You consider yourself a power user. You’ve got lots of files, and damn it, you like to keep them backed up. Around a decade ago, you gave up on burning optical discs, and switched to storing your files on portable hard drives. One local, one off-site, and a cloud backup just to be sure. You’re diligent for a home gamer, and that gets you done.
The above paragraph could describe any number of Hackaday readers, but what of bigger operations? Universities, businesses, and research institutions all have data budgets far in excess of what the individual could even imagine. What might shock you is that some of them are relying on optical media—just not the kind you’ve ever heard of before. Enter Sony’s Optical Disc Archive.
Not A DVD
Historically, tape has been a very popular backup medium as it provides a great deal of storage at a low price. In these applications, the linear nature of tape and the resulting slow seek speeds don’t really matter. However , tape has another problem—that of longevity. Plastic tapes covered in magnetic particles just aren’t that hardy when you start talking about timespans measured in decades or more. To that end, Sony wanted to develop a more durable archival and backup solution as an adjunct to its popular Linear Open Tape storage systems.
The result was the Optical Disc Archive, an optical component of Sony’s broader PetaSite data archive system. It’s considered an ideal solution for storing large amounts of media for long periods of time. Sony cites broadcaster archives as a prime use case, where it’s desirable to store footage for easy access for many decades. The fast seek time of the optical media allows for its use as an online or nearline archive, something which tape doesn’t do anywhere near as well.
Released in 2012, it drew from BluRay technology, using the same 405 nm lasers to burn data on to write-once discs. Generation one cartridges held 12 single-sided optical discs and could store up to 1.5 terabytes per cart, with read speeds of up to 137.5 MB/s. Smaller carts were available with capacities as low as 300 GB, and some early media was rewritable.
By generation three, released in 2019, Sony had pushed storage up to 5.5 terabytes and speeds up to 375 MB/s, using 11 discs per cartridge with three layers on each side. The current generation technology comes in at 500GB per individual disc. From generation two media onwards, all media was write once.
While desktop drives are available, it’s not the typical use case. Discs are typically stored en masse in large stacker units that combine one or more drives and many storage cartridges. One typically starts with a master library unit, to which one can add up to to five expansion units each holding more drives and cartridges. The units contain robotics to load and unload cartridges in the available drives. It’s possible to create a 42U rack untit that stores 535 cartridges with one drive and a total of 2.94 petabytes, according to Sony. Alternatively, if you wanted more drives and less carts, you could build a similar sized rack to store 375 carts and four drives for up to 2.06 petabytes instead.
Using the optical format has multiple benefits to longevity. The discs are read without any sort of friction which can wear away the media, quite unlike tapes which make contact with the reader head. The polycarbonate media is also resistant to water, dust, changes in humidity and temperature, and electromagnetic radiation, within reason. Sony claims a media life of 100-years-plus—this has obviously gone untested in real time. There’s also the in-built benefit of using write-once media—this makes the discs themselves essentially immune to viruses, intentional erasure, ransomware, or cyber attacks—outside of some edge case where a hacker figures out how to overspeed the drives and destroy the discs. Don’t hold your breath.
All this sounds wonderful, right? There’s just the sad note that this wonderous optical technology is already on the way out. Click around Sony’s website, and you’ll find that most of the Optical Disc Archive hardware has been discontinued. Indeed, when Sony announced it was cutting production of writable optical media, we took notice—mostly thinking about CD-Rs, DVD-Rs, and BD-Rs. But an additional consequence was that it would end the production of Optical Disc Archive carts as well, and with no new media, there’d be no need for new drives, either. As to why, the answer was simple—money. As reported by TechRadar:
“The growth of the cold storage market has not reached our expectations, and the performance of the storage media business as a whole continues to be in the red,” a Sony Group spokesperson said. “We have determined that it is necessary to review the business structure to improve profitability.”
