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Comment by MisterTea | Hacker News Reader

I understand that this is enterprise storage related but can we just get cheap optical storage back? My DVD drive can read CD's from the early 90's I used in my 1x CD-ROM drive with caddies in my 486. Those same CD's would also work in a Blu-ray drive. That's true backwards compatibility.

I want a 1TB optical drive with ~100MB write speeds which supports incremental writes. I know I'm asking for a lot but if you could give me the ability to buy a 1TB disc for $1 or less I'm all over it. Archival discs that last for 50+ years would be a huge bonus as well. Perfect cold storage solution.

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I doubt we will get another generation of optical storage after the current Ultra HD Blu Ray. The movie industry doesn't really need more and is moving to streaming anyways, and video game consoles are adequately served by them and are rapidly moving to digital-only. By the time storage requirements in either industry move beyond what Ultra HD Blu Ray can support they won't be selling disks anymore. And without a major consumer industry driving demand there's little hope of reaching an attractive price point.

Blu-Rays have become specialty items, like vinyl. Even most big-budget movies don't seem to have 4k Blu-Rays, let alone smaller movies. And there's now more and more direct-to-streaming movies that will never get a physical media release; think Netflix.

And this prevents it being available in good quality. Streaming is not good quality.

I'm totally with you. I like buying Blu-Rays for especially beautiful films.

This is already a problem with some artists where I literally cannot purchase anything higher quality than 128k Amazon MP3.

Yes they could do 50Mbps or even 100Mbps 4K / 8K with IMAX encoding. That could easily use up 300GB of space. It needs to be super high quality to attract customers. If Netflix or Apple could stream a 20Mbps file what is the point of Physical Disc?

The thing that really sucks about optical media is that it has been controlled by the media cartel meaning hollywood instead of tech companies. So were screwed out of a viable digital storage media because of greedy assholes.

I'd buy a BLu-ray drive RIGHT NOW if the media didn't cost $66 for a 5 pack of 100GB discs or $90 for a 50 pack of 50GB. That's more per GB than SSD or spinning rust. If the cost of the discs was 1/10th I'd already own one.

This kind of exists in LTO tape drives, typically used in businesses/government due to retention requirements. They definitely aren't cheap setups though.

And that really the point: look at most of the media solutions of the last 50 years and the most successful were "subsidized" by a larger consumer or business market. otherwise the cost is "pure" (1:1 R&D to Revenue) and very expensive.

Do you keep those discs in vacuum in constant temperature and with no light access?

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