SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 10 2018, @09:50PM
You'll need 2 of these to store the current Bitcoin blockchain.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by jmorris on Saturday November 10 2018, @09:55PM (19 children)
The problem is they are rapidly being eclipsed by newer tech. Yes you can buy 100GB triple layer BD-XL now, but look at the price tag, then compare to a flash drive. If they can't move these new 128GB blanks at a price competitive with 128GB flash sticks they are going to have a problem. It is a chicken and egg, lowering cost requires volume but volume manufacture needs people willing to buy. And all of the larger BD blanks are write once, flash is at least "write a few times before it craps" media. The claim is optical media stores longer but we, by definition, have no actual track record with any of these new formats. The fact the spec already calls for (translated from tech to English) making scientific wild ass guesses as to what was originally recorded, that they are riding the ragged edge of being able to recover the data a moment after it is first written does not inspire confidence that it will still read decades later.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Saturday November 10 2018, @10:22PM (6 children)
New DVD-sized disc to hold 1 to 5 terabytes of data [arstechnica.com] (2007)
TDK develops 1TB optical disc, leaves other optical storage feeling emasculated [engadget.com] (2010)
First one is probably the vaporware "holographic versatile disc" but whatever. There have long been promises of terabyte-sized Blu-ray discs. Archival Disc [wikipedia.org] will supposedly store that much in its third generation. So 128 GB seems low.
They say these discs will run $10-11 each. 128 GB USB stick or microSD storage seems to be in the $20-30 range, so it is competitive, ignoring the Blu-ray drive needed. Also ignore hypothetical higher data retention for the optical disc, or the question of rewritability.
Now I want to see some petabyte or exabyte holographic storage. Not a 128 GB disc.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Saturday November 10 2018, @11:05PM (3 children)
Not if you buy whatever is on sale that day. Today it is Samsung 128GB for $17.23 at NewEgg. And by the time these new BD discs actually show up in volume flash will have almost certainly dropped again. There is also the transfer speed advantage most of these newer flash sticks have over optical media.
Buy yeah, optical needs to up their game and go TB or bust. Until recently optical media's attraction was being bigger than other commonly available storage devices. That stopped being true with BD. Think about it. When CD-ROM came out the yuge 600+MB storage was game changing, enough people were quite willing to put up with slow access, high cost and for several years requiring pressed "mastered" media. Was living in Dallas and we had at least TWO stores specializing in only CD-ROMs. One, simply called "The CD-ROM Store", is where I got my first Yggdrasil Linux install media. When DVD hit in the late 1990's putting several GB on a disc was again a big win. By the time BD showed up, 25-50GB was already meh and in 2019 128GB is going to be super meh. Upper end phones have 128GB and probably another 256 in the MicroSD slot if they have one.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday November 11 2018, @01:40AM (1 child)
Those people won't be buying just one disc.
What's the price for a thousand terabytes of BD-ROM versus a thousand terabytes of flash?
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by TheRaven on Sunday November 11 2018, @10:49AM
Most people don't have a few thousand TBs of data to store. The economics of storage have also been changed a lot by cloud providers. I back up my laptops to a FreeBSD NAS and then use zfsbackup-go to store the data in Azure (encrypted using PGP). That costs $10/TB/month for cold storage, a bit under $2.5/TB/month for archive storage (archive storage may take a few hours for recovery). Azure can provide such cheap storage because they buy really, really cheap disk drives with high failure rates and put error correcting codes across devices [sigops.org]. You need a lot of independent drives to be able to do that kind of reliability above the device level and so that's hard for anyone to compete with locally. Companies like AWS and Backblaze are constantly trying to push their costs down to compete and that helps keep the cost low for the entire market.
Optical disks have failed as backup media for the last few generations for a few reasons. The first is that the CD-R was the last optical disk that, at launch time, could back up an entire consumer hard disk. When DVD was announced, about 20GB was larger than most hard disks but by the time DVD-R (and the three competing kinds of rewriteable DVD) were released they were initially single-sided, single layer (4.7GB) and hard disks had grown to around 40GB. Blue Ray launched at 25GB/side when disks were hundreds of GBs upwards. I actually bought a BD-RE drive and a little stack of disks for it almost 10 years ago - I've never even got the disks out of the pack because nothing I want to back up fits on a single disk and the effort of doing something like par2 archives spanning multiple disks is too high.
