Sony, Panasonic Reveal "Archival Disc," 300GB to 1TB Optical Disc
- Thread starter Alex Co
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Uhm did I understand something wrong? The whole description of the discs sounds to me like they are for archiving purposes so companies can backup their data without risk of the backup medium dying. For day to day purposes this sounds rather impracticable, with them having two active sides and all.
True but a lot can change with technology in what 8-10 years of a console life cycle. That said I imagine consoles are going to go more and more towards the download model since they are already rely on it quite a lot for patches and the like.rofltehcat said:
Nope. It's meant to replace Blu-ray.rofltehcat said:
It's the actual terminology and the name "Archival" that's kinda confusing here. By "long-term" storage, it means the same as Blu-rays "Optical discs have excellent properties to protect themselves against the environment, such as dust-resistance and water-resistance, and can also withstand changes in temperature and humidity when stored." Interesting bit here is the "inter-generational compatibility between different formats" line. I highly doubt that's going to happen. Maybe a player that can read 300GB to 1TB discs? But cross-gen players like say, DVD to Blu-ray? That's not happening since it's a good way for companies to force people to upgrade.
Sure... except optical drives are the least reliable data mediums since floppy and still very expensive, also I can only imagine Sony will twist everyone's balls with licensing if they want to use it, none of which would make me replace the extremely cheap and far more reliable magnetic tapes any time soon.
The way they keep on updating formats and never state the life expectancy of their disk formats I'm disinclined to invest in any "new format" disk as an archival system. As stated above, mag tape is still the gold standard and movement to digital distribution makes needing large capacity physical media less and less of a requirement.
Streaming media will become a more widely-accepted option than digital downloads as long as games keep taking up more and more space and physical media continues to inflate their prices alongside inflating capacity. Not only is there the download restrictions, but you still have to download to a physical drive; as long as download speeds get faster, it'll be simply easiest to stream games and movies as the digital option.hakkarin said:
I have the lowest data package my ISP offers and it's unlimited broadband. Guessing you have one of those shitty ISPs that prices unlimited broadband highly/doesn't even offer it?hakkarin said:
OT: The real question is, how durable are they? I haven't messed with Blu-Rays at all, gave up on optical discs after DVDs, when I lost tons of data to corrupted discs. I could certainly see a use for a disc that big, especially for business use, but in business, you don't want to lose your data to shitty optical discs.
Blue-ray players read DVDs and CDs, I assume that "inter-generational compatibility" means that the new ones will read all those formats as well as the new one.Alex Co said:Nope. It's meant to replace Blu-ray.rofltehcat said:
Interesting bit here is the "inter-generational compatibility between different formats" line. I highly doubt that's going to happen. Maybe a player that can read 300GB to 1TB discs? But cross-gen players like say, DVD to Blu-ray? That's not happening since it's a good way for companies to force people to upgrade.
First post saying what I came to say. This won't be for rapid playback.rofltehcat said:
Likewise, assuming these disks cost more to produce there's not really any reason for movies to change to this. We're more likely to see the death of physical media at all than an upgrade to this. The reason I say that is that HD Bluray movies like Avatar took around 8 GBs. TV resolutions would have to shoot well past 4k before we'd even come close to hitting the 25GB single Bluray disk layer. The reason DVD and Bluray formats succeeded was because they made sense. DVDs held 4GB on a single layer.
Games are not a large enough industry to push a format. Especially not with HDD storage being a thing and multiple disks being an option that our industry has already used.
Exactly, it would be terrible for playback.JayDeth said:
The term Archival isn't an accident. It's for long-term storage, not regular playback.
While that's nice where you live, no ISP in the United States offers unlimited bandwidth on the lowest package at all. They either a) don't offer it at all or b) offer it when paying for the highest Internet package. Plus, companies will always use physical media for back-up storage as it's usually cheaper (companies get deals in bulk) and because if where-ever they were digitally storing the data were to fail (which can happen) they will have a physical back-up.Vrach said:
As for Bluray, I think you are grossly underestimating how durable a Bluray disc is, as they last way longer than optical DVDs. Hell at my job they still had floppy discs for some backups.