Well you have uva, uvb, uvc
With a uv laser Now your Xbox and PlayStation can just fit the game completed, without adding half a terabyte of patches and updates
Actually get the completed software on disc each disc hold around a terabyte or so maybe 3 if it’s triple layer
You could use X-ray laser and that would be a solid metallic disc, and the X-ray can scan across pits and dots
How many gig and terabyte can theoretically fit on x-ray disc?
What about getting cobalt -60 and fire gamma particles? But that may degrade the medium like a VHS tape over time…
I asked chatgpt for you. For 1nm soft x-ray it predicts 4 petabytes.
Just don’t put a X-Ray drive in your laptop.
But, but, but who then will create the mutant children master race ?
ChatGPT also agreed with 100pb and 400mb. Not sure if its the right thing to ask chatgpt.
I’m shocked, shocked I tell you, that the software parrot can’t figure out the parameters of a made-up and nonsense technology.
Just from area alone, a single-layer storage medium the size of a CD/DVD/Blu-ray can’t be over ~1 petabyte with feature sizes of 1 nm. Just find the area of a 12 cm disk in square nanometers (ok, fine, I’ll answer, it’s around 1E16). Ace job, ChatGPT, if you literally use 1 nm x 1 nm to store a bit (which… wouldn’t work, but whatever), you’d barely get over a petabyte. But sure, 100 PB, whatever.
But even 1 PB sounds terrible once you realize that there are already research papers out there with optical discs ~1 petabit-scale density, and that’s with wavelengths hundreds of times larger.
So why does scaling up wavelength suck? Two reasons – three dimensions, and interferometry. Optical discs have multiple layers because they just focus at different distances, and in addition, you can beat the wavelength limit if you carefully use interference to help you. Those petabit-scale optical disc papers have hundreds of layers and very sub-wavelength features.
You just can’t do those kinds of manipulations with X-rays because you don’t have the kind of index of refraction behavior in materials you do with stuff in the optical/UV.
Tape is still king. Even factoring the 30yr shelf life of the spec running the numbers ends up with, even with 3-4 tapes and migrating to the next lto generation every refresh, e.g. lto9-lto12, lto comes out almost 3x cheaper.
If you,like making coffee between file accesses.
If you’re using tape for random file access, that’s what the kids call a “skill issue”.
LTO is great for backup and restore where everything is written/read sequentially. This isn’t an uncommon scenario — if you need random access, you restore the tape to a HD.
It’s $ony,
I pass.
This seems a bit short sighted on Sony’s part. What’s needed is MORE investment into larger storage media. What we need is a leap forward like the leap from floppy discs to optical media. At the time, we had floppy discs for backing things up and transferring files. Hard drives were larger but expensive. Zip drives were unreliable, Tape backups were fine for businesses but the average user wouldn’t stand for the limitations. Jumping from 1.44 mbs to 600 mbs worth of storage was amazing! Most people could fit all their files on a single disc. Because it was so useful, the cost per disc came down drastically. When CD-Rs starting becoming not big enough DVD-Rs replaced them, Blu ray discs eventually came along, but their higher cost for both discs and burners coupled with larger and cheaper hard drives meant they didn’t gain much traction for data storage. Jumping ahead to today, we have large hard drives or solid state drives for large data storage. Solid state drives are fast but expensive. Large hard drives are cheaper but are slower and are built around technology that limits their usefulness for long term data storage (ie being filled with helium that will eventually leak out etc.) What we need is a storage medium that’s reliable, can hold more data than the largest hard drives (or large enough and cheap enough that using only a couple of discs is feasible) and hopefully cheap enough that mass adoption will eventually drive the price down even further. Data storage needs keep going up, especially if you’re doing any sort of video work or dabbling with AI. I’ve been waiting for the day when storage eventually catches up to our needs where you can back everything up to a single drive and be cheap and reliable enough that you can have multiple full backups without breaking the bank. Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be happening anytime soon.
“Jumping from 1.44 mbs to 600 mbs worth of storage…”
Neither 1.44 megabytes per second nor 600 megabytes per second is a storage amount.
lol, I ended up reading this in a deadpan tone and it made me laugh. I think they meant 1.44MBs / 600MBs. i.e. the ‘s’ indicates plurality rather than seconds.
