A Guy said:

Believing there is a future for optical discs, Sony and Panasonic have said they will jointly develop a new next-generation standard capable of storing a minimum of 300GB on a single piece of media. While both companies have released their own high-capacity optical solutions in the past, they will now work together to develop a new format that will target professionals, but may also come in handy for regular consumers as well.

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A Guy

Thanks Bill

a minimum of 300GB

Wow looking forward to seeing this

Heh, Jimbo has a point. Even if we disregard the DRM stuff, Blu-ray was very very "meh". Expensive the disk, even more expensive the players needed to read it, myopically focused the market (basically 3D movies. Never seen blu-rays used to do anything else here).

So yeah, if the price does not become 50 bucks per friggin movie plus 100+ for a player and 2000+ for the home cinema that is actually able to play it at full quality regardless of HD, 4K or multi-dimensional holographic movie making technology, then it will likely still have some kind of place as the last gasp of a dying technnology.

I still think that the future will be transition to either fully digital downloads/streaming or modified USB flash drives as they rely on technology that has a ton of other uses as well so can enjoy higher cost reductions due to massive mass-production.

If they are "burn once" discs (ROM) they have a big advantage over Flash and HDDs, malware can't install itself to the media (after they have been burned).

I could carry backup images of all of my clean VMs, several Linux distros and numerous repair tools on a single disc.

The problems I see are burn time and access time.
It takes ages to transfer 300 GB off of my USB2.0 external HDDs (even USB3.0 isn't particularly speedy).

There will always be a market for a hard copy. People also need to archive data. On the one hand it does seem rather pointless as I can remember being told when I had a PC with a 1GB drive I would never fill that up But I did and then some. Here in the USA we are reading reports of cable providers sabataging streaming downloads from Netflix, youtube etc. You can buy a fast connection but the cable companies don't really want you to use it Time Warner Cable: No, we don
So unless you like watching your favourite actors "buffering" constantly you will need a DVD of some kind.

lehnerus2000 said:

If they are "burn once" discs (ROM) they have a big advantage over Flash and HDDs, malware can't install itself to the media (after they have been burned).

Linux does not allow that to happen anyway. Which is why I use linux distros on my USB PC recovery "toolkit" I made with YUMI.

Besides, there are USB drives that can be write-protected with the flip of a switch like the bulk of SD cards, and that technology isn't going to disappear while they are developing this new optical standard.

I could carry backup images of all of my clean VMs, several Linux distros and numerous repair tools on a single disc.

That will work only on a select few PCs (the ones with the reader, that will be a minority for a loong while, given how even old stuff is still good enough today). Unless you get an external reader.

Indianatone said:

Here in the USA we are reading reports of cable providers sabataging streaming downloads from Netflix, youtube etc.

Here in the rest of the world internet speed sucks for a lot of people anyway so that throttling isn't even necessary.

The point was that there are better ways than another new optical drive standard to move data without an internet connection. (namely flash-based storage devices)

I mean, the same situation did not make Blu Ray disks particularly appealing, and adding a new standard will only make it worse.
As it's a new technology all over again, and you cannot simply assume that everyone has a 300GB optical disk reader at home (unless you are Microsoft) the same way you can safely assume that everyone will be able to read a DVD (and around 40-50% are able to read a Blu-Ray).

So that's a few years of R&D, on top of a few years for the new standard to get some recognition and begin to be widespread enough, while hoping that flash-based drive technology sits here doing nothing?

I mean, we have 128 GB SD cards now man. Next year they are likely going to come out with 256 GB ones at affordable prices (there are already 256 GB SD cards but they cost something like 900$).
And the "new" SDXC standard they made in 2009 allows them to go up to 2 TB when they get the chips for that.

EDIT: addendum:
One of the main reasons behind Blu-ray back in the day was that flash drives were too slow for HD movies or 3D or whatever, but that is no more the case since SDHC class 4 (transfer speeds around 4 MB/s, around that of Blu-rays), all new cards are class 10, transfer speeds in excess of 10 MB/s, and depending on manufacturer speeds vary between 20 and 40 MB/s.
Most USB drives have read speeds in excess of 20 MB/s even without going in the high-end models.

bobafetthotmail said:

lehnerus2000 said:

If they are "burn once" discs (ROM) they have a big advantage over Flash and HDDs, malware can't install itself to the media (after they have been burned).

Linux does not allow that to happen anyway. Which is why I use linux distros on my USB PC recovery "toolkit" I made with YUMI.

Besides, there are USB drives that can be write-protected with the flip of a switch like the bulk of SD cards, and that technology isn't going to disappear while they are developing this new optical standard.

Linux allows things to run with the User's Privilege Level.
I have received patches for RPE and RCE (not as many as for Windows though).

I have never seen a USB stick with that obvious feature (maybe they don't sell them in Australia).
I have seen Internet forum comments stating that say they exist.

I don't use SD cards, but you are right (my friend has a couple lying around).

Why don't external HDDs come with "Write Protection" switches?

bobafetthotmail said:

I could carry backup images of all of my clean VMs, several Linux distros and numerous repair tools on a single disc.

That will work only on a select few PCs (the ones with the reader, that will be a minority for a loong while, given how even old stuff is still good enough today). Unless you get an external reader.

That is true enough. :)

bobafetthotmail said:

The point was that there are better ways than another new optical drive standard to move data without an internet connection. (namely flash-based storage devices)

I mean, the same situation did not make Blu Ray disks particularly appealing, and adding a new standard will only make it worse.
As it's a new technology all over again, and you cannot simply assume that everyone has a 300GB optical disk reader at home (unless you are Microsoft) the same way you can safely assume that everyone will be able to read a DVD (and around 40-50% are able to read a Blu-Ray).

Obviously the limiting factor will be cost. :)

Blu-ray discs are expensive.
Cheap Blu-ray discs are 6x the cost of expensive DVD discs (at my supplier).

The drives aren't much better (at least they are backwards compatible).