See, I find that odd as fuck. I live in Serbia, which is practically a third world country compared to America, so why we'd have better options there is beyond me. We had the limited internet packages before, we might still do (I imagine it's a trade off, getting higher speeds if you accept a limit, but I'm perfectly happy with 10 Mpbs at the lowest package), but I don't think there was ever a situation, at least with the cable companies, where unlimited bandwidth wasn't on the table.Neronium said:
And I wasn't suggesting companies wouldn't keep physical copies, but as far as I know, they tend to use backup HDDs, rather than optical discs.
Remember though, it all comes down to money and greed. I have the highest package my ISP provides and my connection is capped at 5 Mbps because of it, my bandwidth capping at around 200 GB a month. However, at my college where they've made their own Internet servers the maximum speed and cap is 25 Mbps with unlimited bandwidth (and it's free if you register on campus). So the companies can offer better, but won't do it because they'll not make as much money. The biggest ISPs in the US are Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, and Cox Digital; those companies have basically an Oligopoly over the entire nation and have been lobbying against Net Neutrality as well as lobbying for bills to pass to stop the spread of Fibre optics around the nation. It's why Google's Fibre optics service, which is marginally cheaper and better than anything any other ISP offers is only in a few small areas.Vrach said:
Ah my mistake, I apologize. Mainly because I see people at times saying how companies shouldn't be using physical backups at all and should store all backup data digitally only. As for using HDDs, if this disc is cheaper than HDDs then I can see companies using them more to save on space and cost. At my job, we don't clear HDDs at all. If it's full and the backup is outdated, instead of simply deleting the previous backup and creating a new one, we simply take a drill to the HDD and get a new one...wish I was joking, but I've been forced to drill holes through enough hard drives that the amount of space in total would equal at least 10 or 11 TBs...
Yeah, I'm aware of it... I'm just astounded as to what level that shit actually flies. I notice also they're all phone companies if I'm not wrong... those usually give you the short end of the stick too around here, though they've been recently falling in line because of far superior cable providers. Btw, out of random interest, how much does that package run you a month?Neronium said:
No worries, no, I'm not one to advocate digital backups, that's just asking for trouble in any business imo, you're just relying on one more thing when your first thought there is (or should be) safety and reliability. Cheers for the info, that's good to learn really, I've taken a bit of an interest in server admin stuff, but haven't actually had any experience yet, so I'm going by what I was taught. I took an MS course over the summer a few years back, but haven't had the time to actually do anything with it due to actual studies. The instructor advised me in keeping several copies of everything on multiple HDDs in different places (he's personally had a situation with fire in the office, so his home copy came right in bloody handy).Neronium said:
That said, office infrastructure around here isn't really too modern in most places. I doubt I'd see a BluRay reader/burner anywhere, so it could be that the HDDs are just the best/easiest they can do around here since DVDs don't cut it in reliability or space.
Technically they don't IIRC Blu-ray players use a separate laser diode operating in the near infra red end of the spectrum to read the information on DVD's and CD's while the blue laser diode reads the data from the Blu-ray. Dependent on the wavelength of the new medium then to retain the ability to read all formats then they would have to continue to make drives with both types of diode. I recon the DVD/CD drive will eventually go the way of the floppy, still in use but not as universal as they were so I'm skeptical for the long term future viability of backwards compatibility.spwatkins said:Blue-ray players read DVDs and CDs, I assume that "inter-generational compatibility" means that the new ones will read all those formats as well as the new one.Alex Co said:Nope. It's meant to replace Blu-ray.rofltehcat said:
Interesting bit here is the "inter-generational compatibility between different formats" line. I highly doubt that's going to happen. Maybe a player that can read 300GB to 1TB discs? But cross-gen players like say, DVD to Blu-ray? That's not happening since it's a good way for companies to force people to upgrade.
