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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 11 2018, @08:05PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 11 2018, @08:05PM (#760701)

    Another thing is the failure mode of flash and HDDs, more often than not it is the controller hardware sitting between the motherboard and the actual bits that fail, not the bit surface.

    In contrast optical media, much like floppies of old, can easily be moved between RW hardware if it fails.

    Now if we had optical media that behaved like a floppy (drag and drop, written and deleted sector by sector), optical media may be an interesting option again.

    The general problem of using optical media is the burn process, and that it may leave the media trashed if the data stream to the burner gets messed up somehow.

  • (Score: 2) by arslan on Monday November 12 2018, @12:20AM (3 children)

    by arslan (3462) on Monday November 12 2018, @12:20AM (#760744)

    Yea.. I've always wondered why no one's created optical media, or equivalent, in a thumb drive form factor - as in without all the electronics just raw media but in a more user friendly form factor like a thumb drive I can clip onto with rubberized or even water proof shell.