100GB Blu-Ray
With the rising demand for larger capacity data storage. Lots of alternative mediums have flooded the market with options. Between external hard drives, flash memory and tape devices will anyone demand BD XL™?
On the Blu-ray Disc Association website, they believe so. The specification of BD XL™ being targeted primarily at broadcasting, medical and document imaging enterprises, that have considerable archiving requirements. To meet these requirements, BD XL™ has the write-once options on 100GB and 128GB capacity, and re-writable capacity on 100GB discs.
The likes of TDK and Panasonic have long released their offerings of 100GB Blu-ray, but availability remains difficult in the UK. Is this because manufacturing costs, in comparison to other storage mediums remain too high for the BD XL™ to be financially viable? The buy price of Blu-ray (BD-R) is still dropping, whilst the cost of components, such as polycarbonate continue to increase rapidly (seen to have doubled in the last year). The instability of components would indicate that the BD XL™ would need to have a high retail cost, to ensure the product is financially worth producing and will the end user pay for it?
As Pioneer BD XL™ drives are now available, suggesting that they predict that yes, eventually we will pay and yes we will want an optical disc solution for our ever increasing storage demands. So the three or four recordable layers that BD XL™ comprises of, could soon be available at www.handisc.co.uk
Watch this space!
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