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posted by martyb on Saturday November 10 2018, @09:34PM   Printer-friendly
from the Better-than-NAND? dept.

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


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by RedBear on Sunday November 11 2018, @11:16AM (2 children)

    by RedBear (1734) on Sunday November 11 2018, @11:16AM (#760619)

    In the 80's I was told (via a huge Sony campaign) that CDs were indestructible.
    Sooo, Sony. How long will these disc last?

    Whenever the M-DISC version comes out, they should theoretically last well past a century with almost zero probability of the type of "bit rot" you're talking about, which happens to cheaper media like organic dye based discs. I had a nice complete box set of Stargate SG-1 DVDs I got from Cosctco about ten years ago. A few years later at least a third of them were full of glitches or unreadable. M-DISC (Millennial disc) is interesting because it claims to use a non-organic, mineral based substrate that is highly resistant to damage from UV, moisture or temperature variations that will quickly destroy normal optical discs. Seems to mostly Verbatim marketing them.

    Besides M-DISC media and some "gold archival" stuff, I haven't seen any optical media that claims to reliably hold data more than a decade at the very most. Sadly, the same goes for offline spinning hard drives and all flash media and SSDs. Many solid state drives will start to lose data within a few months, hard drives within a few months or years. Well, there's tape media, which should last quite a long time and be readable even with a few errors if you use error correcting formats. But getting into tape in a useful capacity is very expensive.

    Then again, M-DISC is quite costly as well. Ten regular 100GB BD-XL discs are $50 ($5 each), just five M-DISC 100GB BD-XL discs cost $85 ($17 each). I won't be surprised if the 128GB M-DISC BD-XL will cost about $20-25 per disc. Still, in my research I haven't found any other reasonable alternatives for truly long term archiving of large amounts of data.

    But yeah, don't even bother with the non-M-DISC version of any optical media. And the largest capacity gold archival media I know of is just basic 4.7GB DVD-R discs. Not that useful these days.

    --
    ¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
    ... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @12:52AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @12:52AM (#762437)

    I'm missing a mod type "Indeed" for your comment.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 17 2018, @11:23AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 17 2018, @11:23AM (#763043)

    Verbatim is now a sub-brand of them if I remember correctly, and they worked out an exclusive deal to market and produce the m-discs for Millenata.

    I have a couple of their discs, and for important old code, photos, etc they can't be beat. However I've switched to JVC/Optima 50 packs of 25GB BD-Rs which provide much more capacity per dollar. But even then I am finding it more sensible to just buy 1-4TB hard disks which can transfer data in a matter of minutes that will take a half hour or longer to burn, and restrict my burned media to stuff I am worried about getting accidentally deleted or corrupted on the hard disk. Just given dry weather and 50F-100F storage temperatures I've got drives that have lasted 10-30 years with minimal data loss (some even that had partial head failures in the 1990s which I just read off in the past few years once testdisk/photorec/dd_rescue got good enough. Given that, the odds are good that the hard disk will be just as recoverable in 20+ years as the BD-Rs will.