Read more.Aims to launch at 300GB in mid 2015 with 500GB and 1TB versions on the roadmap.
Read more.Aims to launch at 300GB in mid 2015 with 500GB and 1TB versions on the roadmap.
Funnily enough, that's been something that's been uppermost in my mind at the moment ... how should a typical "home data centre" manager (or to put it another way "the house computer muggins") arrange for long term backup of the various smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops and ultrabooks that are normal for a well off household these days?The amount of data people are using and generating is always growing and the Archival Disc is hoped to answer the need for storing much of this data safely for the longer term. Sony cites demand from the film industry (for 4K movies perhaps) and cloud data centres as spurs to develop the new large capacity optical disc standard.
Tablets and smartphones are relatively easy - cloud services (assuming you're not holding views similar to Saracen*) or, for some, large uSD cards and use one of the many backup software apps.
(* no I'm not denigrating his position wrt cloud services. I understand and appreciate the position he's taken).
Desktops, laptops and ultrabooks are trickier - especially the mobile devices. The most convenient seems to be NAS+WiFi, but there's a place for yea olde USB crate. But both of those backup to normal disk - so it's not exactly convenient to go shipping (fragile?) disks here, there and everywhere. There's cloud services like Carbonite etc - but that presupposes that you've got a friendly ISP who allows good uplink speeds and no data caps.
So yes, I'd like to see 500GB disks - or even 1TB ones - as a way of 3rd level storage. Back your systems off to NAS, then transfer those NAS resident backups at intervals to a couple of these. At present, if I use highly compressed backups, then I'd need 5 of those 300GB disks to save full system backups of all the kit in the house. Problem is that I see "Professional" in the description and think "£1,000+ for the drive and £200/disk".
So it looks like NAS is going to be the endpoint of my backups for a good while yet ... roll on the time of the holographic storage says I!
Hopefully they make something that works like DVD-RAM, where you don't need special burn software and can just keep writing incrementally.
Don't like the sound of double sided
unless the disk drive has two laser so you don't have to flip the disk
either way
it will be stupidly over priced to begin with.
I backup all of my "important but not critical" data to optical disk (of which I have a lot). Started with CDs, then moved to DVD-R and now on to BluRay. It's easy to keep track of and easy to store in quality folders. The 300Gb/disc capacity is extremely appealing to me, although I'll need a new indexing system to keep track of what's on each.
Considering a 300Gb tape is about £50 these days. These are going to command a premium until they are widely accepted, so I'm thinking £100-£150 per disk on day 1. Hardware isn't going to be cheap either.
My main concern here is even at £100, that's a mightily expensive coaster. And even a small scratch/scuff is likely to wipe out gigabytes of data. Seems like they are asking for trouble if they aren't in protective cartridges, although being double sided, I suspect they might be. Press release was a bit vague.
I read this and thought, this is so yesteryear, why are they even bothering.
I guess where disc technologies come into their own is in the event of an EMP the data is unaffected? (although hardware to play it is fried)
Terabyte hard drives will be cheaper than this media, let alone the added cost of the drive that goes with it.
I still like movies on discs, so there must be others too and unless lossless compression evolves, we will need more capacity for 4k films for sure.
+1 on that media cost, and the drive cost too. Especially with Sony in the mix. Hopefully they can get a lot of media manufacturers signed up so we get some economy-of-scale going. One of these days I'll have to see what the cost of a large capacity tape drive is - last time I looked it was more than the cost of my PC.
Spare a thought for the poor schmuck that I heard about. Was saving data to his NAS and his pet (assume large cat) managed to knock over the NAS and it fell (presume it was on a shelf or desk). Head crashes on all drives - so it was a write off.
TBH, I'd be less worried about physical fragility - although as you say at £100/disk that's maybe an easier thing to say than actually mean in practice - I'd be more worried about write hiccups trashing that expensive media. Remember seeing a comment "you only get ONE chance to get it right/write" from pre-BurnProof CD days. Some things never change ....
I don't think that matters. It certainly doesn't to me.
For many years, I've separated my data into stuff that varies, perhaps at differing rates, and stuff that, once created, doesn't change at all.
