Sony Releases Quad-Layer 128 GB BD-R XL Media
Sony is about to start selling the industry's first 128 GB write-once BD-R XL optical media. The discs will also be the first quad-layer BDXL media formally aimed at consumers, but bringing benefits to professionals that use BDXL today.
Although the general BDXL specifications were announced back in 2010 for multi-layered write-once discs with 25 GB and 33.4 GB layers, only triple-layer BDXL discs with a 100 GB capacity (generally aimed at broadcasting, medical, and document imaging industries) have been made available so far. By contrast, quad-layer 128 GB media has never seen the light of day until now.
As it turns out, increasing the per-layer capacity of Blu-ray discs (BDs) to 33.4 GB via a technology called MLSE (Maximum Likelihood Sequence Estimation) was not a big problem, and most of today's BD players and optical drives support the BDXL standard. However, increasing the layer count to four while ensuring a broad compatibility, signal quality across four layers, yields, and some other factors slow downed release of 128 GB BDXL essentially by eight years.
Related: Ultra HD Blu-Ray Specification Completed
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday November 11 2018, @01:45AM
Around the time I was at CERN, some collaborations were starting to use massively parallel Exabyte drives. One bit to drive one, one bit to drive two...
Of course both BD-ROM and Flash can do that. Is there some limit to how parallel they can be made to be? For example Flash can have many small, parallel chips, whereas BD is always going to have one disc per drive, whose speed is limited by that one disc.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]