.
They are also an offline media and not suitable for video playback.
Most of the floppies fr
Re: (Score:2)
Where I work I'm migrating all the tapes to newer generations.
I have evrything from DDS (thats DDS 1) to LTO 4. I'm currently moving the DDS tapes to spare LTO 4's, then once I've done them I'll move the LTO1 and 2's upwards. Especially the LTO1 tapes as I only have 1 drive that can read those, I have several LTO4s.
Soon I'll order an LTO 8 drive and move everything over.
During this migration I have had only two DDS tapes that had an "issue". Neither stopped the rest of the data being read. I had 1 tape th
Re: (Score:2)
I just use multiple NAS in different sites TrueNAS uses ZFS, I'm not worried. They are all at least triple redundant.
Re: (Score:2)
What's the next step now that BDR production is ending?
Removable disks like floppies and optical discs have the big advantage that the reader can be replaced if it fails. SSDs usually encrypt the stored data, so even if you could extract the flash chips you likely wouldn't be able to use the data. HDDs are little better.
There is LTO, but the tape drives are a pain to use. Mostly SAS only, loud, can't be played back directly.
Re: (Score:2)
I've ruled out USB powered external HD (2.5"). They don't seem to do well when unused for a year or more. Getting an external enclosure with its own power supply, drop in a decent NAS internal HD (3.5") and that seems far more likely to survive.
Maybe flash drives, but migrate more frequently. Like optical discs, flash drives can be tossed into an existing bank safe depot box for offsite backup.
Build a dedicated f
Re: (Score:2)
> What's the next step now that BDR production is ending?
Buy BD-R from another company??
Sony stopping production is hadly going to make a difference, most BD-R discs arnt made by sony!
Re: (Score:2)
> Losing optical increases risks
Luckily we are far from that point.
It's only Sony pulling out. They didnt sell much in the first place as everyone thought they were too expensive so we all bought just as good but cheaper options like Verbatim.
Even Verbatim discs are not made by Verbatim any more.
Re: (Score:2)
Note that the optical discs that are mass-produced and sold commercially with games/movies/music etc on them are made with completely different processes (usually mechanical pressing) than the disc burning you'd do at home, and they last much longer as a result. I've had A LOT of burned CDs and DVDs fail from disc rot [minitool.com] in less than a decade, so I stopped relying on them and copied all the data I was storing on them to a live HDD with an offline HDD backup. I would not trust any home-written optical media les
Re:I just don't think of disk drives (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think you can say the same about disk drives and SSDs. Which means that you basically got to move everything to a different storage medium every 10 to 20 years. It doesn't sound like much but when you actually sit down to do it with how storage isn't really increasing much these days it would get miserable fast
Re: I just don't think of disk drives (Score:2)
There is no such thing as long term safe cold storage for consumers. Recorded BDs degrade after 5 years. What most people do for data they actually care about is keep it in *online storage* in RAID, then periodically swap one of the drives for a fresh one and put the other one off site
Re: (Score:2)
> Recorded BDs degrade after 5 years
No they don’t. Not even my 14 year old LTH disc is THAT bad and all the HTL discs wipe the floor with the LTH one.
Every BD-R I scan has a BIS and LDC average way below the maximum levels before an unrecoverable error would be met.
As they have hardly changed at all, apart from the LTH type disc which is the only optical disc of any type I have ever seen that changes at that speed, all my BD-R, barring accidental damage or loss, will last decades.
You probably got
Re: (Score:2)
I have stuff on KAO Gold CD-Rs burned in '94 (on my 2x Smart and Friendly burner imported from Japan) that still plays fine today.
Re: (Score:2)
Heh, I just got 14gigs for $189 a few weeks ago so yeah, storage is super cheap.
Re: Actually surprised (Score:2)
You might have been ripped off
Re: (Score:2)
Well theres a big difference between backup and archival. SSD and flash drives are prone to damage in ways that dont make them great for archival a decade later. We dont really have a fantastic long term media besides M-DISC and that claim may or may not be the 100yrs they claim. It needs to be impervious from electrical or static electrical; EMP-like exposures; near lightening hits; heat up to 150deg F; and basic material decay. I fear that the longer we go with powered storage replacing everything older,
Re: (Score:2)
Surprisingly enough, I still use Blu-Ray disks. A lot of documents I have are not that large, so a 25-50 GB BD-R or BDXL disk will cover the critical stuff.
