Sony CD-R Technology

[Buck]

Article: http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/News/Details.asp?RelatedID=2752

The technology looks interesting, but with those high capacities and slow transfer rates - we'll have to wait for this technology to develope.

 

[jtr1962]

Something like this is long overdue-there's really no viable way for the average person to back up a 100 GB hard drive these days. Tape is too slow and way too expensive, CD-R or RW requires too many discs, and using another hard drive isn't really safe.

The transfer rate(36Mbs) should give a real world performance of ~3 MByte/sec, which is halfway decent, although it would still take well over two hours to fill one disc. Like anything else, I'm sure the speeds will go up and the media cost come down. I'm also sure you'll have rewriteable discs in a year or two. The biggest problems I see will be getting the costs of the drives and media down to CD-RW levels, although since the media has much larger capacity it can sell for a few dollars each and still be competitive.

 

[Mercutio]

It'll go nowhere. At least in present form. Perhaps the blue laser will get picked up for use in HDDVD or something, but as a data only accessory, I'm having a hard time seeing a future for it.

We can just go ahead and call this one the future of DVD-RAM.

 

[Pradeep]

It's basically designed to enable the recording of HDTV to an optical disk, as opposed to the current route where you have to use either a D-VHS tape deck or a hard drive based system. The 36Mbit/sec is identical to the bitrate of D-VHS I believe.

 

[.Nut]

Actually, this "old" NEW news. Sony and friends made their intentions with Blu-Ray technology over 2 years ago, but actually have talked about blue laser products since the early 1990s.

...Tape is too slow and way too expensive...

There actually is *fast* tape around. Of course, you and I would never consider buying these fast enterprise class tape drives for home use. LTO Ultrium has no problems working at a 20 MB ~ 40 MB per second sustained transfer rate with a 200 GB capacity per cartridge. But, an LTO Ultrium tape drive costs well over US$4000. The soon-to-be-released LTO II drives will have 40 MB ~ 80 MB rates.

...and using another hard drive isn't really safe...

A high capacity FireWire or USB2 external hard drive should be easy and safe to use as a backup drive. If you need archival backup capabilities, using external hard drives would be a rather expensive. But, just for weekly safety backups, an external hard drive might even be ideal (speed, convenience, relatively economical storage).

...The biggest problems I see will be getting the costs of the drives and media down to CD-RW levels, although since the media has much larger capacity it can sell for a few dollars each and still be competitive.

The biggest problem is actually building the manufacturing line for media. There are other efforts -- namely by Toshiba and friends -- to use a different approach to delivering a blue laser disc to the masses. Their plan is to use various existing DVD disc manufacturing technologies to bring a blue laser product to market.

The other major storage technology that has yet to debut in a commercial way is fluorescent multi-layer (holographic). There are spinning disc, streaming tape, and static implementations of holographic storage, and all have their places in the market. The tape (a.k.a. -- "optical tape") has vast storage densities and the disc has high capacity and is as convenient to use as a CD. Both have very high read and writer speeds. The disc is impervious to fingerprints and surface dust. The static storage media (usually cards) can have high capacity and/or high levels of resilience. The reader's head moves across the medium as the card, sheet, or strip stays still.

 

[.Nut]

Actually, this "old" NEW news.

Huhhh??? Actually, this is OLD news.

(...needs spellchecker)