News Optical Discs at $5 per TB? Folio Photonics Attempts a New Spin

[Admin]

1TB disks (in 10TB caddies) are aimed at enterprises, and won't be ready until 2024.

Optical Discs at $5 per TB? Folio Photonics Attempts a New Spin : Read more

 

[lmcnabney]

No mention of read / write speeds. Writing a TB to magnetic media takes a while. How long to write to these disks? Hours? Days?

 

[King_V]

Definitely interesting, though. I'm glad to hear of the 100 year lifespan for the discs, as I've experienced at least one audio CD that suffered from disc rot. And, it spent the majority of its time in its case, in a holder.

 

[mikeebb]

Yes, interesting, but: 1) speed, as questioned above and in the article? 2) longevity, based on what data? 3) disks sound great, but where's the drive? Certainly won't work in the DVD drive I have in the computer now, or even the BD writer I can plug into USB. On the plus side, if the drive can be backward compatible all the way to CD, and write them too, I could replace the DVD writer in the desktop with it. Again, interesting, but more info needed.

 

[escksu]

No mention of read / write speeds. Writing a TB to magnetic media takes a while. How long to write to these disks? Hours? Days?

No idea but don't think it matters.

I can already forsee companies buying them for long term archival purpose. This is why I said time taken to write is't important. A full backup of a huge multi-terabyte server can take 24hrs or more. Its usually executed only on weekends so it doesn't matter. Nobody will be watching and waiting for it to complete. Start on Friday night or Saturday morning and check again on Monday.

Speed wise, blu-ray 1x is around 4.5MB/s, fastest todat is around 10-14x (45-63MB/s).
For DVD- 1x is around 1.3MB/s, fastest is 24x around 31MB/s.

So, even if we take it as a paltry 20MB/s, the drive can still write 1 TB in 14hrs, not too shabby. IF it can hit 50MB/s, thats around 5 1/2hrs. Looks very good. Btw, its WORM so you can't use it for regular backup. Only for archive.

Btw, such speeds are ok for corporate use because backup is mostly done through the network. Not all companies have 10Gbps network links.

Now, the main issue with be cost of the drives.

 

[kjfatl]

WORM would actually be very good for regular backups. Start with a full backup and then follow it up with incremental backups which are typically a small fraction of the total amount stored.

 

[LuxZg]

As people already said - cost and availability of DRIVES is what's missing. Will it be 10k$ like tapes, 500$ like Blueray, 25$ like CD/DVD?

I gave up on optical media due to data size, write speeds, and lack of durability. But a 10-TB cradle for 50$ would be good pick for personal archival. But HDDs are 20$/TB. So if drive is 500$ you need to write tons of data. For personal use I'd say anything over 200$ is dead on arrival, and it would need to be under 150$ to actually make notable impact.

For companies they'll need a "jukebox" type of rack-mount disk library with FC and 25GbE options AND integration with popular backup software. Then they can charge 10-15k for device. But tapes are large, cheap, and heavily established... Will be hard to overthrow. Specially because most companies practice disk + tape backups so random access isn't big concern. Tape is mostly for archival and to satisfy regulatory requirements.

 

[Sarreq Teryx]

And how much do/will the drives cost? I've wanted to get and LTO drive for a while, but don't have several thousand dollars to buy one.