
Sony and Panasonic announce the Archival Disc format - jhack
http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press/201403/14-0310E/index.html
======
dsr_
Important information that will drastically affect actual usage not provided:
\- expected and guaranteed lifetime of discs \- minimum undamaged read/write
speeds \- recoverable-error read speeds \- bit error rate for writing and
reading

Let's take a typical small business system's requirements. We have a 2U
database with 12 3.5" hot-swap disks, 2 200GB SSDs for caching and 10 3TB
disks in a RAID10. We have up to 15TB that we want to archive.

Optimism: we get 100MB/s write speed and a write BER of 10^-15. We swap 30
500GB disks, each taking about an hour and a half to write, and about one in a
thousand disks has an unrecoverable error.

More likely: we get 75MB/s sustained write speed and a write BER of 10^-14. We
swap 30 500GB disks, each taking close to two hours, and we can expect one in
three complete sets to have an unrecoverable error.

Press releases: not quite useful.

~~~
wazoox
In the meanwhile, you could grab an existing LTO-6 drive, and archive
everything on 6 uncompressed tapes in about 30 hours (much less if your data
is prone to compression).

~~~
beagle3
Or 4x 4TB drives (at ~$180-$250 each from a quick newegg search), at ~15 hours
if you can connect all of them at the same time, or ~60 hours if you need to
do that serially (assuming 75MB/sec, which I often get - are you sure you're
actually getting 150MB/sec on your LTO-6 tapes?)

At about a quarter of the price of the LTO tape drive alone -- data can be
recovered anywhere for the next 20 years or so (I have tapes from 2002 that I
was unable to find a tape drive for in 2007, but I have a pair of 15GB IDE
disks from 2000 that I checked last month and are still readable).

At $60-$80/2.5TB, ($24/TB) LTO6 does have an advantage to disk ($40/TB) if you
have hundreds of TBs to backup. However, because of the cost of the drive
itself ($3000), you only break even after 200TB or so. And if your drive
breaks (or you need to backup in one place and recover in another, as is often
the case with DR plans), you break even only after 400TB or so.

Since approximately 1998, hard drives for backup beat tapes on capacity,
price, access speed (drives are random access!) accessibility (an external
universal SATA/IDE can be bought for $30 or so, but you already have the
connections on your motherboard so you don't even need it). I haven't been
able to find anyone with a convincing argument for tapes - maybe you have one?

~~~
wazoox
Well I've recently restored 150 LTO-2 tapes from 2002/2003 using a perfectly
current LTO-4 drive, and I'm pretty sure you'd have a heck of a hard time
successfully reading all of a bunch of 150 hard drives of the same vintage
without losing a single file.

Hard drives are much less reliable than tapes; hard drives aren't made to be
stored on shelves; and when a hard drive fails, you most of the time lose most
or all of its data, while a tape failure generally affects only one file (if
it's a reasonably large file and you aren't using compression).

As soon as your storage and archival needs are more than a few disk drives, do
yourself a service and switch either to RDX or to tape. Storing basic HDD on
shelves is a recipe for data loss. I know it because we sell backup solutions
to people doing it and losing data all the time :)

~~~
beagle3
Disclaimer: my experience with tapes is dated. I used IBM tapes with a
mainframe (System 390, library robot and all) until 1995, and then only used
consumer level myself, but had witnessed the occasional horror story at a
client's.

> Well I've recently restored 150 LTO-2 tapes from 2002/2003 using a perfectly
> current LTO-4 drive, and I'm pretty sure you'd have a heck of a hard time
> successfully reading all of a bunch of 150 hard drives of the same vintage
> without losing a single file.

That might be true. However, I have so far had perfect success with about 50
or so drives that I've restored from (across 10 years or so), and abysmal
success with tapes (about 1/10 in the mainframe days would not restore).

> Hard drives are much less reliable than tapes; hard drives aren't made to be
> stored on shelves;

That's true, but neither are tapes. Hard drives are less tolerant to
environmental conditions than tapes, they survive better when exposed to heat,
and get damaged more quickly when exposed to cold (oils used to keep it
running smooth tend to congeal irreversibly when exposed to cold for long).
Also, at least in the past, even weak magnetic fields wreaked havoc on tapes,
and even strong ones spared drives.