DNA storage.
Isolinear chips
Bioneural Gel Packs.
Pros: Faster processing and buffering of data
Cons: Oh god. Too many. One of the few components you can replicate; Highly susceptible to both digital and biological viruses.
Just don’t let Neelix bring any alien cheeses to the party! 🖖
I wish someone would make a large capacity optical storage for consumers again. Every now and then you’ll hear about something in the news 300gb or 1tb or whatever, but it never comes out. I think it was 2004 or 2005 when I first heard someone was working on a 300gb holographic disc or whatever. There’s such a big push to force people to use online storage, so they can extract rent. Same thing with streaming, “digital movies” instead of Blurays, and all that. There needs to be a correction to all of the nonsense one of these days.
i still havent made enough data where i need more than one hard drive to back it all up. no need to pay anyone rent for data unless you have serious data hoarder tendencies, and even then a capable home nas is probibly cheaper than a gaming rig. cloud storage still has a place for shared data or offsite backups. but its easier to put a tape in a safe deposit box or do a drive swap with a friend.
im more worried about cloud independent operating systems and software going the way of the dodo. i use a lot of out of date software. even hardware is starting to be a problem in that a lot of things need to be activated via the cloud just to use it. id rather the cloud be optional.
I have piles of stuff on disk at home. I use Nextcloud instead of any of the cloud solutions. I’ve also got a heaping pile of datasheets, notes, software, manuals, etc for all sorts of electronic devices, kits, ICs, you name it. It’s been my experience that such things tend to disappear from the web over the sort of time spans that I’d like to be able to retrieve them. I’ve also ripped all my DVDs and Blue-rays so I can play them wherever I want with JellyFin, or any other network player. My CD collection, also all ripped. I refuse to “buy” media if I can’t keep my own copy. It’s not terribly useful if I can only play it on one service, and only until they go under, lost rights to it, etc. Then there’s backups of old PCs, which have been invaluable over the years, “I need X, I think I last saw it on Y”. I’ve gotten better about storing things on the network and not locally, but there’s always something that gets forgotten before a PC is reinstalled.
In all it’s somewhere around 6.5TB. There’s a bit of duplication in that, but until I get a proper backup system sorted out (gee, be nice if this storage format was still in production), I’m not going to make the effort to clear that up.
Well, with portable drives, the optical storage just doesn’t ‘fit’ our needs anymore. Plus the portables are re-writable so no need for more ‘disks’ for every backup. It is a win-win for the consumer who doesn’t need 100 years+ of durability. No the ‘home’ optical storage era has passed.
I agree about the cloud storage model… Don’t get why people buy into it…. I store ‘nothing’ in the cloud for the data miners. The cloud is just another way to bleed money from the consumer too … and of course lock in to a service out of your control.
But you wouldn’t hand a hard drive to your friends and say “Hey, you guys can keep those. Those are for you.” Sure, Thumb drives are cheap enough at that point but only moderate amount of ways to Specialize a momentous or a keepsakes disk of say Family Tree history and research….. we have all been taught to always keep multiple copies of things and even iterations of said body in case of corruption whatnot.
Disks were always way cooler to pass off to friends mix tapes…. music videos etc
I have an actual Nas at home, but I use my 2tb Google drive as a kind of quick access/staging area for files and such. I use mine as a networked memory card. When I’m not at the house I will throw things into it as needed and pull them to my PC later as needed. Or I will load up something I know I will need later but don’t have time to transfer to my phone or laptop and then let it upload while I’m traveling to my destination.
My wife backs up her files to it and then later a copy gets pulled back down to the Nas with an automatic script. That way she just drags and drops photos and such into the Google drive and forgets it and Nas does the work in background.
There are a lot of uses for cloud storage, it’s not just off site cold storage.
100+ years is dubious if you dont make drives for 100 years. its sort of like when i tried to back up my cd collection and found out that none of my optical drives still worked.