For instance, I have quite a collection of 'reference' documents that have been doenloaded over the years. That includes relevant legislation, white papers, some green papers, reports from think tanks, political party manifestos, Budget documents (from the Treasury), and so on.
I also have thousands of documenrs if my own, business and personal, in a document-image management system. For instance, scanned bank records, copies of tax returns, etc.
All this type of data is fixed. Once created, it never changes.
So .... I typically don't need it 'online' (and I mean in the older sense of the word, as opposed to offline storage, not internet-online). What I do need is it stored on a medium that is, above all, resilient to degradation over time. My current choice, and for many years now, is DVD-RAM, with double-sided DVD-RAM discs, the ones that come in their own protective case, and the disc surface itself is only exposed when in the drive. They are physically protected, such as from scratches or finger grease, very resistent to light, etc, partly due to the csse and partly due to not being dependent on changing the state of a dye.
What matters to me is not that both sides can be read, because part of the data security of 'archiving' is that the data isn't kept online in the first place. When I need it, I put the disk in a drive .... right side up.
What's important, to me, for "archive" data is the extent to which data is protected, and long term reliability and stability.
I draw a distinction between data that needs "backup", and that that needs "archive", and the methods appropriate to each are different.
I used to backup to CDRs and DVDs but then the datasizes of HDD and video etc ballooned and optical media didn't keep up.
(650MB of CDR was larger than the 500MB HDDs of the time)
Nowadays it's a couple of identical (data) external HDDs - used in a similar way to tapes - monthly rotation, many copies
- those using a single NAS should remember the old mantra of offsite backup and multiple copies!
Well, at least they've got the logo down...
I agree completely for normal backups, at least in the short term, but wonder what the long-term, non-refreshed storage life of data on these might be. There seems to be a rule that the newer the media, the more fragile its content. Much 20th Century cine film and videotape has already deteriorated beyond repair whilst we can still read documents 1,000 or more years old.
A 1.6TB (compressed) LTO 4 tape is about £20, which is probably the cheapest price/byte - once you have got over the investment in the drive, and have a machine that is fast enough to stream to it. Is tape archive or backup? A moot point, it can be both, but tapes are cheap enough to have multiple backups in multiple locations, and lifetime is between 10 and 30 years.
£00GB is pretty small by today's storage standards - LTO 6 is looking at 6.25TB (compressed - approx 2TB of video data, which is already comprised) with write speeds of 400MB/sec which makes this optical system look small, especially as the LTO roadmap goes up to LTO8.
Too little to late? time will tell, but its selling point will be based on entry level price, and robustness.
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My broadband speed - 750 Meganibbles/minute
With the majority of corporate, short and low budget (less than £1M) films now being shot digitally, storage is major issue, but it's true the cheapness of 500GB/1TB drives has made a massive difference. Generally a production company will buy a double set of external hard drives for each production/shoot for the footage to be copied onto and backed up to. These can then be used for any transcoding and the edit meaning each production has a set of hard drives with all the recorded footage, edits, and outputs which can be stored on a shelf once finished.
The question is how reliable are hard drives for this pupose ? Getting hammered for a month and then left on a shelf for years ? Not as good as you'd think to be honest, I know several people who have gone back to drives from 2-3 years ago and nothing, just dead. Having a decent Archival Disc standard to backup completed projects onto by just dragging and dropping is something well needed and will be well received in those circles.
Last edited by Barakka; 10-03-2014 at 04:20 PM.
System:Atari 2600 CPU:8-bit 6507 (1.19MHz) RAM:128 bytes Colours: 16 (4 on screen) Resolution: 192x160Originally Posted by The Mock Turtle
Exactly.
As far as I'm concerned, backup and archive have very different objectives, require different solutions and technologies, and this proposal is aimed at the latter.
Not everyone will want or need archive, but we shouldn't conflate the two, even though there is an element of overlap. Personally, I've been doing both for years.
A double set? As in, a master copy and a backup? Sounds like a recipe for disaster, and not something I'd trust a £1 million film to
For the cost and frustration of having to reshoot everything probably upwards of several hundred thousand pounds, I'd be budgeting a few hundred quid more for a more robust storage solution!
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