4 ms·

Great article discussing the benefits of optical discs and the author's own experience of using them! I burned hundreds of discs a decade ago and read them all

by nayuki 5y ago

Great article discussing the benefits of optical discs and the author's own experience of using them! I burned hundreds of discs a decade ago and read them all back perfectly, to my surprise. I strongly agree with the write-once behavior for photos and downloads. HDDs worry me in the long term because even if the platter holding the data is fine, the R/W head, mechanics, and electronics could fail, not to mention that a head crash could wipe out good data. I'm extremely disappointed that the capacity of optical disc formats are essentially frozen, topping out at 100 or 128 GB for BD XL. They're definitely not keeping up with the continual increase in storage density and decreasing cost of hard disks and flash memory. Why are new formats not forthcoming? Where's my 300 GB Archival Disc? Where's my 1 TB holographic disc? Where's Microsoft's glass optical disc that's stable for millions of years? I want to keep on burning optical discs and putting them in cold storage, but this gradually obsolete technology is not making a convincing case for me today. Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26038893 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26038893 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29221418 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29221418

tinus_hn 5y ago
How many people are buying these 128GB discs? Probably not a whole lot and that is the reason why nobody’s going to make the investment to create bigger discs. If you want huge local offline storage, the solution is tapes.
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  Even lowly LTO2 is 400gb. Plus the reliability of long term storage of tape is much better researched.
- em3rgent0rdr 5y ago
  But it is already known that magnetic tape is much less reliable in long term storage. The author is looking for long-term reliability, not just huge local offline storage.
  - tinus_hn 5y ago
    It is not known what the durability is for an optical disc format that does not exist. There is no optical disc format that stores the required amount of data. LTO tapes do store the required amount of data and if you want them to last extremely long you should make new copies every 10 years or so. Just like you should for optical media. Sure, some discs might last 50 years. But some others won’t be readable after 15.
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    I remember seeing VHS tapes from the 1980s fail in the mid 1990s with the magnetic layer flaking off from the plastic tape.
ximile 5y ago
Higher capacity optical storage is under development (see https://foliophotonics.com/ https://foliophotonics.com/ for example). My guess is that it's just hard to beat tape or justify upgrading/modifying existing optical disk readers. The selling point now isn't that is a temporary storage solution that happens to last long like CDs and DVDs. I'm sure you have to make a pretty good case to get a customer to switch their high reliability data storage to a novel format. I do hope it can eventually come back though.
eezurr 5y ago
Another issue I've had is bad blocks forming on my SSD drive. I thought I lost a bunch of photographs (nothing important thankfully, just amateur shots when I first got my hands on a camera), but searching around I discovered CHKDSK. 4 hours later and everything was back to normal. My OS (Win10) is on the same SSD. When I made the decision to get a 1 TB SSD for the OS and media storage, deep down a voice whispered [dont do that]. That decision has come to haunt me 1 year (!) later. I used to use 128 or 256 GB SSDs for the OS and keep all my media on another HDD drive (which failed after 10 years). Also: 1 TB discs: https://techgeekforever.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/sony-and-panasonic-announce-archival-disc-1-tb-of-storage-in-the-size-of-a-cd/ https://techgeekforever.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/sony-and-pa...
kmeisthax 5y ago
Archival Disc exists, they just don't support bare discs or readers. You have to buy a full Sony ODA Gen 2 system and... reads the linked comment notices my own reply ...oh. Nevermind. So, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that all of the new formats are not "forthcoming" because of basically two problems that happened at roughly the same time: - Newer optical media formats became too expensive to implement in consumer devices - Optical media is inherently user-hostile, almost as much as tape Ok, first claim first. Back when Blu-Ray first came out, drives were hideously expensive; to the point where the PS3 was basically eating SONY alive because the drive itself cost as much to make as the whole console sold for. Apple outright said they'd never ship a Blu-Ray drive in a Mac because it was too expensive and the patent licensing was a nightmare. Even today Blu-Ray drives are still more than twice as expensive as DVD drives. But, of course, this isn't the only hurdle, but it did dramatically slow Blu-Ray adoption. The spat between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray almost certainly didn't help either. All of that ultimately meant that people weren't buying Blu-Ray players and putting them in their living rooms; which meant that it didn't make sense to have one in your PC either. The dirty secret of optical media is that it's remarkably user-hostile as a consumer storage medium. Discs want to be written from beginning to end, and preferably all-at-once with a single table of contents. This makes it very difficult to actually provide a drag-and-drop utility for getting files onto a disc. You can do this, but in most cases this is a hack involving multi-session filesystems that relies on readers knowing how to stitch together the sessions. This is why Windows had that entirely unhelpful "What do you want to do with this disc" dialog for optical media. If you try to use a Blu-Ray disc like a flash drive you will be extremely disappointed in it. In the days of CDs and DVDs this didn't matter. The consumer benefit was that the discs you were making could go straight into a CD player or DVD player that you already had; the fact that you had to jump through some hoops to do it didn't matter. And if you bought CDs or DVDs you can play them on your computer, too. But far fewer people owned Blu-Ray players, and if they did the player probably also took USB drives. So there would be no reason to ever burn a disc to get a movie onto a player, and getting data onto them was enough of a pain in people's arses that they'd just use USB drives instead. So with all that taken together, nobody is bothering to scale optical discs for consumers because there really isn't a market for them as a data storage medium anymore. The things that discs still do well - i.e. selling you prerecorded movies - also just so happens to still be fine with topping out at 100GB/disc, even for 4K video. Some games are starting to push beyond what a BD-XL can hold, but those games also are "live service" games that update way too frequently for "getting all the assets on the disc" to make any sense. All the supra-Blu-Ray optical data storage formats are all targeted towards the archival market because it's something that optical just accidentally does very well.
forgotpwd16 5y ago
>HDDs worry me in the long term Are SSDs any better in that regard?
- rhn_mk1 5y ago
  No, the memory cells lose charge over time. Even one year can cause data loss. Sorry, I don't have the link, but there was someone who tested how latency increased on drives that spent months on the shelf. The explanation was error correction working harder.
  - xhkkffbf 5y ago
    You don't need a link. I can corroborate with my own experiences. Flash memory slowly forgets information. One guy told me that he can't unplug is big SSD array because he's afraid to lose a few bits. He might as well call it RAM.
mrjangles 5y ago
> Why are new formats not forthcoming? oooh I can answer this one. About 15 years ago I saw a talk from a team at, oxford I think?, that had invented a way to store many terabytes on an ordinary blue ray by adding rotation to the scratches, which can then be read because scratches at different angles polarized the returning light differently. Anyway, they had a working prototype and everything and the big companies like Panasonic all said "No sorry, everyone is shutting down their optical drive lines. We have determined that the future is internet storage and solid state. No one wants disk no matter how much storage they can hold." And that was that.
- rasz 5y ago
  minidisks use polarization

