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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, @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.