> As soon as your storage and archival needs are more than a few disk drives,
> do yourself a service and switch either to RDX or to tape. Storing basic HDD
> on shelves is a recipe for data loss. I know it because we sell backup
> solutions to people doing it and losing data all the time :)

In my current top-secret venture, I need to keep everything (~20TB/customer)
randomly accessible for 3 years, and cold-store accessible or 7. So far, we
just keep multiple copies (some online and some offline), and keep refershing
to newer larger drives every couple of years. When I specced it 3 years ago,
tapes were twice as expensive (I need a tape drive at every customer location
+ at least two at my office) and didn't properly address the random access
aspect.

But I keep re-evaluating. So far, the next step seems to be going to a
BackBlaze style pod - which would also address the valid drive-fails-
completely concern you raised.

p.s., I find the "compressed" statistics really misleading. Every kind of
backup software can compress - if I saw a hard drive manufacturer sell a ("2TB
drive (1TB uncompressed)" I would consider it fraudulent, but that's the
standard for tapes. For the record, my data is (as far as tape drives are
concerned) not compressible at all -- think audio, video, jpegs, and other
analog recordings.

EDIT: p.p.s: Of course, don't keep hard drives on shelves. Nor tapes. Humidity
and temperature need to be controlled, and the environment needs to be anti-
static. For archival purposes, the 5400-RPM usb self-powered disks are a
little slow, but keep very well, in my experience, with reasonable
temp/humidity.

EDIT2: (bad) memories are coming back. The biggest problem I recall with tapes
in the mainframe days, were that some tapes (the daily and weekly backup sets)
were continuously reused, to the point that mechanical wear and tear was a
bigger problem than magnetic wear. And the even bigger problem was that you
only found that out when trying to restore. One advantage of disks is that you
keep reading them while writing them - wear is apparent much more quickly. If
you're only doing archives and never rewrite tapes, that doesn't matter. If
you keep reusing the same tapes/disks, it makes a huge difference in
reliability.

~~~
wazoox
Yes modern use case for tapes is archive, not backup. In fact, LTO-7 should be
back-compatible from LTO-4 onwards to reflect this. Most people do backup
disk-to-disk, with a remote copy on tape for instance.

------
Tepix
What about M-Disc? The DVD-writers that can write them are just as cheap as
normal ones and I think $4 for a DVD-R is acceptable for long term storage.
They announced that they would offer Blu-Ray media soon but I haven't seen
them for sale.

~~~
mashmac2
[http://www.mdisc.com/what-is-mdisc/](http://www.mdisc.com/what-is-mdisc/) for
those curious - it appears to be a stronger archival DVD/blu-ray that is
already burn-able on certain drives that are on the market.

~~~
cgore
Has anybody used these? A 1,000-year DVD/Blu-Ray sounds good. I would use it
if it is actually reliable. (Actually just want decades, but centuries is
better.)

~~~
post_break
Non LTH BD-R has an estimated lifetime of 50 years if stored properly. 40
cents a disk. In a cd case, in your closet.

M-Disk 1000 years, same storage idea. $5 a disc.

------
Pitarou
This makes perfect sense.

Sony and Panasonic need to do _something_ with their lead in optical disk
technology, but there's no demand for a Blu-ray successor. Heck, there isn't
even much demand for Blu-ray. So archiving is the way to go.

I just hope they make those things to last.

~~~
sliverstorm
Demand for Blu-ray is there. Perhaps not as great or immediate as the demand
for DVD after VHS was (thanks to great backwards compatibility), but at least
everyone I know or have met has switched to Blu-ray for their new movie buys.

If there's any repression in the movie market, I would blame prices/multi-
format bundling. I don't want to buy a six-version pack with two different
digital versions, a Blu-ray copy, a DVD copy, a 4:3 DVD copy, and a VHS copy
for $40. I want ONE DISC, Blu-ray, for $8-10

~~~
wernercd
Name a bundle that included BR, DVD and... Widescreen/4:3 copies? Much less
VHS?

I'll pay a couple extra dollars for the BR + DVD bundles (Although, all my
stuff plays BR these days)... I think it's fairly standard to get Widescreen
these days as well. I don't remember any recent 4:3 releases for newer titles.

The main issue I have is "release day" discounts of $~10-15... followed by
months of $~20-25. I hate missing a "must have" and then waiting until the
price is reasonable again.

~~~
sliverstorm
I was mildly exaggerating, but I mean stuff like this:

[http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CTSDDVO/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_ttl...](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CTSDDVO/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=2TO0N2MFVR7LV&coliid=I2HH5BUT7XKQR9)

[http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00867GHS8/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_ttl...](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00867GHS8/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=2TO0N2MFVR7LV&coliid=I1FWD427HL83LU)

I don't _mind_ the 2-disc BR/DVD bundles, I just wish I had the option to buy
a 1-disc BR instead. It gets even harder when you want a 1-disc 3D BR.