For most consumers the easiest thing is two more hard drives and a mirroring controller and swapping out the mirror for a backup every so often. If you are creative you might even find a way to do that programmatically. The only thing you are missing there is offsite, but if a tornado takes your house away you probably have bigger fish to fry than worrying about your plex media disk.
A 5.5GB cartridge that you can write to once will set you back about $185. It looks like you can get a new 18tb hdd from newegg for under $250. It will take more than 3 of the cartridges to hold the capacity of the disk, not to mention you have to buy the thing that uses the cartridges and you start to see how bad this solution is. I just can not see a use case that it would excel at.
“if a tornado takes your house…” Get a sturdy, waterproof safe and bolt it to something immovable like your concrete foundation.
Unfortunately people have been duped into thinking any storage medium that is physical and that they can hold in their hand is uncool and passe. Too bad. I don’t know what percentage of cloud data is cold, but I bet it’s a lot, and it’s being held on power-hungry servers in huge data centers wasting unreal amounts of electricity.
USB sticks are still “cool”.
i think the problem is that removable storage just hasn’t kept up with spinning rust and ssds in terms of capacity. usb drives are fine so long as you are just moving small files around, but i really wouldn’t want to use it for backup and distribution. flash degrades over time especially when not powered and is subject to bit rot. even the shelf life of professionally mastered cds and dvds is highly questionable. meanwhile original atari carts still work.
id like to see a new rom tech that has density similar to flash, such that you can use it for software distribution. throw in a usb interface and you can buy games and software on rom laden thumb drives. but when software as a service is a thing, its really hard to go back to old distribution models. people might use your old, out of date, unmaintained software forever without paying you, cant have that now.
The NAND flash in a removable drive is the same NAND flash as in an SSD. you can even use SSDs as removable drives.
And yet they still love to buy completely obsolete and meaningless box sets of awful movies.
Interesting tech, thanks for the article!
“.. There’s also the in-built benefit of using write-once media—this makes the discs themselves essentially immune to viruses, intentional erasure, ransomware, or cyber attacks…”
So your Telling me that once Written, It can not be EVER Damaged by an intentional Overwrite corruption?.
Cap
If the right type of interface existed between the computer sending the “write this file to the disc” command and the actual writing hardware, then yes. If the only computer a hacker can get to is the one which is sending commands to the drive, and the drive only recognises particular commands and is designed to be physically unable to interpret instructions as executable data and is incapable of updating its firmware over this communication channel, then yes, proof against that. A drive which had an internal computer (or for that matter a microcontroller will do, less that can go wrong) recognising which bits of the disc it had already written to, logging this to an eeprom, and only performed write commands when it had checked that they wouldn;t over-write sections of the drive where it was already storing something, would be proof against this, short of attackers with physical access.
So you’re telling me that someone who uses the phrase “cap” unironically is clueless as to what permanent data storage is?
1.5tb isn’t big enough you can already get similar storage for 10 REWRITABLE Blu-ray dual layer discs yourself… Sure not as streamlined but helluva lot cheaper and easier to do on your own!
Yes, but is it archival?
I would be interested to know. There’s been discussion about M-discs, but the original DVD type M-disc (4.7Gb of data per disc) is no longer manufactured. There are blu-ray type M-discs (same capacity as blu-ray discs) still in production, but no clear proof as to whether they are as resilient as the original DVD M-discs were. The original DVD M-disc format was put through some real harsh accelerated aging tests by both the company that developed it and by one of the US government’s departments, it survived well. Nobody knows if the blu-ray M-discs have been tested like that. The M-disc organisation’s website hasn’t been updated in years, there is no method to contact them with questions. I’m sure the original M-disc format was write-once-read-many, I don;t know whether the blu-ray M-disc format suffers from being rewritable. And even for Blu-ray M-discs it is hard to know what equipment one would need to buy to be able to make use of them whilst ensuring Linux compatibility.
10*50GB = 500GB.
Even if using the biggest BDXL discs, which has four layers, you get only 1.28TB. I believe these carriages use exactly that kind of discs.
