Are you kidding? People want PHYSICAL storage despite the availability of digital downloads and SSD's. Now wait, is it any wonder that TAPE BACKUPS are still being used? C'mon Toms, I just bought a blu-ray burner SPECIFICALLY with back up in mind.

The thing is, no company will give out $100 worth of SSD or $25 worth of thumb drive if a sub-$2.00 10-layer blu-ray will do it.

Great, considering the seek times of current blu-rays it'd take an hour for the drive to find the file you're looking for

Wow, that thing is huge! A company could put some crazy high quality video and sound on that thing with spare space left!

Thats a big fucking disk. The prices of normal blue rays are gonna drop. a lot. And with how much this stores it will probably also slightly drop the price of Hard drives.

this is a nice breakthrough for blu-ray now if they can get they disc cost down to a affordable realm i can imagine some effect on the rest of the storage industry.

The next obvious question - what is the life-span of this media? Environmental stability?

I thought TDK was no more... Last time I saw TDK was back in the BETAMAX days :| Wow 320 Gb disc... That is a LOT of backed up data to loose if you happend to break/loose the disk! Let's put all our eggs in the same basket

Thinking out loud, but what would be the application for using Blu-Ray and this type of tech in actual hard-drives? Can that actually be done?

The price won't be sub $2... it'll be around $10 each, which is cheaper than 320GB hard drive. Only thing is as invlem already mentioned, it might be super slow to read from this gigantic CD. Not to mention it's only one-time write (if they invent rewritable, good luck with that, it'll be 40 hours if burnt at stable (2.4x) speed).

Very impressive, but likely very slow to read/write a whole disc. Hopefully this will bring the price of regular Blu-ray discs down when it comes out.

You can make several copies! Redundancy...

you bought a bluray drive for backing up? it would have been cheaper to get an external 1TB drive

Yeah, that is what she said last night. :-)

Just wait until HD content exceeds 1080p in resolution, such as 4k (4000x2000) and 8k (8000x4000). Toshiba is going in that direction. The extra space will be required for that kind of resolution at some point down the road. It's total and utter madness I tell ya! Hehe.

It will never see that light of day if they make the media as exensive as just buying a much faster HD of the same size.

If BluRay-R/RW data disc burning is as unreliable as it's DVD predecessor, then it should be even more worthless for backup purposes. External drives are the only viable solution anymore IMHO, CD-R was the last viable optical disk. When CD-R first came out, you could back up your entire HDD on one or two of them, but it's been all downhill for optical disks ever since...

Well, consider that the initial retail price of a single layer bluray disc from sony was $25-$30 when they first came out. That is what I remember when retailing for at bestbuy back in the day anyways. I would think that it would be at least $50 per disc upon initial introduction. If that was the case, as you say, they will likely never sell and would end up in a niche market due to hard drive prices being so low. I paid $65 for a 640GB hard drive and $95 for a 1TB hard drive. Comparing those figures, it wouldn't make sense to go with a 320gb bluray disc unless you wanted a storage medium that was going to have a long shelf life of 50-100 years, lol. No magnetic based media will ever last that long.

a one TB drive is one medium - one single object which can be lost broken, stolen, etc. What if you only want to backup your 20GB of music? And then you want to backup all your photos (would take me two disks). Then what if you want to bring the pictures with you but leave the rest? Lightweight, portable, come on, there is always room for both storage technologies.

Now if all you are doing is incremental backups day after day, obviously a HDD is the way to go.

What irritates me is that if you don't want 1TB but only say 200GB, the drive isn't 1/5 the cost, it's like 3/5. (I know it wouldn't be exactly 1/5 because of overhead, component cost, etc.) My need is to backup family digital photo album. I predict it will grow to about 1TB by the time my kid(s) are adults. What do I back that up with that I can trust? I dont want to keep buying a new HDD every 3 years just to be safe, especially since my current boot drive is a 32GB SDD with room to spare after music and apps.

We need RELIABLE long term storage Maybe it's time to start storing less, throwing out more digital photos, movies, etc.

The industrial use of this is awesome!!! Reading through comments and the authors opinion it would seem you have never needed to physically store Tera and Peta bytes of information. A Terabyte hard drive will take up more physical space than a Terabyte of Blu-Ray disks. Besides the fact, 1 terabyte hard drive cost 10 times more than a 10 disk spindle will when these are released. Yes optical disks are a slower media than hard drives, but when you're storing a backlog of customer, user, advertising, etc. data you don't need near instant access. You just need to know it exists and can be accessed.

Little known fact, until recently (2-3 years) many TV stations were still using Beta tapes to record broadcasts because of the longevity and quality compared to digital recordings (DVD & hard drive) and cassette tapes.

I'll believe it when I see it on a store shelf at a reasonable price. Until then, I could care less.

Pioneer already did this last year but theirs had 16 25GB layers for a total of 400GB. I still haven't heard any more (price or availability) since then. I might actually consider Blu-ray an option for backup if I could buy discs like these, but I'm not backing up a TB of data onto a whole stack of 25GB discs.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Blu-ray,5836.html
There's the link.

Simply put, no. It's an entirely different method of storing data.

This is cool, though. 320GB disk. Wow.

[citationStill, with the industry leaning towards SSDs and digital downloads, it's a wonder why manufacturers are still trying to cram truck-loads of data onto a disk.
[/citation]

Well if Comcast shuts off my internet after I download 100GB I'm going to need someway to get my data.

When would I be able to record my brain on a disc? I need to leave a trace of my insane life to the world >

Hey now. Say you need to MOVE data from an SSD in a main office to an HDD in a remote office. Do you ship it all on a NAS, or burn it and ship a disc. Or what if you need to do a bare metal restore of a failed server from backup. Do you wait all day for it to stream data across a slow WAN link, or have a disc locally? Heck, say you buy a game that takes 20+ GB of space. Do you download the whole thing if you live in an area where high speed internet is either unavailable or extremely expensive (as is still the case in much of the U.S.) or just get a disc from Best Buy?

Next, are you going to ask why anyone would want a TB or larger hard drive when you can just store all your files online? Heck, why get your own quad-core processor when there's cloud computing around? Hey, why not just replace your dedicated PC with a dumb terminal and a citrix session to a mainframe somewhere?

There IS a use for physical media! Anyone who says otherwise has no grip on the real world.

I wonder how long it will be before the little USB flash drives are $20 for a 100GB Chip.

When considerin how big HD are now the 320GB is too small. Holographic disk... I am waiting...
But yeah 320 is guite nice and new 4k resolution and 3D content reguire more space. Digital downloadin can not keep up with the ingreasing size of the media content at this moment, so it would seems to be.

They could use this sort of disk to market off movie + game + soundtrack combo disks very easily, hollywood should take a peak into these.

they can already do that on current BD, "if" they want to do so.

another question is, i'd like to see a whole HD TV seire on a single disc either per season (usually 15~25 eps) or fitting the whole serie, that would require at least 200+ GB a disc.

once the price comes cheap enough (

(posting error..)

they can already do that on current BD, "if" they want to do so.

another question is, i'd like to see a whole HD TV seire on a single disc either per season (usually 15~25 eps) or fitting the whole serie, that would require at least 200+ GB a disc.

once the price comes cheap enough (under $15 over 300 GB) i will start doing backup the whole media library sorted by serie and genre, and keep only the medias of "recent interest" in the HDD/NAS. I can also easily make copies of them for family and friends without let them browsing through the whole HDD file directory...

disc reading speed is not as painful as burning after it's done.

it would be a good way to organize things neat (and safer), maybe that's just me.