Sony And Panasonic Announce The 1TB Archival Disc

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Sony Corporation and Panasonic today announced that they have formulated "Archival Disc", a new standard for professional-use, next-generation optical discs, with the objective of expanding the market for long-term digital data storage. Optical discs have excellent properties to protect themselves against the environment, such as dust-resistance and water-resistance, and can also withstand changes in temperature and humidity when stored.

They also allow inter-generational compatibility between different formats, ensuring that data can continue to be read even as formats evolve. This makes them robust media for long-term storage of content. Recognizing that optical discs will need to accommodate much larger volumes of storage going forward, particularly given the anticipated future growth in the archive market, Sony and Panasonic have been engaged in the joint development of a standard for professional-use next-generation optical discs.
 
I could back up so many blue prints on...

...Actually wait, I could still use floppies for that.
 
Wow; biggest step forward in a while.
Hard disc arrays have a relatively short life for long term storage.
Would like to have this tech to preserve family photos and videos for generations.
I have about 6 years worth of DV video tapes I would like to archive.
Also I have a huge box of VHS tapes that belong to my parents that need to be archived also.
I have done this on hard drives only to see them fail and then I'm back to search tapes.
Eventually the tapes themselves or the old DV camcorder I play them on will give up.
 
The problem is, "a new standard for professional-use." That means that recorders are going to be $500 and discs are going to be $80. Just like the optical discs that the various manufacturers already have out for broadcast video.

4k blu-ray is just a matter of working out a standard. Blu-ray already has the capacity and speed to support 4k. A whole new disc format isn't needed. It already exists. It's called BDXL. I don't know about you, But I already have a few blu-ray burners that are BDXL capable.

BTW, I foresee a cheap flash based format for archival purposes coming out in the near future. Kind of like the old WORM discs. (Write once, read many) Something similar to an EEPROM. The write speed doesn't need to be superfast, 100-200MBps would do it. Have the interface optically isolated to protect from static. The chips and controllers could be relatively cheap because there's no need to worry about wear leveling. ...just my $0.02.

BP
 
Flash memory is too volatile for archival purposes. A magnet or a cosmic ray can blast your chip and it's gone. That said I'm kind of amused that anyone would use an archival disk now...isn't everything just backed up repeatedly and continually sloshing between drives on various servers forever now? Data is on the verge of being entirely divorced from media as a practical consideration now.

I know at home, my hard drive contents are backed up to disk images on an external hard drive, and if one of those drives fails, it's replaced. The data itself is practically immortal, anything that can take down both drives would destroy archival media anyway.
 
Aluisious said:
I know at home, my hard drive contents are backed up to disk images on an external hard drive, and if one of those drives fails, it's replaced. The data itself is practically immortal, anything that can take down both drives would destroy archival media anyway.
Click to expand...

Yes but you always need to buy new drives. "Permanent" storage solution is better for economical and environmental reason... But we've been stuck with only HDD solution since the other storage solutions didn't keep up with fast growing size of HDD, data and also because the bluray backup disc never dropped price enough (only 25gig for almost 10$).

I have 5x2TB HDD right now simply for backup files that won't change/move/deleted and keep them offline. But I have to check them "often" just to be sure the HDD is still working.
 
This might be good if the prices for the drives and media where low enough.
However, I still see keeping multiple backups on hard drives as a cheaper option.

For people with less than 1 TB, just buy a couple external drives and alternate your backups.

For people with 2-8 TB, buy a external dock, and use multiple 2 or 4 TB sata drives.

For my office (currently over 20TB to backup) I use a LTO-6 drive/changer. 2.5TB per tape uncompressed, and I usually get 3.5 to 4 TB per tape.
 
Finally we can move on from tape backups for servers. The main problem with tape is that reads and writes are always sequential. Optical disc based storage allows you to query the backup in a more direct fashion.
 
How 'spensive though? Is this supposed to be considerably cheaper than just using your smaller "obsolete" 1TB drives and throwing them in a safe offline?

Although with $150 4TB drives, I have to wonder if its even worth it. Just run them in RAID, voila.
 
Wait, isn't this the same speech we bot about CD. Then BR ?
 
The quantity of storage and the time scale just seems pointless. 2015 / 2016 for 500 GB / 1 TB ?

We are already at 1 TB SSDs... who knows where we will be in 2016?

The raw information flow on the planet, is doubling every couple of years.

Those discs will probably be write-once discs and expensive. You really have to want to archive stuff...
 
Blu-Ray XL blanks (100GB) are from $50 to $80, so I can't imagine what these might cost...
 
MrAgmoore said:
The raw information flow on the planet, is doubling every couple of years.
Click to expand...
While data caps are becoming the norm.

I can already max out my 250gb data cap (which counts up and down together towards that quota) in about a day theoretically on my current connection.

Suddenly Netflix style distribution of a TB here and there, if affordable, makes sense.
 
JosiahBradley said:
Finally we can move on from tape backups for servers. The main problem with tape is that reads and writes are always sequential. Optical disc based storage allows you to query the backup in a more direct fashion.
Click to expand...

I don't see much of a need for these in the backup market.

The transfer rate for Optical disk is way slower than tape, while even the highest capacity 1TB disk is smaller than the current 2.5TB of LTO-6 tapes. By the time the 1TB disks are available, LTO-7 drives/tapes will be available with 5-6 TB (uncompressed) per tape.
 
Anyone have any idea what the storage life is like on these? For personal archival use I just use M-Discs. They're basically DVD-Rs with an inorganic layer in place of the usual dye. I don't need TBs for personal data. Get rid of the overhead of modern software and convert it all to formats from DOS apps available in 1989 and it would all fit on a floppy except for the family photos. The manufacturer claims M-Discs will last 1000 years. I don't really believe that but I figure if they can get rid of dye fading and make a claim like that they ought to at least last a few decades.
 
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