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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, @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?