~~~
hga
What these bundles are telling us---and they're fairly common in US market
anime---is that the price of pressing a DVD is so cheap it's better to make
one SKU with both. Probably also encourages people to buy a Blu-Ray player as
well if they still haven't.

~~~
sliverstorm
And that's fine, but the bundle seems to be used to justify higher prices.
"Oh, well it _would_ be $10, but you get both a Blu-ray and a DVD, so we have
to charge you $20"

~~~
hga
Bleah. I haven't noticed that in the US anime market, but prices are all over
the map as companies seek better/sustainable business models. Anime suffered
from the general decline in DVD sales, and the decrease in retail outlets,
like The Musicland Group (Musicland, Sam Goody, Suncoast Motion Picture
Company, On Cue, and Media Play superstores) going poof after Best Buy bought
them.

------
jackgavigan
I expect this will be the same form-factor as existing 5.25" magneto-optical
and Ultra Density Optical disks, which have been around for quite a while.

Back in 1998, I dealt with HP jukeboxes the size of a wardrobe with robotic
arms to pluck 9.1GB magneto-optical disks out of the racks and stick them into
drives. IIRC, HP guaranteed their disks for 100 years.

~~~
ChuckFrank
I get a kick out of the idea that someone would guarantee something beyond
their lifespan, and possibly that of the institution. 100 years is still a
pretty long time, and lots of things can happen, so I'm not sure who would be
there at the 80 year mark if something were to go wrong with the disks.

~~~
unethical_ban
I guarantee my stone tablets will last 100 years if they are cared for as
specified in the user manual.

Am I crazy?

~~~
err4nt
Yes stone is great, but how many bytes/tablet do you get on average?

~~~
eropple
Are you chiseling in UTF-8 or UTF-16?

------
gggggggg
From the 2013 release: "they intend to offer solutions that preserve valuable
data for future generations".

No mention in the new release how long they are meant to last though. This
seems like a pretty key point to me.

~~~
ekianjo
Even if they are not meant to last, say, more than 10 years, you could back
them up with fresh disks in 8-9 years timeframe and be good to go for another
decade, What's important after is that the disk can still be read by newer
drives later on.

------
blue1
This does not appear to be a consumer-oriented format like CDs and DVDs, but
rather a niche product. Meaning that it will probably be not cheap. How is it
supposed to be competitive with tape? 1TB is not that much.

~~~
jackgavigan
Tape is less reliable than optical disks.

~~~
stonith
It's also so slow to retrieve the content that as a DR strategy it's not very
good, since you could be waiting months to recover all your data.

I would imagine that a silo with multiple robots to place disks in many
readers would be significantly better than tape in most ways, and would retain
the low power advantage that tape enjoys over powered systems.

~~~
welterde
The time to read the complete tape might be longer than the time to read a
blu-ray, but in terms of data rates modern tapes are still about a factor of 3
ahead of optical disks (160MB/s for Ultrium 6 vs 54MB/s for Blu-ray 12x).

~~~
kalleboo
I wonder what happened to the idea of multiple optical read heads. When CD-ROM
drives were trying to maintain 52x read rates, I think Pioneer or someone made
a drive that read at twice the rate using 2 separate optical assemblies.

~~~
sp332
Kenwood had a 72x drive that used 7 lasers!
[http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=339&page=2](http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=339&page=2)

------
roeme
Very interesting, though I'm really missing information on what kind of
material they are using. While it's true that CD's can take a bit of the kind
of environmental abuse they describe (you scratching your game's CD doesn't
fall into this category), we all know that in reality they weren't that
durable – though I suppose that stemmed more from the fact that most CD's were
produced cheaply, corners cut, a lot of abuse by the end user and whatnot. Did
you know that there's even a fungus that really likes to eat CD's? (
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geotrichum_candidum](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geotrichum_candidum)
– Not so much for damp archive cellars, then! ).

In conclusion; I think that just enforcing high manufacturing standards won't
suffice, there must be some material definition as well. Looking forward for
more information on this.

~~~
nodata
Wasn't the problem with CDs that they had a plastic layer, and a scratchable
metal data layer with no protection on top?