The advantage that BD-R provides is simple. A long term archive format that stores the bits physically... not in gates, not in magnetic domains, but done right, can stay readable a long time.
Wish someone can make a higher capacity optical format. It isn't like technology hasn't improved since then, be it multiple layers, different ways to lay down bit
Re: (Score:2)
I too archive my stuff to BD-R.
> A lot of documents I have are not that large
I'm dreading the day I find documents that are over 200MB in size
Re: (Score:2)
MicroSD is crap. Used for data transfer and temporary storage it works fine. YMMV terribly when it comes to the actual quality.
They also have no R/W protection and are designed not to be manhandled much. They are small (physically) so they can fit slimly into thinner devices, another benefit but it tends to make them pathetic as something a human with fat fingers is expected to insert and remove frequently. Thus MicroSD is used and aimed at those wanting to put one in the phone *for a few years*.
Full siz
Re: Actually surprised (Score:2)
You have too much time on your hands. Why are you trying to convince me? I don't GAF what you do. OP asked a question, I answered it, end of story.
Re: (Score:2)
Er... not sure what rock you live under but its nearly impossible to justify the hassle and PITA of dealing with disks when you can buy SSD or MicroSD storage for around $50 / TB and under. It is simply not worth dealing with BD, even if you do like to archive at home.
Even when you want to deal with disks there really isn't a use case for Bluray over DVD. DVDs are cheaper and if you're dealing with files in excess of 4.7 GB you really should reconsider the type of removable media you're using (as you've said, solid state is better or tape if you need it to last). You generally go with optical disks when you want cheap and durable portability, emphasis on the cheap as it's mostly for mass distribution. Plus almost everyone has a DVD player, I've never owned a Bluray playe
Re: (Score:2)
Flash devices are explicitly not archival.
Neither are CDs, DVDs, and Blurays, as anyone who has tried to play back their music collection from 20 years ago can tell you.
Re: (Score:2)
> Neither are CDs, DVDs, and Blurays, as anyone who has tried to play back their music collection from 20 years ago can tell you.
Those are all established archival media types. Besides tape there is nothing else.
I have never seen any recorded optical media that has failed. None. Over 30 years of using computers (PC architecture since 1994 ish and others before that but they only hate tapes) at home, in university and through my IT career I have seen HDD's, flash devices later on of all types just drop
Re: (Score:2)
Won't the RIAA or some such SWAT you for even thinking about music that old? Let alone advertising it?
Sorry - I just did a mental calculation, and it's 30 years since I threw my music collection (on tape cassettes, if you remember them) not the 20 years I guessed. Should I make my way to the RIAA gallows now?
Re: Actually surprised (Score:3, Informative)
Who wants to deal with bluray in 2024? Storage at home is essentially free. You'll get a 50TB nas for a couples thousand bucks for the at gome production. And if you are serious about your home video that is cheaper than your cameras, lenses, mics, etc.
To distribute, there are plenty if solutions from youtube, daily motion etc if you want to go cloud to private solutions like owncloud that are pretty simple to deploy nowadays. That could also run off your owncloud.
Archival storage in the cloud is also essen
Re: Actually surprised (Score:4, Interesting)
Storage at home is essentially free. You'll get a 50TB nas for a couples thousand bucks for the at gome production.
Read that again. Now read this [usatoday.com].
What you just stated is the equivalent of Zuckerberg telling you to buy an island in the Caribbean so you can go on vacation.
Re: (Score:2)
I think you are misunderstanding my point. A 50TB system is massively overkill and it's only about 2000 bucks.
Meanwhile the hardware and software used for home video is going to be more than that.
Re: (Score:2)
Nobody cares about the poor. If the poor were worth anything, they would not be poor. See how that works?
*sigh*
Re: (Score:3)
>Archival storage in the cloud is also essentially free. The 12-hour retrieval option on amazon which is the cheapest they have is at 0.09 cent per GB/month. also known as $1 per GB for 100 years. It's essentially free.
