Credit: stock.xchng
During the last generation of video gaming, Sony added Blu-ray technology to its PlayStation 3. This resulted in games with more realistic graphics, unlike anything we’d seen before. Now, Sony, along with Panasonic, are hoping to make that experience even better, by announcing the successor to Blu-ray, called Archival Disc. Each Archival Disc will hold up to 1TB of data.
Now that most consumers are storing more of their data in the cloud, optical discs are becoming obsolete. We have our music on our phones. We keep our important documents in the cloud. And flash drives are an inexpensive and hassle-free way to carry other data. Although some video games have even moved to the cloud, their large file sizes make them more difficult to store and play that way, and that’s where Archival Disc will come in handy.
Archival Disc allows video games to have even more detail and more lifelike graphics. The extra storage would allow game developers to get as realistic as they want to, without needing to sacrifice details due to file sizes. Gamers benefit and everyone wins: we get games that look better than ever. These discs could also be used for game streaming services (like Sony’s upcoming Playstation Now). These new discs would make storing game data inexpensive and easy.
But the Archival Disc isn’t just limited to benefitting the game industry. The entertainment industry could also use the extra storage. Think of those big boxes of DVD’s that hold seasons of television shows. More data storage means fewer discs. This cuts down costs for the industry and will, hopefully, result in savings for the consumer.
The current iteration of the Archival Discs are two-sided, with each side containing three layers. The laser technology used with the discs is the same as what’s used for Blu-ray. Archival Disc will launch in 2015, starting with 300GB of data, then moving up to 500GB, and eventually making the leap to 1TB. LINK
Via Extreme Tech
BUT, It sounds like they are just rehashing the old tech they had made back in 2011... >
Panasonic has 100GB triple-layer Blu-ray discs, but who cares
Now that most consumers are storing more of their data in the cloud, optical discs are becoming obsolete. We have our music on our phones. We keep our important documents in the cloud. And flash drives are an inexpensive and hassle-free way to carry other data. Although some video games have even moved to the cloud, their large file sizes make them more difficult to store and play that way, and that’s where Archival Disc will come in handy.
Archival Disc allows video games to have even more detail and more lifelike graphics. The extra storage would allow game developers to get as realistic as they want to, without needing to sacrifice details due to file sizes. Gamers benefit and everyone wins: we get games that look better than ever. These discs could also be used for game streaming services (like Sony’s upcoming Playstation Now). These new discs would make storing game data inexpensive and easy.
But the Archival Disc isn’t just limited to benefitting the game industry. The entertainment industry could also use the extra storage. Think of those big boxes of DVD’s that hold seasons of television shows. More data storage means fewer discs. This cuts down costs for the industry and will, hopefully, result in savings for the consumer.
The current iteration of the Archival Discs are two-sided, with each side containing three layers. The laser technology used with the discs is the same as what’s used for Blu-ray. Archival Disc will launch in 2015, starting with 300GB of data, then moving up to 500GB, and eventually making the leap to 1TB. LINK
Via Extreme Tech
BUT, It sounds like they are just rehashing the old tech they had made back in 2011... >
Panasonic has 100GB triple-layer Blu-ray discs, but who cares
Yeah, I guess cramming 100 gigs onto a triple-layer rewritable Blu-ray disc is nice, but seriously, what's the point? Physical media is a terrible idea, especially right now, when the future is all in the cloud.
Panasonic's sexily named LM-BE100J BDXL Blu-ray discs are a special edition of single-sided discs capable of holding up to 100 gigs and being rewritten over and over. Neato. They'll cost you $120 each when they go on sale in Japan in April. Oh, and they've also got a special scratch-resistant coating to help prolong the time until some accident renders them totally useless, destroying all of your data at the same time.
And that right there is the problem with physical media, specifically with optical media. It's fragile, and that makes it a lousy place to store data you care about. Besides, under what circumstances would anyone ever need optical media? In day to day use, I can think of like two: buying software and renting movies. Both of these uses are getting rapidly eclipsed by online services, and rightly so.
Cloud-based services have the advantage of making sure that your data is always safe and secure, mirrored across one or more redundant RAID systems in geographically separated server farms. The downside is that having all of your stuff somewhere else means that when you need something, you have to either download or stream it, but it's not going to be too long (knock on wood) before we're all rockin' awesome broadband connections that will make data transfers fast and effortless.
Like many of you, I've got a big DVD collection left over from back when there was nowhere else that made sense to put several gigs of data. But now, I'm slowly transferring all of that onto my home RAID system and my Pogoplug, which will quite happily stream my movies to all of my computers that don't have DVD drives. And that's really the future: all your media, wherever you want, whenever you want. Bigger and better Blu-ray is just prolonging the inevitable.
Via Physorg
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