~~~
ars
Yah, everyone assumed that the clear side was the fragile side and protected
it, but actually the label side is much more fragile - and unlike the clear
side, unfixable if it gets damaged.

But what happened to the promised sapphire (alumina) coating on disks that
makes them scratch proof?

------
rlpb
1TB doesn't take so long to upload nowadays. Isn't this product going to have
battle with a new era where we just upload to a storage provider, the provider
aggregates customers' stored data on a massive scale and so the underlying
storage technology no longer matters?

I'm thinking about services like Amazon S3 and Glacier here, together with
whatever competition appears. I presume that at this level, what matters is
exabyte level storage hardware (perhaps a robot-managed room of archival discs
or tapes). One where the provider can switch technology every few years, and
customers never have to notice.

At capacities on the level of terabytes, we're getting to the point where
upload bandwidth isn't so much of a bottleneck any more, aren't we?

~~~
Spittie
What? I don't know where you live, but I assure you that there are plenty of
places where uploading a TB takes a lot of times (for example, it would take
about 3 months with my home connection). Even using the average global upload
speed (7.6Mbps[1]) it would take 12 days.

So no, I don't think this is going to battle storage providers.

[1] [http://www.netindex.com/](http://www.netindex.com/)

~~~
rlpb
I claim that people who have the speed of your home connection is not the
target market. You may want one of these, but this kind of demand will not be
enough to support the existence of this product.

Businesses have a choice: they can invest in buying storage hardware for a
bunch of their computers every few years, or they can invest in a fast-enough
Internet connection and outsource the storage. That Internet connection will
bring them additional benefits over just storage.

I claim that the economics are switching in favor of the Internet option, and
will continue to do so over the next decade.

~~~
Spittie
The problem is that businesses don't always have a choice. Maybe big
corporations do, but for small companies, you have to deal with that the
locals ISPs give you. Where I live (Italy), unless you happen to live in a
major city (and even there, the coverage is small and the best speed you can
get is 10mb/s) the best you can get is a SHDSL line, which gives you at most
8mb/s for about 300-400€/month. And that's if you're lucky to have a central
nearby that supports it, otherwise ADSL2+ it is (1mb/s). I'm sure this is the
situation in most of the world.

There's is also the "political" problem (as outlined by everyone else), I
can't see every company wanting to outsource the storage of their secret data.
Then you're also at the mercy of Amazon, that for whatever reason can stop
providing you service (It's a tiny possibility, but it's still there).

~~~
mseebach
For the "Archive Disc" to be viable, it needs to still be viable several years
from now. Despite areas with poor connectivity, connection bandwidth will only
ever go up (and prices down), and it does so very quickly.

------
jrochkind1
It seems this is mainly just a larger capacity (1TB) optical disc, and the
'archival' is just marketing?

For that matter, if they were really marketing at those who are professionally
concerned with long-term reliable storage (archivists), even the marketing
would include some information on what makes this new media any more reliable
over the long-term than existing optical media. The press release includes
_nothing_ on this, odd for something branded as 'archival'.

It looks like it's just a larger capacity optical disc (which I'm sure there's
a market for), with the 'archival' part just being marketting (odd; apparently
they think there's a market for this too, even when it's just spin).

~~~
keeperofdakeys
CD's don't last forever
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-R#Lifespan](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-R#Lifespan)),
so you can't use them for archival purposes. For now, there is no way to tell
whether these will be any better.

~~~
hga
I believe you can use them for archival purposes _if you buy quality discs_.
Which for me means Made in Japan Taiyo Yuden, although perhaps Mitsui/MAM-A
are good. See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=7372810](https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=7372810)
for my most recent experiences with these discs.

~~~
acdha
This is really, really, dangerous advice unless you're following proper
archival practice and have made multiple copies which are regularly checked
for bit errors. For all media, but particularly for CD-Rs, you have to be very
careful about environmental conditions – a few degrees temperature difference
makes a difference for how fast the dye degrades and unless you actually
monitor this, it's easy to have that problem without noticing it until things
start failing.

For a small user, you have the extra concern of betting large on a single
production run from a single vendor. If you care about archival, you'd really
want to burn multiple copies using discs from different production runs and,
preferably, different manufacturers.

(This is, of course, why I'd really recommend using CD-Rs only in conjunction
with a different technology such as AWS Glacier which has a completely
different set of failure modes)

~~~
hga
There's actually a lot less commonality in a single production run than you'd
think, or so I believe having analyzed Taiyo Yuden disc hub numbers. Different
physical machines, I suspect. But of course the "chemistry" will be roughly
the same, and thus a whole batch or more could go bad early. Although one
might hope they do accelerated aging tests on their production.