Until they discontinue that service and you lose most of your stuff because you can't transfer it to another service (or local) fast enough.
Re: (Score:2)
Storage at home is essentially free. You'll get a 50TB nas for a couples thousand bucks for the at gome production.
You and I have very different ideas of what "essentially free" means. A couple thousand bucks is most definitely not free. I think you're compensating for something with that notion of "free".
Re: (Score:2)
I think you misread me. a 50TB nas is massively overkill. Only the most hardcore hobbyist would have a system like that. And these systems are cheap compared to everything else that a serious hobbyist would get.
A mid range DSLR is already over a thousand bucks. You'd need lenses, probably mics, a computer to do editing. These are expensive! Your godamn iphone is over $1000.
Storage is essentially free nowadays.
Re: (Score:2)
If you buy a consumer NAS and it dies, what are the chances of recovering that data?
Also a NAS is not a backup.
As for the cost, my phone which can be bought for about 500 Euro produced over 1TB of data on my last trip, and I don't even record that much video.
Re: (Score:2)
What is the 0.09 cent/GB/moment offer from Amazon? I had a look at their cloud storage options and they all seem to be 100x that price.
Re: Actually surprised (Score:2)
that is the glacier 12 hour price.
That is to say, data is stored on tape. if you need the data, it takes 12 hours for them to make it available to you. It is useless for data you need to access. But it is the perfect solution for long term offsite backups.
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks. I found it, it's not bad. A bit cheaper than my current instant access cloud storage.
Re: (Score:2)
Prices on Amazon Glacier Deep archive can vary depending on region.
Note you are also charged (greatly) for "re-hydrating" the data from Deep Archive to a tier that allows access like an S3 bucket. I use Deep Archive and NEVER intend on ever retriving anything at all unless all my other safeguards have failed and it is the only thing I have left.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, looking at it I don't think it's worth the small saving. Having instant access and no bandwidth fees is much more practical. I can use Duplicati to manage backups, and can regularly test them.
Re: (Score:2)
> Who wants to deal with bluray in 2024?
Those like me who want to keep my data till I die and beyond. Like family members beforem me, when I go my surviving family will find preserved videos and photos of all members of many ages and times. Like me with my granddads reel to reel tapes, with just a little care investment and slight technical capability, they wont have any trouble reading those discs with a working drive.
> Storage at home is essentially free
Yes because I use BD-R which is cheaper than
Re: (Score:2)
Or something. With 16 TB thumb drives being under ten bucks, who the hell needs recordable blu-rays?
Re: (Score:2)
Or something. With 16 TB thumb drives being under ten bucks, who the hell needs recordable blu-rays?
Where can you find those?
Re: (Score:2)
You can get a Cadillac for $2K on Temu too. :)
I did recently make a 2TB pocket drive from an SSD for just over $100 though, 10 Gbps USB.
I still rely on 14TB spinning rust for ZFS mirroring, though, for photos and home video.
Seriously if anybody knows how to put 20 4TB SSD's inside a PC case, LMK. The demand on PCI lanes vs SATA doesn't seem to favor nvme yet.
Re: (Score:2)
I think you mean 16 GB drives
Also, if you do a cost comparison you find the 16GB flash drive is insanely more expensive than a 25GB single layer bluray!
If you are going to KEEP that flash drive and re-use it then that’s fine as the cost is reduced the more it is used (assuming it don’t die on a shelf like many of mine have) but the second you think of giving such expensive items away regularly you find it way cheaper to burn a dvd or a bluray and that includes even having to buy a usb external d
Re: (Score:2)
People want to say "Hey Google / Siri / Alexa" and stream the movies. They don't want to buy a disc and rip it to their NAS. I mean I and a hundred other people on /. do exactly that, but when I talk about it to normal people they think it's a weird hobby of mine.
Sony would know best where their revenue comes from. If we're not buying discs, then they are not going to make them. With the added benefit that licensing multiple streaming services is likely much more lucrative for a big IP owner like Sony.
Re: (Score:2)
> People want to say "Hey Google / Siri / Alexa" and stream the movies. They don't want to buy a disc and rip it to their NAS
Incorrect. I'm people and google/alexa/siri are banned in my house. I buy all my stuff on physical as most of it isn’t anywhere to be found on streaming services.
