This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I think it is so sad because It is end of the nice era.
I'm one of like 5 people on the planet who still uses his minidisc player. I've bought some of the blank minidiscs Sony was still making. Seeing them finally end production hurts. I have a bunch of minidiscs already, but I feel like I should stock up before prices go nuts.
I had a minidisc for years. Quickly got replaced by chip based MP3 players.
I still liked my discs because I could swap and play more music.
I had a minidisc stereo in like, idk, 1998? That was an awesome piece of tech.
It was the physical mp3
This is only for recordable BD-Rs, Blu-ray movies will not be affected.
It's a media that contains what a USB drive does. That's great for one movie, not really as a slow data storage device.
They should invent a USB drive in the form factor of a DVD
Since it rotates so fast, the bits would get pushed out much quicker!
Trouble is that pushing the bytes on will be really difficult.
That's why you stop rotating before writing, obviously
So it is one option less to store data long term and inaccessible to covert internet surviallance, but only the plebs are restricted.
Optical media is not long term. Hurry up to backup your DVD videos and games, before you can't anymore.
Recordable media isn't. Factory pressed media if stored correctly should outlast the person who bought it.
Should. Real is about 20 years even for big libraries. I've seen bad DVD (plastic gone dull) in the library of ETHZ.
using optical media for long term storage is quite a bad idea. Especially R/RW media. They tend to (although not always) degrade quite quickly
There are a few optical storage mediums designed for long term archival storage. Like M-Disc or (as mentioned in the article) pioneers DM for Archive, both of which are still commercially available.
And provided they're stored properly, even more general consumer oriented optical media can easily last a few decades. Granted the environmental aspect of "proper storage" (<50% relative humidity, constant temp <80F and >50F) can be difficult to achieve at home in a lot of regions, but generally banks and credit unions have an option to get a safety deposit box which is generally in an environmentally controlled room. Other than that just store your media in an opaque single disc case.
Even the bank safes are useless in hot and humid cities if you want to preserve anything for say 10 to 20 years.
I wa going to suggest tape drives for long term archiving, but after looking, holy shit are they expensive for some reason. I've used them at work but I guess I've never actually seen the price tag.
They used to be affordable. Nah ... they used to be cheap.
I don't even know what to say about this mess, but yes: that's enterprise pricing. It doesn't need to be that way, but it can be because those are the kind of prices you can charge businesses. And really, just as a pleasant capitalistic side effect of this, is that the lower classes are completely locked off form this technology. It's not a mystery, it's not a conspiracy, it's business. And I hate it.
Yup, when you have a captive customer base, you have a lot of flexibility on pricing.
Tape is still the cheapest option for mass amounts of storage since the actual tapes are so cheap. You just need to store enough data to offset the cost of the drive. Drive cost increases very quickly the higher you go in storage density.