You are of course correct about the precautions that have to be used, but
there's screw cases for everything you can use to back up your data. I was
merely responding to the assertion that CD-Rs are entirely unsuited for
archival purposes, and backed it up with my own experiences over a decade and
a half.

Me, I live a hair's breath from Tornado Alley, and use multiple means to
backup my data, local discs, disks in another room (which got trashed enough
to be unreliable in a tornado [http://www.ancell-
ent.com/1715_Rex_Ave_127B_Joplin/images/](http://www.ancell-
ent.com/1715_Rex_Ave_127B_Joplin/images/)) which I've switched to LTO-4 tape,
some of which live in a safe deposit box, and the really important stuff
offsite to rsync.net (which saved the only important data totally lost locally
from the tornado, or at least without $$$ to a data recovery firm). And of
course the CD-Rs, which at some point I'll start putting into the disk and LTO
bases system.

~~~
acdha
> Although one might hope they do accelerated aging tests on their production

The experienced storage admins I know share that hope but don't trust vendors
not to get it wrong. It's just too easy to miss a factor which turns out to
matter.

> I was merely responding to the assertion that CD-Rs are entirely unsuited
> for archival purposes, and backed it up with my own experiences over a
> decade and a half.

Question: have you done bit-level checksum validation on that old media or is
that just the ability to read without errors? There's a little bit of error
correction built into the format but I wouldn't trust it for anything
important.

~~~
hga
Bit level CRC-32 checksum validation, absolutely. (Which is actually probably
marginal for the file sizes concerned, but that's the standard everyone uses.)

However my words are coming across in this discussion, I'm really not a very
trusting guy! Many of my early computer experiences were in the early '80s
with surplus hardware from the '70s, including a PDP-11/45 that was a bit
beyond the 300th DEC manufactured. Of course everyone used magtape back then
for backups, and those were quite reliable (originally intended to be reliable
off-line storage).

ADDED: and there are other precautions to take. E.g. I only bought my optical
media in April and October, to minimize the environmental stress during
shipping.

~~~
acdha
> Bit level CRC-32 checksum validation, absolutely. (Which is actually
> probably marginal for the file sizes concerned, but that's the standard
> everyone uses.)

In the digital preservation community, the standard is at least MD-5 / SHA-1
and most people are moving to SHA-256/512\. With a CRC-32 check you're likely
to get false-negatives for modern data volumes and there are disturbing
reports of CRC failures at higher than expected rates[1] which suggest that
the best answer is using multiple, cryptographic hashes particularly since the
computation has effectively been free for a least a decade except on unusually
CPU-starved storage hosts.

1\. I don't recall the paper but I believe it was a followup to
[http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2000/conf/paper/sigco...](http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2000/conf/paper/sigcomm2000-9-1.pdf)

------
nemasu
Sounds interesting. Hopefully they will release more technical information
about what makes it "archival" quality. Seems like a normal Blu-ray at first
glance.

~~~
fur0n
like it says, higher capacity (300GB, 500GB, and 1TB) along with higher
redundancy.

~~~
deletes
But they don't say how well it does, compared to the problem of cd/dvd, that
fail to work after 10 years for no apparent reason( no visible physical damage
).

------
hrktb
>development of a standard for professional-use next-generation optical discs
\-- > dust-resistance and water-resistance, and can also withstand changes in
temperature and humidity when stored.

So it's a new standard with tougher physical requirements. Actually in a
japanese press release [1] they present at the end the current archival
solution offered by Sony, which consist of a set of 12 optical discs in a
cartridge. I'd image this new disc standard could be sealed as well for better
protection.

[1]
[http://www.sony.co.jp/SonyInfo/News/Press/201307/13-0729/](http://www.sony.co.jp/SonyInfo/News/Press/201307/13-0729/)

------
jmnicolas
I, for one, am glad that disc is not dead.

------
egeozcan
I'd bet this will take years to produce in reasonable price levels and by then
the capacity will have been made irrelevant by the market.

------
anon4
If these still come as flimsy plastic fully exposed to the elements and can't
be touched on the face, lest the data be destroyed, I'll be sorely
disappointed.

Seriously, why hasn't anyone made diskette-style discs a common standard? I
have never seen a cd last more than a few years, or one single touch with a
finger on the shiny side.

