Optical Discs Aren't Dead, as Pioneer's New Drive Doubles BD Write Speeds | Hacker News Reader

Optical Discs Aren't Dead, as Pioneer's New Drive Doubles BD Write Speeds

tomshardware.com

21 pointsrbanffy14 comments

I have an optical drive on my desktop, it's handy for reading old DVDs and Blurays, which are actually a fairly cheap way nowadays to get media, and ripping off of disks to digital formats is pretty easy. I wouldn't put one on a laptop at this point, but I'd probably keep one on my desktop, I still use the one I have on my desktop fairly regularly -- it's not just collecting dust.

At the same time, I don't know that I would go out and buy a new model. I don't use my disk drive enough that I need to care a lot about having extraordinarily fast BD write speeds.

:shrug: maybe the economics have changed and I'm being foolish buying SD cards and and external hard drives for archives instead of rewritable blu rays. But I feel like a lot of backups need to be mirrored to other mediums anyway to combat disk rot, so I'm not 100% certain that I'd like to have all of my backups sitting in a CD case to begin with. Seems like it would make retrieval awkward. Again, maybe the modern tech is different and Blu Rays are now an amazing way to store data.

But mostly I use my drive for compatibility with older formats and as a way to get access to cheap media, and while I see that continuing to be useful, I'm also not hungering to update my setup or buy new devices.

I'm interested in 100GB MDISC optical media for long term backups, i even bought an external BD writer, however their astronomical price (14€ per disc) makes them a lot less attractive.

Whereas 25GB BD-R are 0.26€ per disc, the 100GB BD-R (non MDISC) are 8.21€ per disc (also obviously overpriced).

PS: 25GB MDISC are 3.25€ per disc

And it even compatible with M-DISC media. Me want!

I guess I'm one of those fuddy-duddies whose main desktop rig has always had a CD (/DVD/BD) drive since the 90s.

I also have optical drives for backup and music/movies. I tried Netflix for movies but they have very few movies and for what they have, quality is low (few titles in - network dependent - HD and terrible sound - need to pump up the volume on TV until 70 % to be able to listen normally). And a 720p DVD looks better than an 1080p Netflix.

sounds like you have terrible internet or devices that you’re streaming on? I’m regularly streaming 4k/hdr/atmos movies on Netflix. I’m sure I could find some compression artifacts if I did a side by side comparison with a blu ray but it’s not noticeable in isolation.

I have gig internet and streaming still doesn’t match. There are definitely artifacts in some scenes at 4k. My kids have made me watch Frozen 2 a half dozen times and there’s a scene at the end where the reindeer are all running in a circle that turns up blocky crap every time.

With that said, I haven’t put in a physical disk for a movie in years. I tolerate the artifacts for the convenience.

The image in some movies (eg. Life of Brian) is ok. The sound as i said is strange. The image on Star trek DS9 is terrible. Looks like 320x240 scaled with gaussian blur applied over the image.

Most cases don't even have 5.25" bays anymore for one you have to get an external if you want one.

I'd like to see multi-terabyte optical media for backing up data as an alternative to using tape drives or NAS units.

Facebook has did in the past whether they still do i don't know. https://engineering.fb.com/2015/05/04/core-data/under-the-ho...

Panasonic sold a similar product https://panasonic.net/cns/archiver/product/ whether they still do i don't know.

https://datacenterfrontier.com/inside-facebooks-blu-ray-cold...

Panasonic has quite the nice setup but the first article wasn't about optical media, merely racks upon racks of hard disks used as cold storage.

Speed doesn't matter if no one uses it.

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