Important information that will drastically affect actual usage not provided:
- expected and guaranteed lifetime of discs
- minimum undamaged read/write speeds
- recoverable-error read speeds
- bit error rate for writing and reading<p>Let's take a typical small business system's requirements. We have a 2U database with 12 3.5" hot-swap disks, 2 200GB SSDs for caching and 10 3TB disks in a RAID10. We have up to 15TB that we want to archive.<p>Optimism: we get 100MB/s write speed and a write BER of 10^-15. We swap 30 500GB disks, each taking about an hour and a half to write, and about one in a thousand disks has an unrecoverable error.<p>More likely: we get 75MB/s sustained write speed and a write BER of 10^-14. We swap 30 500GB disks, each taking close to two hours, and we can expect one in three complete sets to have an unrecoverable error.<p>Press releases: not quite useful.
What about M-Disc? The DVD-writers that can write them are just as cheap as normal ones and I think $4 for a DVD-R is acceptable for long term storage.
They announced that they would offer Blu-Ray media soon but I haven't seen them for sale.
This makes perfect sense.<p>Sony and Panasonic need to do <i>something</i> with their lead in optical disk technology, but there's no demand for a Blu-ray successor. Heck, there isn't even much demand for Blu-ray. So archiving is the way to go.<p>I just hope they make those things to last.
I expect this will be the same form-factor as existing 5.25" magneto-optical and Ultra Density Optical disks, which have been around for quite a while.<p>Back in 1998, I dealt with HP jukeboxes the size of a wardrobe with robotic arms to pluck 9.1GB magneto-optical disks out of the racks and stick them into drives. IIRC, HP guaranteed their disks for 100 years.
From the 2013 release: "they intend to offer solutions that preserve valuable data for future generations".<p>No mention in the new release how long they are meant to last though. This seems like a pretty key point to me.
This does not appear to be a consumer-oriented format like CDs and DVDs, but rather a niche product. Meaning that it will probably be not cheap. How is it supposed to be competitive with tape? 1TB is not that much.
Very interesting, though I'm really missing information on what kind of material they are using. While it's true that CD's can take a bit of the kind of environmental abuse they describe (you scratching your game's CD doesn't fall into this category), we all know that in reality they weren't that durable – though I suppose that stemmed more from the fact that most CD's were produced cheaply, corners cut, a lot of abuse by the end user and whatnot. Did you know that there's even a fungus that really likes to eat CD's? ( <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geotrichum_candidum" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geotrichum_candidum</a> – Not so much for damp archive cellars, then! ).<p>In conclusion; I think that just enforcing high manufacturing standards won't suffice, there must be some material definition as well. Looking forward for more information on this.
1TB doesn't take so long to upload nowadays. Isn't this product going to have battle with a new era where we just upload to a storage provider, the provider aggregates customers' stored data on a massive scale and so the underlying storage technology no longer matters?<p>I'm thinking about services like Amazon S3 and Glacier here, together with whatever competition appears. I presume that at this level, what matters is exabyte level storage hardware (perhaps a robot-managed room of archival discs or tapes). One where the provider can switch technology every few years, and customers never have to notice.<p>At capacities on the level of terabytes, we're getting to the point where upload bandwidth isn't so much of a bottleneck any more, aren't we?
It seems this is mainly just a larger capacity (1TB) optical disc, and the 'archival' is just marketing?<p>For that matter, if they were really marketing at those who are professionally concerned with long-term reliable storage (archivists), even the marketing would include some information on what makes this new media any more reliable over the long-term than existing optical media. The press release includes <i>nothing</i> on this, odd for something branded as 'archival'.<p>It looks like it's just a larger capacity optical disc (which I'm sure there's a market for), with the 'archival' part just being marketting (odd; apparently they think there's a market for this too, even when it's just spin).
Sounds interesting. Hopefully they will release more technical information about what makes it "archival" quality. Seems like a normal Blu-ray at first glance.
>development of a standard for professional-use next-generation optical discs
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> dust-resistance and water-resistance, and can also withstand changes in temperature and humidity when stored.<p>So it's a new standard with tougher physical requirements. Actually in a japanese press release [1] they present at the end the current archival solution offered by Sony, which consist of a set of 12 optical discs in a cartridge. I'd image this new disc standard could be sealed as well for better protection.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.sony.co.jp/SonyInfo/News/Press/201307/13-0729/" rel="nofollow">http://www.sony.co.jp/SonyInfo/News/Press/201307/13-0729/</a>
If these still come as flimsy plastic fully exposed to the elements and can't be touched on the face, lest the data be destroyed, I'll be sorely disappointed.<p>Seriously, why hasn't anyone made diskette-style discs a common standard? I have never seen a cd last more than a few years, or one single touch with a finger on the shiny side.
Ah yes, this must be targeting the ever-popular "people who didn't pay attention to any of Sony's OTHER proprietary formats that have now been utterly abandoned" market.
The Holographic Versatile Disc format has existed since 2004 and can store up to 6 TB vs Archival Disc format capacity of only 300 GB - 1 TB. Any idea what advantage ADs have over HVDs?
Mitsubishi ARLEDIA, long-term DVD-R optical media storage has this a few years ago. I think they started in 2008. Archival Disc format is not a great news.