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Comment by lehi | Hacker News Reader

Page 13 prompts some questions. 128GB BDXL is positioned before the document's publishing year of 2015, but doesn't appear to have actually been released until 2017. The multi-TB discs extrapolated out to present day seem to still be vaporware. Why did advances in high-capacity bit-rot-resistant optical media apparently stall?

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Downloading 100gb games over the internet became a thing, and h264 and h265 were efficient enough to prevent consumer video needing anything much larger than blu-ray.

Sony ODA is a thing, and uses 11 600gb discs in a compact cartridge to give around 6tb per cartridge.

I do not expect large-capacity optical media to become available for consumer use, but A 100GB BDXL can archive only 6 minutes of 8K video at 60 fps from a RED, so I would assume high-end visual production would want something better than 100GB per disk.

Sony will happily sell you ODA at 6tb per cartridge for $$$$.

I think the video production folk use LTO and HDDs for long term storage.

Everyone who still cares would like multi-terabyte optical - but it’s not a big enough market anymore outside of long term corporate archiving (the ODA use case), and Sony probably doesn’t want to canabalize that market.

Sony sells decks and recorders for their high-capacity "Professional Disc" that can hold up to 128GB per disk. And then there is their cartridge to compete with LTO, the ODA Gen 3 that holds, IIRC, 11 discs with a total of 5.5 TB per cartridge. A bit less than LTO-7 (and half as much as LTO-8), but I don't think LTO tapes can survive being boiled in water.

BDXL M-Discs are available but I imagine Sony didn't see a need for bigger Blu-Ray disks so there aren't ant M-Disc equivalents.

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