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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 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.