The second thing that hurts optical disks is the high cost of the drives. BD-RE is now pretty cheap, but at launch time the drives typically cost about the same amount as a decent-sized disk. This means that you need to be storing at least 2-3 disks worth of data for it to make sense to buy a writeable optical drive. CD and DVD readers helped get economies of scale up by having a useful second function: being able to play audio CDs and video DVDs on a computer. BD screwed this up by putting such insane licensing restrictions around their broken DRM scheme that hardly anyone ever bothered. If it had been easy to play and rip BD disks then this might have been different. This is exactly the same problem that tape has had: the drives are so expensive that they don't make economic sense for small users, which means that they never get the economies of scale, and that keeps the costs high for the entire lifetime of the device.
These disks are costing a bit over $10 each. That gives me 128GB of backups, but with no redundancy. If you want off-site backups, you need to find somewhere else to store them and, realistically, if you care about your data then you're going to want to store either multiple copies or error correcting codes. If you're storing them off site, then the recovery time includes the time to get them back from wherever they're stored, so archive storage is a similar latency, so they're competing with $2/TB/month. That means that the cost of the disk (alone, not including the cost of the drive) would buy you about 3 years of cloud storage for the same data. You can write to the cloud storage from any number of devices independently, you don't have to change disks, the redundancy is handled for you (and you can pay for more if you're paranoid - I don't, because the probability of Azure losing data at the same time as the RAID-Z setup in my NAS dies seems vanishingly small - the main threat model that I care about is a thief breaking into my house and stealing everything that looks like a computer), and the physical storage is handled for you.
sudo mod me up
(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]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 17 2018, @11:26AM (1 child)
Relied on a two laser configuration that never became affordable. As far as I remember hearing the tech all worked, but after the failure of HD-DVD, which they were most compatible with, the holographic disc standard was decided to not have a future with hard disk and flash drive capacities taking off. They would have used red/green lasers instead of the blue/purple lasers of the bluray based tech. One laser had to be higher wattage for the holographic phase change, while the other was used for reading both traditional and the new media.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday November 17 2018, @12:09PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc [wikipedia.org]
If they had shot for 5-6 terabytes early on instead of 100 GB, maybe they could have had a future.
But there are other, similar technologies being worked on today that could potentially fit hundreds of terabytes, or even petabytes or exabytes, onto a disc or cartridge:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_optical_data_storage [wikipedia.org]
"5D" Laser-Based Polarization Vortex Storage Could Hold Hundreds of Terabytes for Billions of Years [soylentnews.org]
Gold Nanoplasmonic Hybrid Glass Optical Disc Could Store 10 Terabytes for Over Six Centuries [soylentnews.org]
Science! Luminescent nanocrystals could lead to multi-PB optical discs [theregister.co.uk]
Depending on their characteristics, these could compete favorable with HDDs, high capacity SSDs, and tape storage. And technologies that can only store a handful of terabytes could find some use if they are found to have a better longevity than competing mediums.
Even a home/enthusiast user could potentially do something with petabytes of data storage. Like 32K VR [soylentnews.org] or storing data about all of the stars in the galaxy [esa.int] (the data could be used by programs such as Space Engine).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 10 2018, @11:08PM (4 children)
Ten or fifteen years ago I would download various TV episodes and movies to my PC. Every 2 or 3 months I'd cleanup my hard drive, and burn them to DVD+R single layer disks. Back then I had a DVD player that could read DIVX and XVID, so it worked great. The main downside is it would take several hours to group all the files, rename, and burn one disk at a time.
At some point buying the blank disks and spending a Saturday afternoon archiving files wasn't worth it anymore - hard drives were too cheap. Since then I moved onto a synology NAS, and more recently a qnap NAS. No renaming, burning, searching for the one disk you are missing buy can't find - just navigate the network drive and you will find it.
