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Comment by Pitarou | Hacker News Reader

This makes perfect sense.

Sony and Panasonic need to do something with their lead in optical disk technology, but there's no demand for a Blu-ray successor. Heck, there isn't even much demand for Blu-ray. So archiving is the way to go.

I just hope they make those things to last.

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So little demand for Blu-ray is there that Panasonic's own archival storage device reached End Of Life four years after its launch in 2007. That one was called PowerFile [1].

The idea was pretty good, the industrial design was lackluster but serviceable. But the longevity of the discs was questionable (especially if you took advantage of the ability to remove the spindles holding them), and the devices themselves were abruptly pulled from the market around 2011.

The drives inside were actually laptop drives--the kind you used to slide into your laptop before you had a MacBook. I doubt they would last very long, but we didn't really get to find out, because once new units were no longer being sold we had to abandon the system.

So, do not buy this thing for long-term storage, because one of its main backers already proved they do not have what it takes to service this market.

[1] http://www.kintronics.com/powerfile/prodSubIntro.html

Very good point. I in general no longer trust Sony as a corporation, although I haven't heard any horror stories about their backup products. That Matsushita, ah, I'd forgotten they renamed themselves Panasonic in 2008, would pull such a stunt ... nope, not going to trust this stuff for a decade. Will stick to LTO tape and Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs.

Demand for Blu-ray is there. Perhaps not as great or immediate as the demand for DVD after VHS was (thanks to great backwards compatibility), but at least everyone I know or have met has switched to Blu-ray for their new movie buys.

If there's any repression in the movie market, I would blame prices/multi-format bundling. I don't want to buy a six-version pack with two different digital versions, a Blu-ray copy, a DVD copy, a 4:3 DVD copy, and a VHS copy for $40. I want ONE DISC, Blu-ray, for $8-10

Name a bundle that included BR, DVD and... Widescreen/4:3 copies? Much less VHS?

I'll pay a couple extra dollars for the BR + DVD bundles (Although, all my stuff plays BR these days)... I think it's fairly standard to get Widescreen these days as well. I don't remember any recent 4:3 releases for newer titles.

The main issue I have is "release day" discounts of $~10-15... followed by months of $~20-25. I hate missing a "must have" and then waiting until the price is reasonable again.

I was mildly exaggerating, but I mean stuff like this:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CTSDDVO/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_ttl...

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00867GHS8/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_ttl...

I don't mind the 2-disc BR/DVD bundles, I just wish I had the option to buy a 1-disc BR instead. It gets even harder when you want a 1-disc 3D BR.

What these bundles are telling us---and they're fairly common in US market anime---is that the price of pressing a DVD is so cheap it's better to make one SKU with both. Probably also encourages people to buy a Blu-Ray player as well if they still haven't.

And that's fine, but the bundle seems to be used to justify higher prices. "Oh, well it would be $10, but you get both a Blu-ray and a DVD, so we have to charge you $20"

Bleah. I haven't noticed that in the US anime market, but prices are all over the map as companies seek better/sustainable business models. Anime suffered from the general decline in DVD sales, and the decrease in retail outlets, like The Musicland Group (Musicland, Sam Goody, Suncoast Motion Picture Company, On Cue, and Media Play superstores) going poof after Best Buy bought them.

> I hate missing a "must have" and then waiting until the price is reasonable again.

This tells you the item was not a "must have" then, or you would have bought it already, rather than waiting...

Well to be honest, no Movie is a "Must Have"... for me at least. But a "I REALLY want that to sit on my shelf and hold up all the dust" is only worth so much.

you're cherry picking your sample set, here. of course it makes more sense that people who still buy movies will have a significant percentage who adopted blu-ray.

personally, i know not one single person who still buys physical video discs anymore. personally, i can say that demand for blu-ray is non-existant.

what would be useful, here, would be some sort of data that compares usage/adoption rates for units of time after a formats release. how many people are using blu-ray X years after it became available, compared to DVD, etc.

i would expect it to not be as popular as DVD or VHS before it, but expectations and anecdata aren't terribly useful.

Only one problem -- archiving is mostly a big business use case. Therefore, the technology will only have big business price tags. Remember when you could back up a home hard drive onto a single tape, and the media cost was only a fraction of your hard drive cost? And the tape drive was no more expensive than the hard drive? (i.e., those mini QIC cartridges).

> Only one problem -- archiving is mostly a big business use case.

Not necessarily. With photography having been digital for about a decade and home video for about half that, tech savvy families easily have several TBs of data that they would want to hold on to for the long haul. The prospect of being able to burn a complete copy of these things on a few discs and leave them at the grandparents or in a bank box seems very appealing, and only more so over the coming years.

It's easier to imagine those families moving their data to ever larger magnetic disks than making something like this "consumer grade" (as in "consumer-proof").

Most people I know just copy everything to a large external USB drive (sometimes managed by backup software). So these things would have to be less than $50/TB for the media, and no more than a couple hundred for the drive, in order to compete with external USB spinning disks.

After they knock the external drive off the desk, they might go looking for a different media for offline storage. The cloud works for some cases, but it's definitely not great for large data volume- at least in the US, with broadband that isn't nearly what it could be.

The nice thing about external USB drives is that you can position them some distance from your computer. Back before I switched to LTO tape, mine were taped down in a low/no traffic area. But, yes, they're fragile, almost certainly the most fragile backup media you can use, and my first set didn't survive this http://www.ancell-ent.com/1715_Rex_Ave_127B_Joplin/images/, at least not without reporting so many errors I gave up on them.

And you're of course right about the cloud, especially in the US; I've got rock solid AT&T ADSL, but it's very A(symmetric) and has a 150 GiB monthly cap, so only my very most important stuff gets saved to rsync.net, which e.g. saved my email from the tornado.

Hard Disks are not an archival format. In addition to the standard data retention issues... arms can rust and get stuck. There are simply more moving parts to a mechanical hard drive than either optical storage or tape storage.

Archival hard drives exist of course, but are at a cost disadvantage compared to tapes or optical media.

At least while we're waiting for bigger SSDs. Not sure what the expected lifetime of a (theoretical) 4TB SSD that's used mostly in append-only manner is. Will the drive outlast the USB3/SATA interface it comes with? It should at least be pretty resistant against physical wear-and-tear.

The storage cells are essentially capacitors, they store a bit of electrical charge. Eventually that'll leak away, unless the controller is sophisticated enough to do DRAM style refreshing every N years. Or you do it.

SSDs are way too young to depend upon, as far as I'm concerned. For that matter, if you really screw up and have to recover data from a drive, they're much more opaque than hard disks.

Archiving is very much a consumer use case. Photos/videos, and generally old computer HD contents are the main applications.

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