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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 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]