Tell me where I can watch the workprint, or international cut of Blade Runner in 2024? I'll tell you, on the DVD or BD collectors releases.
Tell me where I can watch Acorn Antiques, a 1980's Victoria Wood comedy, or
Well it was missing automation (Score:2)
It might have had a chance, if there was some sort of automation. If they would have pushed 100x changers, it would have had a serious chance if the costs were below harddisks. The cost of having to have a person swapping disks by far outweighs any potential cost benefit of an optical medium.
I mean there was a time when Sony made CD-Jukeboxes. Why not use that technology for Bluray writers? I mean Sony even made a Bluray-Changer for playing movies. Why didn't they market (almost) the same device with a Blur
Re: (Score:2)
I put it down to three things:
- General consumers are typically very ignorant about the options available and the pros and cons of each.
- Such consumers make decisions based on what is offered to them and what they see available on the shelves.
- Most consumers tend to be sold on what is more convenient, vs what makes more sense or what is safer for the data.
Basically this means that most consumers have totally no idea how vulnerable their data is, nor how optical media will mitigate much of that.
They have n
Re: (Score:2)
Bittorrent is dead now...
In some countries you have to go out of your way to use it with VPN's etc, which are likely soon to be regulated too.
Then there is the paradox that you say physical media died for you when bitorrent was a thing yet bottorrent has no storage capacity at all. and files appear and vanish without a trace all the time. When I could use bittorrent in the UK, back when it was a thing over 10 years back (nobody I know uses it anymore, it's remembered like limewire is) the biggest proble wa
Re: (Score:2)
> Flash-based storage is the norm for home video at this point
Not here it isnt. Too small, too expensive and in the case of my famly members if I gave them a flash drive with an mp4 on it they have no way to play it as they have nothing with a USB port to play it on. No they are not old fogies, they are my 30 something year old cousins who are not affulent enough to have flashy new TV's with USB etc, they have what they have and only recently have they started having good enough wifi for streaming on a
Re: (Score:2)
I've been very pleased to find that if I look carefully, to make sure I'm usin the correct service and paper options, that photo labs still expose images onto silver hailide paper as they always have.
Incredibly stable, although their life shortens in in bright light all the time, such prints will last decades. If they could offer selenium toning etc that can easily go above 100 years as we already know.
I honestly thought that all photo printing services were inkjet or dyesublimation. I was really pleased
Capacity too small (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Too slow to write.
Re: (Score:2)
What the hell has that got to do with the price of bread?
How the hell does a bluray writer, even one that has 1TB discs, happen to stop you doing anything?
Gone are the days where you dared not move the mouse of a PC burning a CD-R lest you end up with a buffer underrun and a coaster. Writers have been "burn proof" for decades and bandwidth to and from IO devices is so high that it makes no issue. I leave my bluray writer burning 25 GB to a slow BD-RE disc for two hours and simply just forget about it whil
Re: (Score:2)
As the saying used to go, shortly before Eternal September, "don't underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 full of AOL floppies".
Re: (Score:2)
I've got a couple of terabytes backed up on Blu-ray discs. It took a while. Considered tape but you need SAS and a 5.25" bay, unless you get really lucky with a USB one.
I've got about 5TB in the cloud too, but want a local backup. HDDs are okay but I'm not convinced they will last when sat on the shelf. I mean they might still work, but the data might not be readable.
Re: (Score:2)
> unless you get really lucky with a USB one.
Use a SAS external.
Re: (Score:2)
I did look at that, but the SAS enclosures are not cheap. It might be worth the investment, but I'm not sure. HDD prices are falling and they keep getting bigger, where as LTO seems to retain its value and the drives can't use future higher capacity tapes. Cloud storage is getting cheaper too, and has the advantage of being off-site and infinitely expandable.
Too slow! (Score:2)
Also, too slow. :(
Re: (Score:2)
How does that stop you picking your nose?
or walking the dog?
Or watching GoT?