On a related note, I still have yet to have a drive or player in my house that will play BluRay disks. Between streaming and all the various HD file formats available on certain corners of the internet, I highly doubt I will ever have a need for one. But then again I do like sticking it to Sony... I haven't bought a single Sony product in well over a decade, due to their incompetence. Never forget [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday November 11 2018, @01:47AM (3 children)
-l to TPB.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday November 11 2018, @12:36PM (2 children)
Nice modding.
https://old.reddit.com/r/opendirectories/ [reddit.com]
Normies have trouble filling 1 terabyte. I'm sure I could fill 100 terabytes if I set my mind to it. That would take at least 13 weeks at an average rate of 100 Mbps, or less than a week and a half at 1 Gbps.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 11 2018, @05:18PM
It would surprise you...
I once had a conversation with a taxi driver who had 2.5 TB of music, 4TB of video and something approaching 1TB of a mix of games ROMs and comics on his home NAS boxes, and this was over a year ago now.
Puts my 2TB ZFS box to shame, though at least I can back up the contents of my server to a single portable HD, which are thankfully getting cheaper making multiple offline backups more economically viable.
(oh, and thanks for that link, I've never been a reddit fan so would never have come across this in the normal course of things..)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 11 2018, @11:23PM
I have trouble filling 256GB. All of my important data is text (configurations, scripts, sources built up over the years). My music collection takes up the most space, but that only grows a few gigs a year at max, and I end up deleting at least half of it over time anyway.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday November 11 2018, @06:30PM (5 children)
Flash drives are for temporary storage, less than, say, a year without power. This is a different use case than DVDs. The appropriate comparison is to an external hard drive. However that's also increasing in capacity more rapidly.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 11 2018, @08:05PM (4 children)
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)
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.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday November 12 2018, @06:45PM
Like Hi-MD [wikipedia.org]?
Or DataPlay?
(Though I admit DataPlay was a write-once...)
Or did I miss something about your post?
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday November 12 2018, @07:20PM (1 child)
Crap. DataPlay [wikipedia.org]. And next time I use Preview... until the time after that. ;)
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Monday November 12 2018, @10:44PM
Dataplay looks good, unfortunately never heard of it or even seen it. Must have been doomed due to non-technical reasons?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 17 2018, @11:14AM
However those at least have one purpose: Providing individual or customized production runs of media for people who want a physical copy as proof of license/ownership.
The currently available models are DVD, 25GB BD-R, and 50GB BD-R. 100GB BD-Rs are only available as standard optical media, but the costs are in-line with the M-Discs, despite the much shorter expected lifespan of the media. Given the burn times of the current optical media, the only people it makes sense to purchase these or the drives are people who need semi-immutable data in the event of an apocalypse scenario, who might need to survive both EMP and gaussing magnetic blasts. In those events however, either the equipment needed to interface with the media will be destroyed whether hard disk or optical, or the devices will be kept somewhere insulated enough not to be affected either way. At that point the only benefit to the optical media is that it might last a few hundred years if necessary without significant data corruption. Only the drives and computer systems wouldn't last that long due to flash cell degradation. And since rom alternatives aren't available on all but the oldest hardware, getting a bootstrap environment to reflash newer devices if their firmware is corrupt would be next to impossible, even with the documentation.
Technological bootstrapping kits needs to be a techie priority lest some event happen that pushes us into a modern dark age. Enough of our technology is proprietary or insufficiently documented that recreating the intervening bits, or the bits needed to recover newer devices or processes would be impossible without reinventing the wheel, assuming tech crashed back to a 1950s or earlier level.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 10 2018, @11:02PM (3 children)
Fuck you, Sony.
(Score: 4, Funny) by anubi on Saturday November 10 2018, @11:19PM
Yeah, in that regard, Sony does have a reputation like someone caught pissing in someone's car.
He will be watched around cars for the rest of his life and no one wants him in their car.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 4, Funny) by takyon on Saturday November 10 2018, @11:52PM (1 child)
Can't hide a rootkit on a blank disc... right?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Sunday November 11 2018, @01:42AM
How about in the binary blob in the driver?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 5, Insightful) by archfeld on Saturday November 10 2018, @11:39PM (3 children)
I am curious about how long these things will store and still be recoverable. Also I wonder, having not read the article, about compatibility. Will my current BR player utilize the higher end multi layer disks or will I have to get a new 'multilayer' capable drive. I've got MP3 disks I created just a couple of years ago that fail to play now, and if I go to the trouble of transferring my precious Flying circus episodes, and scanned photos I want to know that they won't be junk in 12 months.
