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Comment by mrsaint | Hacker News Reader

And let's not forget holographic technology. The first enterprise hardware is geared towards 2015, where one recordable optical disc reaches storage capacities of at least 300GB. Both Sony and Panasonic are working on that. The future is plenty... plenty of gigs that is. If Amazon was indeed using optical disks for their cloud storage, then this could only mean even lower prices for us in a very foreseeable future.

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> The first enterprise hardware is geared towards 2015

I've been hearing about this since pets.com was a hot investment and not a whole lot has shipped since then. For a new storage technology that's particularly concerning since you don't know how accurate current guesses as to cost will be and, critically, nobody has a baseline to say what reliability will be like in the real world.

Costs and reliability - very good points. Regarding reliability, couldn't we say the same about BDXL technology? Certified discs for BDXL have a 50 to 100 years media longevity, or so it's said. Question is, how accurate are these numbers? The first rewritable 100GB BDXL discs hit the market in 2011. Would three years real world experience be sufficient to extrapolate the findings to the next 97 years?

I wouldn't disagree completely – anyone predicting longevity greater than, say, 5-10 years is simply making up numbers and hoping you don't ask about methodology.

That said, BDXL has shipped in volume for years and has less new technology involved so I would be surprised if it's significantly different than older Blu-Ray or DVD/CD systems which have been heavily tested.

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