Folio Photonics Announces Breakthrough Multi-Layer Optical Disc Storage: 10 TB for $50

[DeathtoGnomes]

It will not be very expensive once adoption takes place. Even if the consumer drive turns out to be a few hundred, worth it!

Thats true for any new hardware, waiting for the mass acceptance is a lesson in patience until you can bring one home.

 

[lexluthermiester]

Thats true for any new hardware, waiting for the mass acceptance is a lesson in patience until you can bring one home.

Of course. I'm likely to be one of those early adopters. Even 1TB or 2TB discs would be heaven for my backup schedules. Even a 500GB disc would make my life easier. And if 10TB is $50, then 500gb is likely to be $6, 1TB $10 and 2TB $14 per disc. That is just my theory, but history suggests that will be what happens, and I am down with that.

 

[Blue4130]

Of course. I'm likely to be one of those early adopters. Even 1TB or 2TB discs would be heaven for my backup schedules. Even a 500GB disc would make my life easier. And if 10TB is $50, then 500gb is likely to be $6, 1TB $10 and 2TB $14 per disc. That is just my theory, but history suggests that will be what happens, and I am down with that.

Or it will go the way of tape and be enterprise only.

Or go the way of zip disk and fail to saturate market.

 

[lexluthermiester]

Or it will go the way of tape and be enterprise only.

That would suck. It's also unlikely.

Or go the way of zip disk and fail to saturate market.

You might be too young to remember this, but the Zip drive/disc product range was wildly popular and successful.

 

[AusWolf]

You might be too young to remember this, but the Zip drive/disc product range was wildly popular and successful.

In the West perhaps, but I lived in Hungary at that time, and I've never seen a single Zip disc or drive in my life.

I agree with your previous posts. I'd be happy to pay $50 for 10 TB of permanent optical storage, provided the drive isn't overly expensive.

 

[Blue4130]

That would suck. It's also unlikely.

You might be too young to remember this, but the Zip drive/disc product range was wildly popular and successful.

I lived through it, they never got that big in canada. I was the only person I knew who had one.

 

[Aquinus]

CD's maybe, but not DVD's. DVD's are sandwiched together between two layers of plastic. As long as the glue layer stays sealed(and it's nearly impossible to break those seals without using force that would destroy the disc anyway), degradation is extremely unlikely. DVD's are as physically hardy BluRay discs, just without the antiscratch coating. So that concern really isn't something to worry about.

IIRC, CDs are the same way, but the reality is that along the edges of the disk, there is more exposure to the atmosphere, particularly if these layers begin to delaminate from something like heat or physical abrasion. These layers of plastic are also not all that thick, so depending on how deep a scratch is, you might be exposing the underlying layer. Either way, my main point is that modern optical media has improved the durability aspect quite a bit and it's been an improvement with each new medium.

In the West perhaps, but I lived in Hungary at that time, and I've never seen a single Zip disc or drive in my life.

Could be. I live in the west and my mother, who was a graphic designer, used them quite often at work when I was growing up. Granted, we only had a zip drive at home so she could work at home if she had to. I wouldn't expect it to be something you'd see outside of professional use at the time.

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

In the West perhaps, but I lived in Hungary at that time, and I've never seen a single Zip disc or drive in my life.

I agree with your previous posts. I'd be happy to pay $50 for 10 TB of permanent optical storage, provided the drive isn't overly expensive.

You might find one as a collectors item on ebay, you can still buy Commodore items and those unit were so last decade when these Zip drives came out. I had both 100MB and 250MB, which were golden for transporting files.

Of course. I'm likely to be one of those early adopters. Even 1TB or 2TB discs would be heaven for my backup schedules. Even a 500GB disc would make my life easier. And if 10TB is $50, then 500gb is likely to be $6, 1TB $10 and 2TB $14 per disc. That is just my theory, but history suggests that will be what happens, and I am down with that.

Early adopter pics or it didnt happen!

 

[lexluthermiester]

In the West perhaps, but I lived in Hungary at that time, and I've never seen a single Zip disc or drive in my life.

Perhaps, and you missed out. They were big here in North America and even the UK. Not sure about the EU. I loved the ZIP disc platform. Still have and use them for retro systems.

I lived through it, they never got that big in canada. I was the only person I knew who had one.

That might have been location related. Who knows..

IIRC, CDs are the same way

That not true. CD's are just a single layer of plastic with the data layer glued on top of it. Anyone who has scratched the top of a CD and destroyed it can attest to this. That problem is the reason the standard was changed over to a sandwiched dual layer construction.

but the reality is that along the edges of the disk, there is more exposure to the atmosphere

While true, the sealing glue used is not moisture or oxygen permeable like the glues used on LaserDiscs years earlier that suffered from disc rot.

Either way, my main point is that modern optical media has improved the durability aspect quite a bit and it's been an improvement with each new medium.

Absolutely correct. With each generation of optical disc the durability is greatly improved.

Early adopter pics or it didnt happen!

If I do, I will!

