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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 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...