by nayuki 5y ago

tinus_hn 5y ago

How many people are buying these 128GB discs? Probably not a whole lot and that is the reason why nobody’s going to make the investment to create bigger discs. If you want huge local offline storage, the solution is tapes.

smackeyacky 5y ago
Even lowly LTO2 is 400gb. Plus the reliability of long term storage of tape is much better researched.
em3rgent0rdr 5y ago
But it is already known that magnetic tape is much less reliable in long term storage. The author is looking for long-term reliability, not just huge local offline storage.
- tinus_hn 5y ago
  It is not known what the durability is for an optical disc format that does not exist. There is no optical disc format that stores the required amount of data. LTO tapes do store the required amount of data and if you want them to last extremely long you should make new copies every 10 years or so. Just like you should for optical media. Sure, some discs might last 50 years. But some others won’t be readable after 15.
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  I remember seeing VHS tapes from the 1980s fail in the mid 1990s with the magnetic layer flaking off from the plastic tape.

ximile 5y ago

Higher capacity optical storage is under development (see https://foliophotonics.com/ https://foliophotonics.com/ for example). My guess is that it's just hard to beat tape or justify upgrading/modifying existing optical disk readers. The selling point now isn't that is a temporary storage solution that happens to last long like CDs and DVDs. I'm sure you have to make a pretty good case to get a customer to switch their high reliability data storage to a novel format. I do hope it can eventually come back though.

eezurr 5y ago

Another issue I've had is bad blocks forming on my SSD drive. I thought I lost a bunch of photographs (nothing important thankfully, just amateur shots when I first got my hands on a camera), but searching around I discovered CHKDSK. 4 hours later and everything was back to normal. My OS (Win10) is on the same SSD. When I made the decision to get a 1 TB SSD for the OS and media storage, deep down a voice whispered [dont do that]. That decision has come to haunt me 1 year (!) later. I used to use 128 or 256 GB SSDs for the OS and keep all my media on another HDD drive (which failed after 10 years). Also: 1 TB discs: https://techgeekforever.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/sony-and-panasonic-announce-archival-disc-1-tb-of-storage-in-the-size-of-a-cd/ https://techgeekforever.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/sony-and-pa...

kmeisthax 5y ago

Archival Disc exists, they just don't support bare discs or readers. You have to buy a full Sony ODA Gen 2 system and... reads the linked comment notices my own reply ...oh. Nevermind. So, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that all of the new formats are not "forthcoming" because of basically two problems that happened at roughly the same time: - Newer optical media formats became too expensive to implement in consumer devices - Optical media is inherently user-hostile, almost as much as tape Ok, first claim first. Back when Blu-Ray first came out, drives were hideously expensive; to the point where the PS3 was basically eating SONY alive because the drive itself cost as much to make as the whole console sold for. Apple outright said they'd never ship a Blu-Ray drive in a Mac because it was too expensive and the patent licensing was a nightmare. Even today Blu-Ray drives are still more than twice as expensive as DVD drives. But, of course, this isn't the only hurdle, but it did dramatically slow Blu-Ray adoption. The spat between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray almost certainly didn't help either. All of that ultimately meant that people weren't buying Blu-Ray players and putting them in their living rooms; which meant that it didn't make sense to have one in your PC either. The dirty secret of optical media is that it's remarkably user-hostile as a consumer storage medium. Discs want to be written from beginning to end, and preferably all-at-once with a single table of contents. This makes it very difficult to actually provide a drag-and-drop utility for getting files onto a disc. You can do this, but in most cases this is a hack involving multi-session filesystems that relies on readers knowing how to stitch together the sessions. This is why Windows had that entirely unhelpful "What do you want to do with this disc" dialog for optical media. If you try to use a Blu-Ray disc like a flash drive you will be extremely disappointed in it. In the days of CDs and DVDs this didn't matter. The consumer benefit was that the discs you were making could go straight into a CD player or DVD player that you already had; the fact that you had to jump through some hoops to do it didn't matter. And if you bought CDs or DVDs you can play them on your computer, too. But far fewer people owned Blu-Ray players, and if they did the player probably also took USB drives. So there would be no reason to ever burn a disc to get a movie onto a player, and getting data onto them was enough of a pain in people's arses that they'd just use USB drives instead. So with all that taken together, nobody is bothering to scale optical discs for consumers because there really isn't a market for them as a data storage medium anymore. The things that discs still do well - i.e. selling you prerecorded movies - also just so happens to still be fine with topping out at 100GB/disc, even for 4K video. Some games are starting to push beyond what a BD-XL can hold, but those games also are "live service" games that update way too frequently for "getting all the assets on the disc" to make any sense. All the supra-Blu-Ray optical data storage formats are all targeted towards the archival market because it's something that optical just accidentally does very well.

forgotpwd16 5y ago

>HDDs worry me in the long term Are SSDs any better in that regard?

rhn_mk1 5y ago
No, the memory cells lose charge over time. Even one year can cause data loss. Sorry, I don't have the link, but there was someone who tested how latency increased on drives that spent months on the shelf. The explanation was error correction working harder.
- xhkkffbf 5y ago
  You don't need a link. I can corroborate with my own experiences. Flash memory slowly forgets information. One guy told me that he can't unplug is big SSD array because he's afraid to lose a few bits. He might as well call it RAM.

mrjangles 5y ago

> Why are new formats not forthcoming? oooh I can answer this one. About 15 years ago I saw a talk from a team at, oxford I think?, that had invented a way to store many terabytes on an ordinary blue ray by adding rotation to the scratches, which can then be read because scratches at different angles polarized the returning light differently. Anyway, they had a working prototype and everything and the big companies like Panasonic all said "No sorry, everyone is shutting down their optical drive lines. We have determined that the future is internet storage and solid state. No one wants disk no matter how much storage they can hold." And that was that.

rasz 5y ago
minidisks use polarization