 

[Dr. Dro]

Suit yourself. Kinda narrow thinking but whatever.. Think about it, 10TB(that's 10,000 gigabytes) for $50. You're not getting that amount of space in an SSD, cloud storage or even HDD's for anywhere near that price. Let those facts sink in. Yes, yes.

Oh yes, I agree that for the cost, it's definitely a very good amount of space, with BD-XLs at 100-128 GB and all (in fact, it's often become cheaper to buy a 128 GB SSD or a micro SD card than a quad-layer BD-XL, as well). But I have serious concerns about the device required to burn such media, how much will it cost (and more importantly, how much of that will be over the patents and brand), how reliable it will be, market penetration, etc.

For any optical media standard such as this to be successful, it requires a foothold in the market - and if it manages to get a foothold like Blu-ray disc did and media starts to cheapen, and more and more manufacturers begin to issue drives and all, then I would probably have one of those in my rig, too. For the media to get popular, it will also have to have a reasonable level of performance, even if for archival purposes it may not matter that much, a lot of people (and I would assume most today) would 100% care they had to retrieve a 10 TB archive at say, the maximum sustainable 12x Blu-ray speed (around 54 MB/s theoretical maximum, probably half this in most cases), which would take an hilariously long amount of time to retrieve from media.

 

[Waldorf]

Unless R/W speeds improve by about 10x, im done with disc media.

and so far,using cd/dvd/BD and even M-disc for backup, in the past 20y,
i have yet to see a single of em, (non-cd discs) fail, cant say that for hdds,
and i had 10x more of those.

and anyone worried about degradation: if its important, its backed up,
which for "pros" means more than a single backup, so any possible "fail" of a disc
is really irrelevant for the ppl doing it right...

 

[lexluthermiester]

Unless R/W speeds improve by about 10x, im done with disc media.

This isn't for you then... Though I imagine the read speeds have greatly improved. The write speeds likely still mean 45 to 55 minutes per disc.

i have yet to see a single of em, (non-cd discs) fail

Same here, unless you count them being microwaved to destroy the data..

 

[Dr. Dro]

This isn't for you then... Though I imagine the read speeds have greatly improved. The write speeds likely still mean 45 to 55 minutes per disc.

Same here, unless you count them being microwaved to destroy the data..

Standard 1x Blu-ray speed is 36 Mbps, or 4,5 MB/s. Video discs run at 54 Mbit, a little under 2x speed for playback.

Assuming a slow burn of the full 10 TB (10000 GB) at this 1x data rate, which you'd want for archival, you'd be looking at ~620 hours, or over 25 consecutive days non stop to write a full disc, assuming that the speed remains constant and excluding any media finalization time if applicable. It'd take the full bandwidth of SATA III (6 Gbps) over 3 hours to do the job.

I would argue speed up over Blu-ray need to be in the order of 100x+ to make this viable as a practical medium

 

[lexluthermiester]

Standard 1x Blu-ray speed is 36 Mbps, or 4,5 MB/s. Video discs run at 54 Mbit, a little under 2x speed for playback.

Assuming a slow burn of the full 10 TB (10000 GB) at this 1x data rate, which you'd want for archival, you'd be looking at ~620 hours, or over 25 consecutive days non stop to write a full disc, assuming that the speed remains constant and excluding any media finalization time if applicable. It'd take the full bandwidth of SATA III (6 Gbps) over 3 hours to do the job.

I would argue speed up over Blu-ray need to be in the order of 100x+ to make this viable as a practical medium

Yeah, but that's 2X speed BDR. For starters, this new tech has much higher default write speed. While they haven't publicly stated what it is, the very nature of how the tech works directly implies a starting point of 7.2->8.4Gbps-ish, which would result in 165minutes-ish to write a 10TB disc. That's not shabby. Of course I'm just theorizing and ballparking those numbers based on what I understand of the tech.

 

[Waldorf]

@Dr. Dro
not sure which video media your refering to, but (4K) BDs can do at least 150Mbit/s (playback),
as thats what most movies are being recorded/or at least the final file going on the disc..
The 50Mbit range was like 10y ago.

At least from what ive seen extracting files from (demo) discs at work (to use usb storage)

 

[Dr. Dro]

@Dr. Dro
not sure which video media your refering to, but (4K) BDs can do at least 150Mbit/s (playback),
as thats what most movies are being recorded/or at least the final file going on the disc..
The 50Mbit range was like 10y ago.

At least from what ive seen extracting files from (demo) discs at work (to use usb storage)

4K UHD BD is a newer standard, the traditional 1080p FHD Blu-ray disc video is what I refer to. But at the same time, the media itself remains the same. All that's done is increase the speed rating to match the bit rate requirements, for BD altogether this is around 12x sustainable for most drives today.

 

[lexluthermiester]

But at the same time, the media itself remains the same.

Sort of. All they did was add more layers and increase the read speed.

 

[Dr. Dro]

Sort of. All they did was add more layers and increase the read speed.

Yup, that's what I meant. Fundamentally the media itself is the same.