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Comment by mike_hock | Hacker News Reader

I, for one, am not looking forward to another round of write-once optical storage media. Managing your data on DVD-Rs when they were bigger than your hard disk was a pain in the ass. I've gotten used to the fact that the largest storage media are not only rewritable, but are the same as the primary storage devices you use in your computer.

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I would love them for backups.

We're not going to be using them for storing our media collections the way we did with DVD-R's. Regular hard drives are plenty big now.

But for backups and other niche uses like storing uncompressed/minimally compressed video footage, it would be fantastic.

> like storing uncompressed/minimally compressed video footage, it would be fantastic.

ugh!! I would hate to see the stack of shiny round discs to handle the content from a 3 day shoot on something that doesn't record to crappy MP4 files. You'd get laughed out of the room for suggesting such a thing in a professional environment, much worse than I'm doing to your suggestion here

So how many petabytes of data do you produce in 3 days then?

The amount of data isn't the point. The point is the time it takes to write. The point is it is a shite physical format for purpose. Something susceptible to scratches and other issues that shiny round discs are prone to just makes it a bad idea

> Something susceptible to scratches

If a DVD gets scratched, that'll buff right out. If a drive platter gets scratched, goodbye data! If you don't want it scratched, put it in a caddy. Caddy-load disc drives have been around for years.

Your concerns about scratches are valid for really old technology, like CED, but I don't think those were ever made writeable.

We're talking about a hypothetical product anyways, so how would you know how much time it took to write?

When you're trying to figure out a format to archive all your source footage in once you're finished with a project, ultra-high capacity optical media could be fantastic -- it's not going to fail catastrophically like hard drives do, and the assumption is that it's far cheaper too. As well as taking up less space.

And for archiving stuff, who cares if it's a bit slower, as long as you can just leave a copy operation running overnight or something? And scratches are a non-issue for archival. Discs are kept in cases or caddies. And basic scratches can be fixed anyways. We're not talking about teenagers throwing loose CD's in their glove compartment here.

A "stack"? "Crappy MP4 files"? I don't have any idea what you're talking about.

I'm not talking about recording video straight to disks, but using them for long-term storage. And if a single disc stores a petabyte, then a single disk could handle weeks' worth of shooting a couple hours of uncompressed 8K footage a day.

I think we’ve reached a point where drives have grown substantially more than file size (a movie was 700mb when my harddrive was <400gb, then 4-12gb when I had 2-3tb, now they’re ~50gb if you want 4k but a 16tb drive is a few hundred dollars. Aside from movies I have little need to large volumes of storage, music files, photos and documents are insignificant in comparison.

One thing I would like is a cheap backup mechanism capable of 1-20tb - if it’s cheap enough, immutable would be a good thing.

This reminds me of a recent talk by Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang. He discusses video compression history a bit. He proposes in the future one would just send a very small amount of data & then the computer displaying the video would recreate everything based on prior knowledge of the person talking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytZcvwZxkrg

Aside from personal use, it's well known that the amount of data being created every day is growing exponentially. Based on the article these discs are not meant for personal use but for data centers.

A 90fps 8k UHD 10-bit movie that's 3 hours long is 120TB uncompressed. You might think that's too much, muh compression algorithms etc, but we have consumer devices that can use this kind of storage, and no economic means of transporting one-to-many, multi-TB files. I would absolutely welcome them, and use it to distribute the entirety of libgen (hypothetically, don't lock me up yet). Or really high resolution VR porn or documentaries. Either way there's good uses for it. It won't replace your hard drive but there's a market gap to fill.

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