Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, January 16, with the continuous development of streaming media, the new generation of the Internet has gradually moved away from words such as optical drive, CD-ROM and floppy disk, and many people have not even seen DVD. But in a sense, optical media has not completely died out, at least not yet.

Folio Photonics, an American startup, hopes to go against the current and open up a new market for optical media.

Steve Santamaria, chief executive of Tuyuan UnsplashFolio Photonics, said the initial capacity of the company's first CD would "exceed 1TB capacity" and aims to reach 10TB + by the end of the 1920s. They call the disc the successor to Blu-ray, hoping to lead the next generation of optical media upgrades.

According to the company, the cost of its media CD is about $3 per TB, or about $3 per disc. Travis Johnston, Director of Marketing Strategy at Folio Photonics, added: "although the actual specifications have not yet been released, we believe that this capacity and proposed pricing are achievable based on our material / manufacturing innovation."

By contrast, a blank 25GB BD-R Blu-ray recordable media disc costs less than $0.40, or about $16 per TB, which is more than five times more expensive than the above products.

Although this kind of disc looks very interesting, the Folio Photonics CD-ROM drive (ODD) is very expensive at first, at least $3000 to $5000. Given the history of CD and DVD and Blu-ray recorders, few people will want to use them unless they can achieve mass production and flatten their cost-effectiveness to a very low level.

CTOnews.com found that Philips launched a desktop CD burner CDD521GN 30 years ago with an initial price of $8495, and four years later HP reduced costs to its 1/10 level and launched a Surestore CD burner. At the moment, however, it may cost only a few dozen yuan to buy a CD burner online.

Folio Photonics hopes to reduce the cost of 10TB media to less than $1 per TB by 2030, but this is an achievement that neither LTO nor HDD can achieve.

It is worth mentioning that its commercial disks and drives are not expected to be available until 2026 and may be more suitable for customers of data centers and ultra-large-scale enterprise-class optical data storage solutions, unlike in the retail market. Making products for enterprises is relatively more "profitable".

Of course, you may ask: now that 1TB SSD costs only a few hundred yuan, what is the point of this kind of CD?

In fact, the reason is very simple, a lot of data needs to be saved for a long time, but it is difficult to achieve "long-term" whether it is mechanical hard disk or solid-state hard disk. The Blu-ray medium does not need the external constant temperature and humidity environment, and does not rely on magnetic storage data, so it has lower requirements for the environment, and it does not need more power resources to maintain the storage environment. In addition, Blu-ray media do not have to worry about demagnetization and have a life span of at least 50-100 years, which is also significantly higher than that of tapes and disks. Therefore, considering the long-term cost, Blu-ray storage has a high performance-to-price ratio.

As an aside, you may see "human civilization retrogression due to the destruction of electronic data" in doomsday / wasteland games / novels, but it is not appropriate to record all key information on paper, so CD-ROMs are indeed an effective way to preserve long-term data from a certain point of view.

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