30 Blu-ray Discs In a 1.5TB MiniDisc-Like Cassette

[wraggster]

Hot on the heels of the most successful storage mediums of all time — MiniDisc and Zip disks — Sony has announced the Optical Disc Archive, a system that seems to cram up to 30 Blu-ray discs into a single, one-inch-thick plastic cassette (http://www.extremetech.com/computing/126195-sonys-optical-disc-archive-30-blu-ray-discs-in-a-1-5tb-minidisc-like-cassette), which will have a capacity of between 300GB and 1.5TB. As far as I can tell, the main selling point of the Optical Disc Archive is, just like MiniDisc, the ruggedness of the cassettes. Optical discs themselves are fairly resistant to changes in temperature and humidity, and the cassettes are dust and water resistant. What is the use case for these 1.5TB MiniDiscs, though? In terms of pure storage capacity, tape drives are still far superior (you can store up to 5TB on a tape!) In terms of speed and flexibility, hard drives are better. If you're looking for ruggedness, flash-based storage is smaller, lighter, and can easily survive a dip in the ocean. The Optical Disc Archive might be good as extensible storage for TV PVRs, like TiVo and Sky+ — but as yet, we don't even know the cost of the system or the cassettes, and I doubt either will be cheap.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/16/1924248/30-blu-ray-discs-in-a-15tb-minidisc-like-cassette

[Da_ALC]

Haaaah! "Hot on the heels of the most successful storage mediums of all time", this article was obviously written by sony themselves, as we all know all sony storage formats have been a big fail including minidisc. (Albeit minidisc
doing slightly better than the rest of their attempts).
"the ruggedness of the cassettes"??? Everybody had broken minidiscs laying around. The retracting sleeve would fall of them in no time at all, dirt would clog up inside them in no time, and half the time the plastic casing would just split apart!

Always funny to see sony talking about themselves in the 3rd person and lying to their consumers and investors as per usual.
Sony's loss this year, $6.4 billion. An all time high in a run of what, 4/5 consecutive years of billions lost? ;)