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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, @11:26AM (1 child)
Relied on a two laser configuration that never became affordable. As far as I remember hearing the tech all worked, but after the failure of HD-DVD, which they were most compatible with, the holographic disc standard was decided to not have a future with hard disk and flash drive capacities taking off. They would have used red/green lasers instead of the blue/purple lasers of the bluray based tech. One laser had to be higher wattage for the holographic phase change, while the other was used for reading both traditional and the new media.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday November 17 2018, @12:09PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc [wikipedia.org]
If they had shot for 5-6 terabytes early on instead of 100 GB, maybe they could have had a future.
But there are other, similar technologies being worked on today that could potentially fit hundreds of terabytes, or even petabytes or exabytes, onto a disc or cartridge:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_optical_data_storage [wikipedia.org]
"5D" Laser-Based Polarization Vortex Storage Could Hold Hundreds of Terabytes for Billions of Years [soylentnews.org]
Gold Nanoplasmonic Hybrid Glass Optical Disc Could Store 10 Terabytes for Over Six Centuries [soylentnews.org]
Science! Luminescent nanocrystals could lead to multi-PB optical discs [theregister.co.uk]
Depending on their characteristics, these could compete favorable with HDDs, high capacity SSDs, and tape storage. And technologies that can only store a handful of terabytes could find some use if they are found to have a better longevity than competing mediums.
Even a home/enthusiast user could potentially do something with petabytes of data storage. Like 32K VR [soylentnews.org] or storing data about all of the stars in the galaxy [esa.int] (the data could be used by programs such as Space Engine).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]