Yes. They are most definitely BDXL. Sony are smart enough to do that and not make some proprietary format after so many bad experiences with that in the past, right?
The reason these needed faith in is that they were designed for the market between big data and end users, and they priced themselves out of that market. Sony even worked to cripple themselves by lobbying for restrictions and additional costs on media internationally. Meanwhile 18TB (yes 18, not 1.8) LTO tapes have been available for a while, are reusable, extremely stable (30 year shelf life) and easy to recover/repair when partially damaged. They transfer at 750M/s. These systems are expensive, and intended to be used in silos that handle caching and availability, but there is a reason they are still used for important data.
Give me DNA storage. Crazy high density, with long-term storage capabilities. Making duplicates also not a problem.
A Proven technology that exists since billions of years.
I shudder to think what pornography stored on DNA will evolve into!
This feels silly in retrospect. “We made a hard drive out of blurays”. Sony is a huge manufacturer of disc changers / jukeboxes so I wonder what their goal was. They make a freaking 400-disc BluRay changer. Personally I’d want a backup solution that used an existing storage standard, just in case XYZ happens and I need to read it from a different machine.
yeah since they’re already discontinuing it, any durable long-term use of these things seems like it will rely on reading it from a different machine. if i was gambling on lifetime, i’d expect bluray to win. no matter how good you make the media, if the reader doesn’t last then it becomes useless. (though maybe 128GB per frisbee seems low today)
I’m surprised someone hasn’t made an easily exchangable hard drive format, like one of those external hard drive bays but for a smaller disk, probably one platter each. Like a modern floppy disk.
Check out the dell powervault rd1000. Came out around 2009
Wasn’t that a Zip disk?
Zip were flexible. You probably are talking about Jazz disks, which were, literally, hard disk plates.
And, of course, I wrote it wrong :-D They were “Jaz” disks.
Jazz was the jackrabbit ;)
Caddyless externally accessible drive bays were rather popular in the server world. Slide in external solid state drive form factors have taken over lately.
trayless hot-swap SSDs are amazing
This is exactly what nvme was designed to do before it became a viable consumer product. No controller, just storage.
Actually, if you have an infected file that you back up to the drive in this article; if you try and access that file by downloading it to your computer, you can infect that computer. If your in computer has proper antivirus protection, it should alert you; that the file is infected when you try and download it, so you can cancel the download.
Cloud storage can also be susceptible to housing infected files; if it lacks proper antivirus protection, to prevent the uploading of viruses, malware, etc.
presumably you would check for viruses before you run your backup. garbage in, garbage out. of course if you go to restore data from a 10 year old cartridge and there is a 10 year old virus on it, chances are whatever exploit it uses will have been closed down by then. besides you would clear the execute bit if you had any opsec standards. its pretty standard to not give backup operators execute privileges just for that reason.
Speaking of formats I hadn’t heard of, I recently discovered m-disc since the drive I recently purchased supports it. I haven’t purchased media in that format yet, but it is supposed to be a higher density, archival retention optical disc. Write once, in the sense that it can’t be erased of course, not that it can’t be deliberately butchered. Having about a gigabyte on a disc doesn’t go very far towards backing up a 20 TB network drive, of course, but it would be a huge Improvement for backing up the irreplaceable records.
That is, assuming media is available, continues to be available, and works as promised.
“42U rack untit” – *unit.
Sad. Everybody now days wants to store things on spinning disks – which don’t store well when not spinning, and don’t last too many years while spinning…
With my first hard disk (10MB) I could back it up on floppies, with later ones with cdroms or relatively cheap tape. Nowadays it’s not really possible with 50GB optical disks – I’d need well over 500 of them for one copy – so they is no alternative to spinning disks (local and remote) or very expensive tape drives…
If I was still running a small business there would be no alternative to buying a $5k+ USD tape drive, but I agree that is a bit pricey for home use..
*Looks at his multiple drives with 10+ years spin time going strong and box of 20ish 500gb to 2tb sata drives that randomly get spun up every few years to look for something have yet to have any fail. *
I may just have freakishly good luck but I’ve actually had fewer spinning drives fail than I have had NAND devices fail lol.
