New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray
The other day I was talking with a friend about the high cost and perceived fragility of tape drives for long term personal archival while bemoaning the loss of higher density optical storage technology. It&#x27;s not easy to backup or shuffle around terabytes of personal video, audio and pictures. Hard drives aren&#x27;t exactly the right media for safe deposit boxes.<p>In the 90&#x27;s I had an Iomega Ditto 250MB drive that held 120MB per tape for $15-20 per tape and my hard drive was 540MB. This was when hard disc storage cost $1000&#x2F;GB. The tape drive had a quarter the capacity of the hard disc and was cheap by comparison. It was practical. Later when CD burners came out they offered 650 then 700MB when hard drives were less than 10GB. Then they became too small and DVD came out but shortly was also passed up as 4.7GB wasn&#x27;t much storage. Bluray was DoA with too little storage to be of real interest with a paltry 25-50GB.<p>I&#x27;d love to see CHEAP &gt;=1TB optical discs with a write speed of 100MB&#x2F;s allowing us to burn a disc in ~10 minutes. I&#x27;d happily pay $1 a disc in bulk and upward of $1000 for a drive. I&#x27;d also happily pay $10+ for an archival disc that has a guaranteed shelf life of 50+ years. Bring back the 100 disc juke boxes while we&#x27;re at it ;-) Cheap storage for everyone!