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Comment by nayuki | Hacker News Reader

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nayuki·

Why can't we have higher density optical disc formats? Is BDXL at 128 GB really the end of technological innovation?

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Previous optical disc formats reached critical volume from content companies.

Now that it's possible, they would much rather get the recurring revenue of you renting access to their content.

They're happy to sell you Blu-Ray discs if that's what you want. Consumers, which is where most of the market is, don't really need higher capacity for anything. And even a 10x increase for BDXL probably doesn't really get you to a capacity that's all that useful for most types of archiving.

> And even a 10x increase for BDXL probably doesn't really get you to a capacity that's all that useful for most types of archiving

Sure it would - it would get over the 1Tb point, which would mean most users could back up their devices to a single disc again.

I expect the economics wouldn't work out for most consumers. (And even if they did, how many would actually make regular backups?) And I'd point out that they can backup, even in an automated way, multiple terabytes to about a $100 disk drive today.

Thats not very usefull for an offline backup, Optical is meant to past decades on a shelf in a way HDDs do not. They can be put in a letter, etc.

You're right that my reason is probably overly cynical, particularly if 128GB is large enough for 2 hours of 8K content. The point still stands that without millions of drives being manufactured, the pricing would force any new optical medium to be expensive.

I would still love to find out if the statement that early AWS Glacier backups were done to BDXLs is true.

It isn't; there's a next-gen archival disc format called Archival Disc with 300GB discs and plans to scale to 1TB/disc. It's only used in cartridge library systems like Sony's ODA, which cost about as much as tape drives do.

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