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

King_V

Illustrious
Ambassador
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

Distinguished
Nov 2, 2014
130
30
18,620
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.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Krotow

escksu

Reputable
BANNED
Aug 8, 2019
878
354
5,260
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.
 
Last edited:

kjfatl

Reputable
Apr 15, 2020
180
130
4,760
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

Distinguished
Dec 29, 2007
225
42
18,710
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

Distinguished
Feb 25, 2015
10
0
18,510
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.
 

Viumantu

BANNED
Dec 2, 2021
2
1
15
Hi there,

I've been waiting for this moment for 20 years. I know that in Japan there were 100 GB "CDs", but that's really too small.

What is fantastic with "CDs" is that they are cheap and allow us to make backups of all our hard drives and SSDs.
No need to buy two HDD (one for backup, which is expansive when we have 10, 20, ... HDDs).

I hope they arrive soon and the reader/writer is not too expensive.
And that this will continue to evolve as HDDs/SSDs "grow".

79738548_Thumb_Up-25.gif
 
Last edited: