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Pioneer Respects Base-2 with 256GB Blu-ray Discs

Subject: General Tech, Storage | May 17, 2014 - 02:47 AM |
Tagged: Pioneer, bluray

By layering eight layers of 32GB Blu-ray media, Pioneer has achieved 256GB worth of storage on a single-sided optical disc. If you are more interested in storage than labels, the company acknowledges the obvious extension to double-sided media with 512GB of capacity. They also leave the door open for 1TB and larger discs by extending their signaling method to more than twelve layers.

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Image Credit: Wikipedia

It suffices to say that this is a lot of storage. If cost can be kept low enough, optical media could once again be viable for archival and backup. Once a drive is purchased, and USB 3.0 makes it trivial to purchase a single drive for multiple computers, a single disc could bit-for-bit copy a full SSD and other, more modern amounts of data. Basically, it is much less work backing up in 256GB chunks than 4.7GB or 25GB ones.

If cost can be kept low enough is a serious point, though. BD-Rs retail for about $50/1.3TB (according to a few Newegg searches) and DVD-Rs are around the same ($25/500GB). This is not too far from hard drive territory (~100$/2 TB). Of course, hard drives are also faster, rewritable, and do not need to be inserted into a drive for reading and writing... because they are one. People are transitioning away from optical media to hard drives. Cost would need to be phenomenal to reverse that momentum.

4K and UHD video content was not discussed but, let's face it, your mind went there, too.

Source: Pioneer

Storage Visions - The Panasonic DataArchiver - 108TB of Blu-Ray Archival Storage in a 6U Chassis

Subject: Storage, Shows and Expos | January 6, 2013 - 09:59 PM |
Tagged: Panasonic, ces 2013, CES, bluray

At Storage Visions I came across a clever device from Panasonic. The DataArchiver:

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This is a 6U rack-mount chasses, capable of being filled with 108TB of Blu-Ray discs. Several stacks of 12-disc cartridges load into two drawers. A handler rides between the two drawers, fetching cartridges as needed, and loading the discs into the 12 installed Blu-Ray drives:

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This system provides excellent long-term archival storage of Blu-Ray discs (when handled properly - as it does), and for the extra cautious, the system can even mount and access the discs as RAID-5 or 6 volumes, allowing for single or double protection from faulty discs / disc sectors. The DataArchiver also implements AES256 across all discs in the array. Certainly an interesting piece of archival technology.

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Source:

Remember when buying a Blu-ray reader would double the value of your PC?

Subject: Storage | August 29, 2011 - 05:19 PM |
Tagged: plextor, PX-LB950UE, bluray, external drive

That isn't the case anymore as you can pick up the Plextor PX-LB950UE for $220 and plug it in externally to burn single or dual layer Blu-ray disks, as well as DVDs.  With both USB 3.0 and eSATA connections you should have no trouble with compatibility and you will want the fast transfer rates due to the volume of data that Blu-ray can handle.  Unfortunately PCStats could not get the Plextor to play back the movie that they were using for testing, no matter what software they tried to use to play it.  A diagnostic showed nothing wrong with the disk nor with the player and a Google search showed that many people have similar problems with a wide variety of disks and players.  They did have a very early version of the firmware; perhaps an updated version will resolve that particular problem.  Certainly something to keep in mind before picking up this external drive.

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"In recent weeks the talk of the town has been a sleek black external 12x Blu-ray WRITER from the folks at Plextor. The Plextor PX-LB950UE connects via USB 3.0 or eSATA cables and is capable of burning single layer Blu-ray Disk (BD) media at 12x, double layer BD media at 8x and DVD-R media at 16x speeds. In addition, it supports the playback of Blu-ray 3D movie titles. The bonus to going the Blu-ray writer route, is that BD-R media is even more useful than DVD media for archiving MASSIVE amounts of data."

Here are some more Storage reviews from around the web:

Storage

Source: PC Stats