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Saturday November 10 2018, @11:57PM
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 11 2018, @03:25AM (1 child)
Good news! If you RTFA, you need wonder no more. The point is addressed, albeit superficially. (If you don't have the attention span to read five short paragraphs, you're probably a goldfish.)
(Score: 2) by archfeld on Sunday November 11 2018, @03:36AM
Good thing you had the time to waste in responding, but NOT answering the question. Dory is that you ?
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Snotnose on Sunday November 11 2018, @12:31AM (7 children)
There's a saying that's been upgraded a few times to "never underestimate the bandwidth of CD-Rs on a 747". Started with tapes on a station wagon, but whatever.
How long will these new fangled discs last? Some, damn I'm old, 30 years ago I bought some Ozric Tentacles CDs. They suffered from this thing call bit-rot, which you could actually see if you held the CD to a light source. If memory serves, somebody in the chain of command went bankrupt, which meant I couldn't replace my visually bad CDs.
In the 80's I was told (via a huge Sony campaign) that CDs were indestructible.
Sooo, Sony. How long will these disc last?
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 4, Informative) by RedBear on Sunday November 11 2018, @11:16AM (2 children)
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
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @12:52AM
I'm missing a mod type "Indeed" for your comment.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 17 2018, @11:23AM
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.
(Score: 3, Informative) by deimtee on Sunday November 11 2018, @12:47PM
My stamped music CDs from the 80's and 90's all still play fine. I have some burnt Kodak Gold CDs that are over 15 years old that still play.
Cheap disks I burnt for the car or got from friends don't do so well. Some of those have delaminated within a couple of years.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 11 2018, @01:45PM
Tape is still king in size per space. Access not so much.
Most CDR type media has a 'bit rot' because of the particular inks they are using. Put in a 'nice' environment and they would last nearly indefinably. Toss it in the back of your car in Florida? May last a couple of years.
Some 'normal' CD type substrates have 2 different issues that can create bit rot. The metal substrate starts to rust. Causing a non reflective surface. Or one of the glue substrates decay and cause aberrations.
I have CDs from the early 80s that are still good. I have DVDs from a couple of years ago that have come apart. It really depends on the manufacture of the item.
For some use cases I could see this being desirable as a short term backup medium (1-2 years). Such as in a rotation schedule. Especially if they can keep the cost down to 1-2 dollars per disc. The 30+TB tape drives are still on the pricey side. I can buy a lot of BR blanks for 3 grand...
(Score: 2) by datapharmer on Monday November 12 2018, @12:26AM
It is still tape. LTO-8 can hold 12TB uncompressed. It even probably powers the cloud (when it comes to pure storage) https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/18/ipexpo_2012/ [theregister.co.uk]
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday November 12 2018, @05:02PM
In theory, you can buy expensive archival quality discs that will last quite a while. In practice...I can't find any for Blu-ray at the moment and I doubt they're really worth the price unless you've got some really niche use.
The cheap, probably garbage discs that I *can* find, which in my experience probably won't last ten years if they're sealed, untouched, in a vault...those discs are still more expensive per gigabyte when buying in packs of a hundred than a large hard drive. Hard drives can fail too, but in my experience getting one to last a decade shouldn't be difficult, especially if it's powered down.
Hard drives are also going to require less physical space than that stack of discs, so they'd give better bandwidth for that 747 too. Plus you won't have to sit through "Please insert disc number 103 of 200..." while writing your data! And it's re-writable, which is a nice bonus...
Seriously, other than Netflix's dying mail rental segment, what use are these things? Is this all just for distributing PS5 games in a couple years?
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday November 12 2018, @04:47PM
I recently had to replace the optical drive in my media center PC, so I figured I might as well get a blu-ray burner.
Then once I had a blu-ray burner, I figured it might be nice for some backups since they can get up to 50GB per disc.
Then I noticed that a pack of a hundred 50GB discs -- 5 TB total capacity -- costs $150. A 5TB hard drive is $130. The Blu-ray discs are write-once. And the Blu-ray discs require me to split my files across a hundred different pieces of media instead of one. And the Blu-ray discs cost more. And I'm sure I could add USB to that hard drive for under $20, which also means I can use that hard drive on most DVD players and many other set-top boxes as well.
Soo...does Blu-ray have *any* advantage?