It doesnt. The miracle of multi-threaded multi-core systems these days is you can do things in parallel
Re: (Score:2)
I pick my nose no matter what! I don't have a dog and couldn't get into GoT, I hate waiting!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I do both. ;)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, Blu-Ray recordable only goes up to 100GB or so. And it's really expensive. You can get a 25GB BD-R for maybe $5 or so. If you want a 50GB dual layer BD-R, the price jumps to over $10. I can't imagine what a 100GB disc would cost, probably $25 or more.
At that price level, if you need to store that data for transport, a 128GB thumbdrive would be cheaper.
And at this point, there isn't much data users have that need a lot of storage - at most it would be video, and at full proper quality at 25GB disc can
Re: (Score:2)
> At that price level, if you need to store that data for transport, a 128GB thumbdrive would be cheaper
No it isnt. Flash is way more expensive than BD-R DL.
Lets do the maths.
128GB flash drive = £28.99 or how lucky: £9.99 today as it's Prime day.
BD-R DL (50GB) = £40.29 for 10. TEN. Thats 500 effing GB!.
Each BD-R DL = £4, and you need 2.5 of them for 128GB so £10 for the lot. So HALF the price of a 128GB flash drive and only due to PRIME day can that flash drive meet that
Re: (Score:2)
Very few people have that much data. Even I, a hoarder of all sorts of things dont produce that much as I curate it heavily.
I use BD-R DL discs that store 50GB each and I burn to those once every few months. They are the archive that will outlast me and what my family will inherit after I'm gone, just like how I aquired my granddads reel to reel tapes 7 years ago.
Ano no, they wont have any isse accessing them. By the time I'm gne there will still be a large healthy market for devices that can read such di
The progression of archival storage (Score:3)
It's interesting to look at the progression of storage media that everyone thought would be perfect for long-term archiving. How many of these technologies still survive and is the hardware still made for it today? Every time a new technology rises to the top, it's eventually surpassed by something else. Are any of them completely bullet proof i.e. they will still be readable in 10, 20, 50 years or more from now?
Hats off to Colorado drives and 3M tape (Score:2)
I also use external USB HD, they seem far less reliable than internal HD. And I use flash drives as well, haven't had problems with these yet.
Interestingly, I use external USB HD and flash drives like I used floppy dis
Re: (Score:2)
CDs were first released in the 1980s, with data discs standardized around 88/89, I forget exactly which year. Anyway, 35 years later you can still buy brand new drives to read those discs, and they probably aren't going away for many years yet.
Re: (Score:2)
> How many of these technologies still survive and is the hardware still made for it today?
It's actually quite a few. In fact very few common and popular formats will pose too many issues for people to access today. BUT, you have to have a technical mind. Dont expect a non geeky person to have the remotest chance of configuring a GoTek to work with an Amstrad PCW word processor to copy word processed files off 3" discs ontro a flash drive without learning a bit about the PCW machine, without having some
They never wanted us to have R/W capability here. (Score:3, Informative)
First came the Compact Disk . . . only, no, that's not really true. Anybody here ever heard of Digital Audio Tape, or DAT? 80dB dynamic range, and a digital format so zero crosstalk, thd, platter rumble, wow, flutter, . . . but it was RW and CD's (which cost more to adopt than updating existing tape/cassette technology) were initially RO. CD's didn't appear in an R/W form until DAT was safely and totally dead.
Then came the whole HDDTV/Blu-Ray contest. The only reason there was ever a writable Blu-Ray disk was so that Sony could make sure HDDTV disks didn't become the standard (you know, like VHS did over Betamax). Once that was done, Sony had to deal with the concept of people pirating their Blu-Ray properties (because a compatible medium to write your rips is always a nice thing). Now that Sony's embraced the optical disk as a R/W medium and extended the optical disk as a R/W medium and ensured that there's no pesky HDDTV standard to upset their applecart, they'll extinguish it.
Not to worry - it's all available streaming on the intarweb. And, by the way, this is the SUPER-condensed version of this story. As someone who has been in the industry these past four decades, there's a lot more story to tell. This'll do for the Reader's Digest version. Suffice it to say that Sony is the reason we can't have nice things.
Re:They never wanted us to have R/W capability her (Score:5, Insightful)
[defeat lameness filter] ^^^^ This. a thousand times, this ^^^^
Re: (Score:2)
Suffice it to say that Sony is the reason we can't have nice things.
