arstechnica.com — The optical disc revolution started with CDs and then moved on to DVDs, and we're in the midst of the next-gen battle between HD DVD and Blu-ray. Since the birth of the CD 25 years ago, we've gone from 600 MB to whopping 50 GB of storage capacity on these little, convenient and versatile discs.
Aug 29, 2007 View in Crawl 4
cyber_akumaAug 30, 2007
MPAA will never let it happen. They would rather try to sell you ultra mega-HD eps at 65000p of The Three Stooges (this is NOT a bash at 1080p video btw) then dare lose money by actually giving you more than 3-6 eps per disk. Or God forbid, an entire series with all seasons.
cyber_akumaAug 30, 2007
You'll be waiting for a while.
andyd273Aug 30, 2007
Seems like this would make a great backup option. once a month or so make a complete backup of all your hard drives and put it in a fire safe... that way I could back up my big drives without using 25 dvds or 6 blu-ray or whateverand it would hopefully be cheeper than tape.
maz2331Aug 31, 2007
Yeah... it kinda violates various information coding theories.
techylahAug 31, 2007
This is a real and crucial question. Hopefully, since they are "disks" there will be a way to stamp them out from a higher dimension.This is the real advantage that vinyl records, CDs, DVDs, and HD dvds all have. Read slowly, but manufacture without "burning" a data stream.See my comment later.
topher06Sep 5, 2007
These are perfect for backups. I don't like the current mentality of using another hard drive to back up your system. I mean, both the backup and the original system is prone to disk failure, I really don't' feel safer with my data on another hard drive. I don't feel like having 12 drives in my desktop for RAID with speed, mirror and redundancy either. So I am currently left spending hours backing up gigabytes of data to multiple dual layer DVDs every 6 months or so. Having an optical disk that simply ghosts your entire system would be ideal, partitions, multiple boots, and all. In fact, if the backup software is decent enough, it should also take care of backing up your back up hard drives all on one disk at one time.But the problem is that they are going to gouge the market and these things will cost an arm and a leg, both the drives and the media, so few people are going to use it and its going to die like most other high capacity optical drives over time.Finally, don't make me laugh about using these for movies, if you don't understand why not don't hurt yourself by explaining how good they would be for high definition video.