4 ms·
Minidiscs are the most practical physical media I’ve come across. The used discs I’ve bought are 20-25 years old and don’t have a case or anything and still pla
by cosmic_cheese 1y ago
Minidiscs are the most practical physical media I’ve come across. The used discs I’ve bought are 20-25 years old and don’t have a case or anything and still play like they were recorded yesterday, even when their contents make it clear that they were recorded to shortly after the disc was manufactured. The CDs and DVDs I’ve burned of the same age are comparably in much poorer shape, some being entirely unreadable.
Their size is great, too, being about as small as you can get while still being easy to handle across the gamut of human hand sizes yet too big to easily lose, and they’re more fun than SD and CF cards with their outer plastic casings coming in all sorts of colors and patterns.
A new media format that takes these strengths and fuses them with those of flash storage would be wonderful. The only thing is that I don’t know how you’d solve is the bit rot problem flash has when spending extended time powered down — maybe dedicated storage for parity data? Capacitors that hold just enough juice to keep the flash “alive”? Redundant flash chips? This isn’t my area of expertise so I’m just throwing things at the wall haha.