Hell, I have a full height 5.25″ scsi 1TB drive that is 30 years old that as of last year still spun up fine and showed zero bad sectors…
You do not, in fact, have a 1 TB drive from 1994.
Pretty sure you meant GB rather than TB there.
hard drives can be cold stored better than flash can, and flash is better for hot storage than cold. ssds i think have better retention so long as the controller chip has power to do its job. look at the value of a flash cell (usually more than a bit) if the value drifts too far out of spec it can rewrite the cell elsewhere. take away the power and you lose their self corrective capabilities. data on disk is pretty safe in the long term so long as its kept in a low vibration climate controlled environment.
You’re a little late. This platform has been discontinued.
We had Sony MO (magnetic optical) drives at our hospital for archiving cases.
That was the target market but Sony never pursued it.
I have one of these. The smaller ones you could take out of the cartridge and use in a normal blu ray burner. Each disc was 128G if I remember correctly. I’m particularly fond of their 100G BD-RE discs. I don’t believe they are sold in the US all the ones I have were purchased from Japan.
100 years?
What’s the point, looks like Sony already stopped making the hardware to read the discs.
You got 10 years of storage, now you’re on borrowed time until your drive fails and you can’t buy a new one to read all your archived data
Counterpoint to “immune to erasure”: the data was written with a laser, you can presumably fill in the REST of the disk with laser marks, too. The amount and type of legible data you can (re)write is limited, depending in part on encoding, but lasering the disk to heck is probably still an option.
Check out the below link if you’re interested in a truly high-capacity optical drive.
https://futurism.com/the-byte/dvd-shaped-disc-hold-more-movies-life
100 layer discs, pretty cool
It is difficult because Sony is cutting back on optical media but it remains one of three legal ways to store/archive information. Paper, Microfilm/Microfiche, and Optical Media. Magnetic Media and Solid State media are only viable as “short term” backup or storage as they are too fragile.
I would have liked to see more consumer grade developments. 4-Layer BluRay or even something denser than BluRay.
This thing sounds great for enterprise level archiving and storage, but most companies still have statutory retention and long-term asset requirements that only writable BluRay can fulfill at this time to the best of my knowledge.
I work for a company specializing in Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery we had a half rack of Blu-ray Data Archiver the Panasonic variant, and it was a disaster. The units had poor compatability with backup applications. Extensive support from vendor required to make sure the cartridge libraries would be Resilient in the event of hardware failure, spoiler it wasnt. What was meant to replace LTO quickly surpassed by LTO6+ media as far as density. Nice idea poor implementation.
I’m guessing Sony just sold the whole department to NSA…
Ion beam etching is the technology that some of the major Hollywood studios are using for ultra long term storage.
https://www.4waveinc.com/technology/ion-beam-etch/
I know this may already be mentioned in the comments, but back in the very late 80’s (I think 1989), the company I used to work at bought several Panasonic WORM drives on the old SCSI interface. Looking very similar to CD’s but protected in a cartridge. Again, hence the name, they were Write Once, Read Many, and were a permanent optical storage solution.
I think initially they held around 500MB of data but I’m sure I saw some hold around just shy of 1 gig.
Does anyone else remember these?
Still very cumbersome. We need an optical format that stores 10-100TB per disk. Maybe one day soon.
How about 200 TB in the size of a regular optical disc? Here you go guys the solution to all our needs!
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2254577/dvd-size-200-terabytes-of-data-capacity-on-new-opticaldisc.html#:~:text=Scientists%20from%20China%20are%20currently,100%20layers%20of%20the%20disc.
You lied. I’ve heard of it 😒
Should have used 12 x 30 CM, double sided, 3 layers per side laser disc size device
I’d like to see a backup system that used a CNC air chisel to inscribe PARC DataGlyphs on stone tablets. According to Google the patent on DataGlyphs has expired (https://patents.google.com/patent/US6641053B1/en).