~~~
rwallace
Well, if you're going to go to a cartridge style format, the competition is
hard disks, which can store three or four terabytes each in a highly reliable
form; sure, they cost more per disc, but the upfront costs are very low; I
suspect the volume at which cartridges would become cheaper is larger than the
market would support.

~~~
sspiff
Hard disks are also not very good at long term storage, I believe most aren't
designed to hold their magnetic charge for decades without being powered and
rewritten.

~~~
rwallace
Sure, but the same is true of every high-density medium. You have to either
accept data storage is a dynamic process of repeated copying, or else do it
the old-fashioned way and store your data on acid-free paper.

(Well, unless you want to use one of the exotic technologies that etch your
data on metal plates or whatever; but in practice, paper is a lot cheaper.)

------
lampe3
And why not save it on a External HDD ? I thought that CDs/DVDs are bad for
backup because they crumble.

~~~
sspiff
Hard disks are also bad for backup because they rely on a magnetic charge
being retained on the platters. Eventually, this charge becomes to weak to be
read reliably, so it is unsuitable for long-term storage. Pressed disks (as
in, those not burnt with a consumer drive) can last a lifetime if you take
proper care of them, and are not as vulnerable to light, heat or humidity as
the typical DVD-R.

~~~
lampe3
Thanks for the information.

If i cant afford to press the disks how should i backup my data?

Right now we are using nas systems with a raid setup

~~~
sspiff
To be honest, I haven't got a clue. Affordable, multi-decade storage is still
an unsolved problem as far as I know.

A RAID NAS is a good medium-term solution, and perhaps creating offline
backups on disconnected drives every 5 years or so can solve long term
storage, though it does require maintenance over time (refreshing the drives).
If you are not afraid to use cloud storage, you might use those services, but
I don't know how long those will be around.

~~~
hga
Note that if you're using cheap, big consumer quality disks and RAID 5, if you
lose one you're likely to lose the whole array because at least one of the
other disks will have unrecoverable read errors during the rebuild. RAID 6
helps, but the math is still frightening.

Granted, I haven't looked for years at what's been done to address this, but
based on the state of the art back then I'd only try this with ZFS, which
checksums everything it puts to disk, which among other things catches the
incredible screw case of the very complicated firmware writing the right data
correctly to the wrong location on the disk (!).

------
mrmondo
I'm almost certain that 1TB isn't large enough for 2014, let alone the next
3-5 years.

~~~
aunty_helen
I'm sure they would sell you more than one ;)

------
bebopsbraunbaer
is there any information about the lifespan the disc? how long cant he data be
read before the discs start to lose data because of age? 5 years?

------
pasbesoin
Is there a "plug and chug" way to do PAR (PAR2, etc.) segmentation and error
correction if one is not using WinRAR?

------
al2o3cr
Ah yes, this must be targeting the ever-popular "people who didn't pay
attention to any of Sony's OTHER proprietary formats that have now been
utterly abandoned" market.

~~~
hga
I've not heard of Sony doing this in the "professional" market, e.g. while
AIT/SAIT has been abandoned, Amazon indicates you can still buy tape
cartridges. But, yeah, if you went with them right now you're wishing you went
with LTO, or have already switched or started.

On the other hand,
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7372595](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7372595)
indicates Panasonic is not trustworthy in this area.

Maybe give this 5-10 years and see if has staying power, adoption by others,
etc. The LTO ecosystem shows this sort of thing can be done.

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slacka
The Holographic Versatile Disc format has existed since 2004 and can store up
to 6 TB vs Archival Disc format capacity of only 300 GB - 1 TB. Any idea what
advantage ADs have over HVDs?

~~~
taspeotis
I think the main advantage is that ADs are relatively less vaporware than HVDs
[1].

> Standards for 100 GB read-only holographic discs and 200 GB recordable
> cartridges were published by ECMA in 2007, but no holographic disc product
> has appeared in the market.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc)

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dannyvanhooy
Mitsubishi ARLEDIA, long-term DVD-R optical media storage are using this
longer. I think they started in 2008.

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dannyvanhooy
Mitsubishi ARLEDIA, long-term DVD-R optical media storage has this a few years
ago. I think they started in 2008. Archival Disc format is not a great news.

~~~
roeme
How are we today, little sockpuppet?

(Can somebody with more karma please flay, er, flag'im?)