OT
Meah I cant see this coming to consumers any time soon, maybe data centers will use them in the future but I'm not really fussed atm as it'll take years and years before this trickles into the mainstream by which time I expect quantum computing to be coming into it's own which will require and altogether different medium of storage
In general American broadband sucks hard when compared to ours in Europe. It's because the companies that own the copper lines will fight tooth and nail to maintain their share of the market. What really shows this up is the fact that they are actually trying to stop the role out of a fiber network. Fiber = better internet speeds but new competition in the form of new ISP's and they can't be having with that.Vrach said:
Funnily though if one of the big companies decoded to upgrade to fiber everyone would flock to it, but they wont because fiber is massively expensive to role out over such a large country. Installing a fiber network would see that that companies bottom line take a hit in the short term to pay for the investment and the shareholders wouldn't stand for it...Long term plans? what are they?...fuck it, we want all the monies now damn it!
As a owner of 660 DVDs for archiving (number not increasing since now im storing things in a HDD specifically bought for that purpose) i would like to see affordable 1 TB storage discs. That wont come for 5 years probably though.
And the Internet may just be too strong to make them acess to market as easy as DVDs and Blur Rays, and even those struggled.
They do are unreliable, but the guy does make some points: you can drown a HDD, you cant a dvd.
Digital media will take over. And we even know when it will take over. It will take over at precisely the moment when more people will have normal internet than a shitty one.
The truth of the matter is, even blu-ray compressed video takes on average 22GB of space per 2 hour movie. The way up is twofold: as you mentioned we can go 4K, which means we will need 4 times the pixels and thus 4 times the filesize, and we can also go for better quality with less compression (like how DVDs were horribly compressed early on and got better later due to different codec). That also takes more space, altrough how much is up to how much is compressed and how good the alogorythm is. Lets just say that 1 minute of completely uncompressed (full frame, basically bitmap) 1080p video already takes up to 5 GB.
And the Internet may just be too strong to make them acess to market as easy as DVDs and Blur Rays, and even those struggled.
All discs are meant for archiving purposes. Just because videogame consoles abuse them as a constant reading storage due to incapability to have installs properly does not mean thats how they are supposed to do.rofltehcat said:
Oh, yes, at 20cents a pop DVDs are sooo expensive. Mind you, dont expect that to be the consumers price of course, but thats how much it costs for the company to print retail copies.Mr.K. said:
They do are unreliable, but the guy does make some points: you can drown a HDD, you cant a dvd.
Well, current Blu-Ray players can read BR, DVD and CD (both + and - for all of them). Altrough admittedly there was a push towards removing the CD compatibility since that will allow cheaper BR drives.Alex Co said:
You are mistaken. Your mistake is that you take a shitty ISP that you use and think everyone uses the same. Datacaps have been removed in 2008 here, i believe last ISP to get rid of them, did so in 2010. Meanwhile the speeds even for "basic" packages are enough that you can easily thing "50 GB titanfall download? ok ill just watch a movie and its going to be over".hakkarin said:
Digital media will take over. And we even know when it will take over. It will take over at precisely the moment when more people will have normal internet than a shitty one.
Avatar was a bad movie to choose altrough i know why you did it.Lightknight said:
The truth of the matter is, even blu-ray compressed video takes on average 22GB of space per 2 hour movie. The way up is twofold: as you mentioned we can go 4K, which means we will need 4 times the pixels and thus 4 times the filesize, and we can also go for better quality with less compression (like how DVDs were horribly compressed early on and got better later due to different codec). That also takes more space, altrough how much is up to how much is compressed and how good the alogorythm is. Lets just say that 1 minute of completely uncompressed (full frame, basically bitmap) 1080p video already takes up to 5 GB.
because when it comes to internet, US is the third world. Here in Lithuania we dont even look at 10 mbps unless your going for the whole completely wireless deal such as mobile phones. thats too slow for us. caps no longer exist. Personally, i said that as logn as i get 100mbps im fine which is why i went with the cheap plan that only offers 100mbps.Vrach said:
any way to get these HDDs to be ginven away instead? i guess not, if they take that measure they want to be sure its destroyed. but i mean after a 16-pass wiper theres hardly anything that can recover it. even departament of defence uses 16pass one. and theres always the 30-pass algorythm for super paranoid.Neronium said: