By layering eight layers of 32GB Blu-ray media, Pioneer has achieved 256GB worth of storage on a single-sided optical disc. If you are more interested in storage than labels, the company acknowledges the obvious extension to double-sided media with 512GB of capacity. They also leave the door open for 1TB and larger discs by extending their signaling method to more than twelve layers.
Image Credit: Wikipedia
It suffices to say that this is a lot of storage. If cost can be kept low enough, optical media could once again be viable for archival and backup. Once a drive is purchased, and USB 3.0 makes it trivial to purchase a single drive for multiple computers, a single disc could bit-for-bit copy a full SSD and other, more modern amounts of data. Basically, it is much less work backing up in 256GB chunks than 4.7GB or 25GB ones.
If cost can be kept low enough is a serious point, though. BD-Rs retail for about $50/1.3TB (according to a few Newegg searches) and DVD-Rs are around the same ($25/500GB). This is not too far from hard drive territory (~100$/2 TB). Of course, hard drives are also faster, rewritable, and do not need to be inserted into a drive for reading and writing… because they are one. People are transitioning away from optical media to hard drives. Cost would need to be phenomenal to reverse that momentum.
4K and UHD video content was not discussed but, let's face it, your mind went there, too.
And since ALL hard drives
And since ALL hard drives fail in a few years and cloud can be unreliable an optical media that could store a TB or more would be a huge help for audio visual pros who want long term stability and ease of use.
A unit/file server with an
A unit/file server with an attatched high speed 4 TB+ hard drive/s RAID 0/other, that could then write to the BD/DVD drive in the background through a backplane connection, with a large storage BD/DVD automated carousel 100-200 BD/DVD holder. Throw in a tape unit for some long term non random magnetic storage, those are getting better also, "Sony develops tech for 185TB tapes: 3,700 times more storage than a Blu-ray disc". BDs/DVD are optical so no problems with magnetic fields, but they cost more than tape, Tape and Hard drives need protection from EMP/other magnetic fields. Magnetic tape is still the most economical large storage solution, for archives, games can be placed on the BD disks, along with other non sequentially accessed data, but even the archived magnetic tape, could be pre-staged to a hard drive/s for random workflows. Most audio visual pros use a combination of Tape and DVD/BD, hard disk/SSD storage(for working data sets), and a Managed file system/software to locate their video/other data. Most big data/cloud providors use a tiered or Hierarchical storage management (HSM) system that goes from SSD, hard disk, BD/DVD all the way to tapes, depending on the workloads and data set size.
Fixed that for ya. 😉
Fixed that for ya. 😉