Do they last more than 20 years in ideal conditions?
Optical discs are already incredibly resistant and shouldn’t be expected to fail in your lifetime. Most of the times they do, it’s either old media (cd and dvd both had physical flaws in design), damage, or mistakes in manufacturing.
There’s really no reason for the discs to degrade. It’s just stamped plastic.
What disc is left? blu ray?
Bluray and uhd bluray are the current standard
The foil coating usually deteriorates first
On cds, yes. Technology from the 80s, designed in the 70s.
How to lose EVERYTHING in one go.
I’d said over on the Old Place back during the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD wsrs that people really liked their 7" optical media. I got down voted to hell for it then, but I’m glad to see I wasn’t totally wrong.
Cheap, high density media has its applications. Tape is still the preferred long-term storage medium for backups in a lot of industy sectors because still stores gobs of data, it’s dirt cheap, compact, light and it transports easily. If you don’t need it to be fast, or you’re regularly producing large scale data sets that are essentially disposable after some time, then it’s a good compromise.
No reason this tech couldn’t step into that niche when it hits the right price point.
I absolutely agree with you, hovewer lto-9 18tb tape costs same money 20tb hdd costs
Back to spinny drives we go?
Optical media have some disadvantages to conventional HDD and SSD though, unless they have reliable scratch and shatter protection.
Unless the 1.6petabytes is all photos you have ever taken of people and all the photos and videos everyone has ever taken of you and all your family, I hope there’s a way for a person to wrap their mind around having 1.6petabits. maybe it’s a big text file that draws your name from random text characters to the order of 1.6petabits. it could be mostly just zeros.