[defeat lameness filter] ^^^^ This. a thousand times, this ^^^^
This.
Sony killed their own format by locking it up so much. They deliberately made it worse than DVD, so much so that computers continued to come with DVD writers until they fell out of favour and were gotten rid of.
So now they're killing off bluray to no fanfare what so ever... nothing of value was lost.
Re: (Score:2)
DAT lost to CD for two reasons. First it wasn't as good, you couldn't skip tracks instantly and because it required physical contact with the read head the tapes wore out or could get chewed up. Contactless laser as more reliable and convenient.
Secondly it was Sony proprietary tech. To succeed CDs had to be fairly open to competitors. Same thing happened with VHS and Betamax.
Piracy was never a big issue with BDRs, because the format included copy protection. Of course it could be cracked, but you couldn't s
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
When they demonstrated the first CD's against DAT it was no contest. The DAT tape had to wind to the tracks, the CD jumped to them.
The audience was convinced soley on that.
Outside of the US DAT and DCC didnt even really appear, like 8 track tapes. Never seen them in the UK.
Delay Lines (Score:2)
As long as there is M-DISC or something similar (Score:4, Informative)
Archivists need something that can be widely read. Most M-DISC [wikipedia.org] BluRay disks can be read by most players made since 2011.
According to that Wikipedia article, at least one company - not Sony - is still making M-DISC media.
Personally, I'm hoping something more stable than today's solid-state media comes along close-to-mass-market prices. I'd love to have something on a chip that will still be readable even if its left alone on a shelf for centuries.
Re: (Score:2)
Verbatim were making M-DISC, although that would be the company that owns Verbatims tech MCC. Many think that Verbatim M-DISCS are now rebranded MABL BD-R's, whether that means there is little difference between an M-DISC BD-R and a HTL BD-R is anyones guess.
I use MABL Verbatim for my archives.
Ritek also make M-DIsc BD-R and are the only other compan to do so. Such discs can be ordered from Amazon.de and Amazon.jp, never seen them on Amazon.co.uk or amazon.com
You will own nothing. (Score:4, Funny)
And you will LIKE IT!
Re: (Score:2)
We will like it. The whole reason production is stopping is because they simply weren't selling. Other than myself I don't know a single person who has burnt a bluray and even then I threw away my bluray writer 5 years ago.
No one cares, evidently, and those that do care use NASes and don't screw around with discs.
A terrible loss (Score:2)
Interesting (Score:2)
Who cares? It's Sony. (Score:5, Informative)
Sony has always massively overpriced their BD-R discs, presumably under the assumption that the only reason anybody buys them is to make a de-DRMed copy of commercial Blu-Ray movies, in hopes of recovering those losses.
A 3-pack of Sony 25 GB 6x BD-R discs costs $20 at Amazon. Meanwhile, a 50-pack of 16X Verbatim BD-R discs costs $41. Per disc, that means each Sony BD-R disc cost as much as 8.13 Verbatim BD-R discs with the exact same capacity and almost 3 times the write speed. Or in terms of write performance per unit time, as much as 26 Verbatim BD-R discs. Yeah, the Verbatim discs don't come with a case, but cases don't make an 82-cent BD-R disc worth almost $7 unless they're covered in gold leaf and laser-engraved.
Fortunately, there are a lot of other companies [blu-raydisc.info] that make Blu-Ray media. Sony's exit from the market is about as important to that market as Fisker's exit from the car market.
Don't let the door hit you in the a** on your way out, Sony. If you had priced your products reasonably instead of trying to price gouge from day one, you might still be in the market.
Re: (Score:2)
The Sony and Verbatim discs are not comparable at all. The Verbatim ones are normal discs and won't last a particularly long time. The Sony ones are their archival grade discs that are supposed to last 50 years. They are sold to people who want to keep their home movies and other data for the long term.
That said I pay about 1 Euro each for 100GB ones when they are discounted, so shop around a bit. Verbatim make some similar "archival" discs for about the same price. One easy way to quickly tell what you are
Re: (Score:2)
Depends what Verbatim disc you get. I use the MABL discs which are the equivalient to Sony's copper alloy discs.