Sony To End Blu-ray Media Production After 18 Years (tomshardware.com) 25
Sony will cease production of recordable Blu-ray discs at its last factory in February, ending an 18-year manufacturing run amid declining demand for physical media. The Japanese electronics giant will also halt production of MiniDiscs and MiniDV cassettes. The company had already stopped making consumer recordable Blu-ray and optical disks in mid-2024, maintaining production only for business clients.
write a single F to a 100G disc (Score:4, Insightful)
respects to optical media.
Just a personal thing, but I think optical media tech is really really cool, and the engineering is really fun. It's a bit of a shame to see it fall by the wayside but such is life. Blu-ray passed me by.
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I'm actually a little surprised though how little demand there is given how many people do home videos but I guess people just throw it up on YouTube and make it private. Easier and cheaper
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Meanwhile I have a 16TB enterprise-grade HDD in an external enclosure that I use for my periodic system backups. It writes faster than writing to an optical disc, and I can set the backup process running and go do something else until it's done.
The only other viabl
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The thing that seems to be missing is a really permanent storage tech. When CDs first came out, it seemed like this might be it, a permanent archival technology. Apparently, the CDs (and later DVDs) turned out not to be so permanent. Now, tape seems to be considered the best but, as you say, it's expensive and not for the home user.
There's two parts to the archiving issue. One, something that doesn't degrade, and second, something where equipment to read the stuff will still be around. Imagine finding
Re: write a single F to a 100G disc (Score:2)
Archival optical can last longer than tape, and also longer than tape drives, but it's expensive and the capacity hasn't kept up with main storage.
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Archival Blu-ray is actually one of the best options for consumers. Tape is expensive and needs SAS, nothing else comes close for durability.
Solid state won. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Solid state won. (Score:5, Insightful)
Now go put that memory card in a box and forget about it for five years. It might still be readable, but it might not.
But to be fair, if you put some data on a really low-quality CD-R, it might not be be readable after one year.
Because they are immutable - different use cases (Score:3)
You can get 1.5TB now on a fingernail sized memory card. Why keep bothering with discs that take ages to burn and only can carry 0.05TB? Yes you have sentimental feelings for your 80s Betamaxes from Sony, but the world moved on.
Optical can't beat flash for what flash is designed for. However, I greatly prefer immutable backups, like optical media. In fairness, in reality, I am lazy and just store my data across 3 cloud services...and run time machine on some external disks every once in awhile out of paranoia in case anything goes wrong with the cloud. However, if some malicious POS got access to my machine and those 3 services, they could wipe out everything and I am at the mercy of the cloud services to look for a backup. A
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While recordable bluray media never got exactly cheap like DVD and CD media did.
It still is roughly half the cost in dollars per unit of storage vs SD cards [varies a bit depending on capacity of the individual cards]. A 25GB disk is still a good chunk of capacity. With compression that is big enough to distribute a VM image on, mass market video game, movie (obviously), it will store a lot of family photo and cell phone video.
The real issue is neither the typical stack of recordable disks nor flash media
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3M branded
Do you mean Imation? I found their CD-Rs to be pretty reliable back in the day.
Looks like they were spun off from 3M in 1996, then in 2017 changed their name to Glassbridge [wikipedia.org], sold off the Imation brand to a Korean company, and became an "asset management" company.
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No I mean really old disks like this
http://www.toshis.net/hificdrs... [toshis.net]
I had a number of these that were the very first CD-Rs I ever recorded and I think I have yet to find any of the ones still around that would not read when tried.
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Back in the day one of my jobs was to torture test every brand in CD-R robots and the only reliable brand was Mitsui. IIRC we even had to specify the ones make in Japan, not China.
IIRC Ritek was behind them but still leagues above all the others.
The "Staples Brands" were all very unreliable.
After that I 'invented' a way to securely send the data over our pair of T1's because that was more reliable than CD-R.
I said developed, the patent attorney was sure it was an invention. Whatever, VPN's came along a few
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You not solving the correct problem. The question isn't $/TB the question is $ absolute for an application. A movie doesn't take 1.5TB, and no you can't manufacture a fingernail sized memory card for $2.50 (the actual cost of a low volume production run of 1000 bluray discs complete with pressing, image printing, casing and shrink-wrapping).
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Found the guy who's never heard of bit rot.
Archive-rated storage technology exists for a reason, whether you know the reasons or not.
RTFS, this is only for Sony-brand BD-Rs (Score:5, Informative)
It's amazing how many people over there didn't read the part that this was about Sony's recordable Blu-Ray disc factory. They were lamenting a streaming-only future from news that one brand of BD-R discs is going away! (To be fair, they had the same crappy headline.)
This is neither the end of Blu-Ray, nor the end of BD-R, as there are other companies still making them. According to TFA, Pioneer is still fine with BD-R.
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Posted by msmash on Fri 24 Jan 10:49AM from the end-of-an-era dept.
It's almost like the editor didn't read the summary before posting it either.
Makes financial sense (Score:2)
For a behemoth like sony, the profits of manufacturing and selling BD-R is chump change that falls between the cushions of the sofa. It also takes Management focus away of more strategic/profitable areas. Better use the resourses elsewhere.
The same profit ammount for a smaller company would be equiparable to striking gold and diamond on the same mine and the same veins.
So, do not worry, we will still be able to buy BD-R disks, players and burners, just not from Sony, but from smaller/more niche makers.
We Need a Read Only Media (Score:1)
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Where's those HVDs? (Score:2)