Withdrawal from the Recording Media Business
t-yuden.com
t-yuden.com
- Because of cloud usage and low prices for hard drives, the usage of recording media is vanishing
- The market for CD-R, DVD-Recordables and others was always dominated by the price ... most customers just looked at the price tag, not on the quality of the media.
It is really a sad thing, because TY is really one of the last quality oriented producer of recording media around.
What is the advantage, I have, when I safe 10ct on the disc, but loose it after one year, because of bad quality? But there where just to few people around with such thinking (other companies already stopped producing higher priced media long ago).
Edit:
When I write about "quality" I don't primarily mean the trouble of buffer-underruns or wrong writes, but the problem, that many lower cost discs are prone to fail after rather short time of storage. As much I know, the TY discs not only made less troubles in writers, but also last longer as other discs. And also there are legit usages of CD-R(W)s -- I used them long time as backup media -- but without quality suppliers, it is no option any more (the size of the discs would not necessarily be a problem, since when I backup only sources, they still fit).
- Burning disc with the fear of Buffer underrun.
- sharing recording disc with friends and making new friends just because you have a CD/DVD burning device.
- Researching how to bypass the protection (though somehow illegal).
is passed.
Of course you can do backups into the cloud ... or on hard drives -- that is today the only solution that is still not so costly for normal users. But in my opinion, a sub-optimal solution.
10 years on, 9 of 12 CD-Rs are unreadable or have substantial data loss. The hard disk is 14 years old. Every checksum is still correct.
Hard disks were the best backup medium for the average consumer back then. They still are. Now they are super easy because they are USB.
Put a 2.5" 1TB external USB in your safe deposit box. Your kids will love whats on it 20 years from now.
I did not want to go into a lengthy discussion about hdds and backup (and still don't want to). Just one thing: While some last really decades without trouble and are really great, it can well be that you have bought one that will just fail one day and than you are bust. While the price-tag of hdds is low today, it is not so low, that you would put four or five of them on your shelf just for backup (I might do in the future, but not yet now). For a good backup-strategy you should not rely on just one media (that can be destroyed by one single drop!).
What also bothers me is, that currently only two or three real producers of hdds are left.
Although now that my data has gotten large enough I'm using LTO tape backup.
ADDED: I see you aren't who started this sub-sub-thread.
But I'd add that except for the environmental control, you don't have to go to great extremes, CD-Rs are physically rather robust. But you did/do have to do your research, to discover that you need to buy Taiyo Yuden or MAM-A media, and get discs from a reputable source (there was a lot of TY counterfeiting some time ago), and store them properly.
There's a niche in archival products for lots of redundant data (like PAR or PAR2) combined with backup duplication across geographical diversity.
There's a German (I think) company offering very robust storage for 10 of your most treasured photos. It's expensive, but they claim to be offering many years archival (100 years? 50 years? (This was on a BBC Radio Four programme but sadly I have no idea how to get that programme or the name of the company.)
There where the MO-Drives, that really lasted many decades, but they also vanished.
Best solution currently are the old-school tapes, since they are created as real backup-solution. Trouble is, that when you want to buy a current drive (with enough data density) you will have to invest a stack of money just for the drive. Also the equipment and tapes are seldom sold for consumers. I looked up some figures ... and one cartridge currently costs half the sum of the same hdd space (consumer drives). So even the cartridges are rather costly for consumers.
Hmmm, and it looks like MAM-A Silver and Gold CD-Rs are what we're going to have to switch to. Previously they weren't judged as really needed given the quality of Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs, but if the latter aren't available....
If you're looking for CD-Rs that will last longer than average I suggest M-DISC, which according to the manufacturer should last up to 1000 years (compared to 7 years for regular CD-Rs): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
It's also possible there's good Bluray recordable media; I switched to LTO tape instead of going in that direction.
I guess I don't know much about this company - is this line shocking because they are such a prominent player, or is this line more of a "We really didn't do much in this area thus nothing will really change"?
But the era of optical disc recording is gone, so it's a good decision to close blink disc business from business view.
For normal people like me, just have a felling that another era is gone, like the floppy disk, PCI sound card, dial-up modem, CRT monitor, film camera and so on.
For example, I read that Sony once had good discs, but today are just re-branding discs of a much lower-quality brand.
I think this is of historical significance: it's a sea-change moment, with a leading manufacturer essentially conceding that optical media is no longer relevant and can never catch up, destined to fade into the past.
Those of us of a certain vintage will remember a similar thing happening to floppy disks - and there are lessons to be learnt from that. Grab a few of these and carefully hang onto them, in the dark and away from heat sources - while you'll still be able to get them in a decade's time, it'll probably be impossible to find any new good-quality media then: so on the basis that you might want one when you least expect it, have a couple handy just in case.
There's a certain melancholy here, having seen this technology through its entire lifecycle - but at least we don't have to worry about scratching USB mass storage devices. I think I have only one PC which still has an optical drive, and it's the one which still has a floppy drive.
Maybe we'll replace spinning rust, and flash memory, too, in time.
[0] http://www.yuden.co.jp/ut/ir/files/news/54376eba6d579.pdf