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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: 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?