Sony is slowly halting production of recordable Bluray discs

[thewayne]

From the article: "In an interview Sony gave to AV Watch recently, the company admitted it's going to "gradually end development and production" of recordable Blu-rays and other optical disc formats at its Tagajo City plants in Miyagi Prefecture, Japan. Essentially, 25GB BD-REs, 50GB BD-RE DLs, 100GB BD-RE XLs, or 128GB BD-R XLs will soon not be available to consumers. Professional discs for video production and optical archives for data storage are also being discontinued.

Sony says it's pulling the plug because the cold storage market never really took off like they hoped, and the overall storage media business has been operating in the red for years. As the company put it bluntly, "We need to review our business structure in order to improve profitability.""

This will not affect production of discs for things like home video and computer games, just consumer recordable discs.

No doubt a lot of people are going to get stung by this. And I'm sure they're useful. But let's look at the computer that I'm on right now. It has 550 gig in use on the main drive. That's five discs to archive it. Five discs that have to be swapped out. OR one 4 terabyte external hard drive that I can do multiple generations of backups to and I don't have to swap discs out during the backup process: plug in the drive, start the backup, walk away.

Now, an external HD is not an archival backup, that hard drive will not last decades, which presumably the writeable discs will - if you keep track of them, AND they remain undamaged, AND your external drive keeps working or you can get another. Those are a lot of ifs and ands.

Backups have always sucked. And archiving materials suck even worse, speaking as a computer guy of several decades and a librarian.

https://www.techspot.com/news/103709-sony-killing-off-recordable-blu-ray-bidding-farewell.html

Comments

[bibliofile]

Over on Bluesky people were talking about archiving electronic information. And gosh, it takes work, and money, and the media formats don't last on their own the way, say, paper does. (Hollow laugh -- somewhere, I think I still have a Bernoulli disc or two, and the drive for reading them.)

[thewayne]

In my library, we have a portable Zip drive!  It's been absolute ages since I've seen a Bernoulli, those were pretty awesome.

[dewline]

This is not a good idea on Sony's part. Right down there with the rootkit scandal.

[thewayne]

The division isn't profitable and shareholders must have their returns.  Personally, I don't buy rewritable digital media as I don't think it's cost-effective for my needs, thus I don't have a dog in this fight.

[disneydream06]

Thanks for nothing Sony. :o

It better not effect "home video" as Disney turned over their dvd production to Sony. :o :o :o
Hugs, Jon

[thewayne]

Shouldn't.  We're talking specifically writeable storage media, and they explicitly stated that this won't affect production of the discs used for home media such as movies and games.

[disneydream06]

I'll hold them to that. :o

[silveradept]

Optical media for backups became less optimal once cheap and effective flash memory came into being. If I can put up a full terabyte on a flash drive, a fifty gigabyte optical disc that I can only use once (or with rewritable) just isn't going to cut it. I'm guessing the read and write speeds are slower than USB3, too.

I still think it's a good idea to have writable optical media, including Blu-Ray, because video content is still worth putting on disc for those who don't have computers to play it with. But unless they can start getting storage comparable to NVMe, optical discs aren't going to be much use. (If they can outlast NVMe, that's another matter entirely.)

[thewayne]

The problem is that no one in charge of archival storage trusts flash drives in that application - yet.

[silveradept]

I believe that, yes. I'll bet discs also don't degrade as quickly.

[murakozi]

Recordable DVD's and CD's are still very much a thing, when working with the government. Flash drives are still forbidden to be used in certain workstations. Heck, just plugging one into a machine cleared for classified processing instantly makes it classified media, which has to be logged, tracked, and often can't be reused. Eventually, they have to be destroyed via approved methods, which generally aint cheap.