Posted on 04/12/2006 9:04:40 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
25GB recordable and rewritable discs hit the shops in the US
TDK has begun shipping 25GB recordable and rewritable Blu-ray discs to retailers in the US.
The 25GB BD-R recordable discs will sell for $19.99 (£11.50), while the 25GB BD-RE rewritable discs will retail at $24.99 (£14.35).
TDK is one of the founding members of the Blu-ray Disc Association alongside companies such as Sony and 20th Century Fox. The company plans to expand on the offerings with discs that hold 50GB.
50GB recordable discs will cost $47.99 (£27.50) and rewritables will be $59.99 (£34.50). The 50GB media have a dual-layer recording material, while the 25GB discs are single layer.
Bruce Youmans, vice president of marketing at TDK, explained that the Blu-ray discs were among the most significant product introductions in the company's 70-year history.
"TDK has been involved in the development of blue laser recording technology since 1998, and TDK innovations such as hard coating and inorganic dye formulation have played an essential role in making this revolutionary new format a reality," he said.
The discs are manufactured at the company's Chikumagawa Techno Factory in Japan.
Hmmmm.... Interesting technology, but I suspect its time has passed. I think flash memory in one form or another is going to replace it. (The only question remaining being, can flash memory act as a permanent backup medium?)
What can we expect in price differential?
Exactly -- and with lower power consumption and NO moving parts.....
There are still some issues that need to be worked out, though -- chief among which is the permanence of data on a flash chip.
Dunno. I know you can get a few Gig on a memory stick for about $100, but I don't know how that translates into prices for a larger medium.
You can get a 60GB iPod for $400, though.
25 gig of flash memory will not be economical anytime soon for movie storage. DVDs are still by far the cheapest cost storage solution - the only thing close right now are PATA hard drives which can be obtained for about $.30/GB when on sale or with rebates.
High definition DVDs certainly will have a market as long as the DRM restrictions are not too tight.
But I'll be waiting for the price to go down,that's for sure.
Maxtor 1TB One-Touch Drive ~ for under $1,000...from Newegg for $743.99....
Cool drive - I remember when I 40MB (meg not gig) drives came out and everyone said that there was not way anyone would ever fill up one of those. LOL
I have 2TB of storage using a media server running UnRaid software. UnRaid is similar to RAID-5 except you can the drives don't all have to be the same size and you can add new drives without having to rebuild the array.
As a new sale on drives comes out, I add to it - last week Fry's had 300GB Seagates for $79 - no rebates, that was the walk of the store price.
Right now 250GB adn 300GB drives seem to be the sweet spot as far as price per GB.
Got a bunch of 250 G drives, how does UnRaid work, Linux or Xp, special hardware?
That's 8 gigabit = about 1 gigabyte.
It runs on linux but that is transparent to the user. The software comes on a flash drive and is used to boot the machine. Even though the operating system is linux, the array appears to the outside world as ordinary window shares.
You can use your own hardware or by a preconfigured server (minus drives) from the company. On the AVS Forums, it seems to be about 50/50 split on rolling your own vs buying preconfigured.
It does one one parity drive and that drive must at least as big as any other drive in the array.
The key selling point for me (besides fault tolerance) was that you can add drives to the array piecemeal and can be of any size. Another very nice feature is that if if two drives go down, you only lose the data on those drives - with RAID 5 you would lose all of the data.
The software is $125 I think. The prebuilt server which holds $12 drives is about $1,300. That price seems steep at first blush, but the drive trays are what really drive up the price - retail they are about $30 a piece and this server comes with 12 of them. The trays are a nice feature though - when a drive fails, just open the tray and slide in a new one and send the failed on off to the manufacturer if it's still under warranty.
They also sell a software, motherboard and drive controller starter kit for about $400 I think.
Here is the link to the AVS Forum discussion UnRaid Media Storage Server
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