We must cut all options for the end user to own anything, let’em pay subscriptions instead.
In a SONY board meeting, probably.
Why are we suddenly selling more NAS grade HDDs?
- Seagate executives
I got mine in November
Recommendations?
I’ve put together a RAID 1 of these and some 860 Evo QLC Hard to say if they’ll last as long as BD but you can’t beat the capacity
https://visiontek.com/products/visiontek-tlc-7mm-2-5-ssd-sata-enterprise
Something tells me the market for media servers is very different than the market for BD-R. The only benefit to having a collection of burned discs over a NAS is that you can let people borrow them. It’s otherwise mostly downsides
If you have a Nas… install plex or jellyfin and you can still let them “borrow” it all the same…
Far from a “downside”.
If you have a NAS you might know you should have a backup on different media.
If they were cheaper I’d use them for archival purposes. They work well as cold storage.
Are we back to trusting Seagate again? Last I knew their spinning rust was t trust worthy. I’ve had 6 drives fail me in the last 2 decades, and all but one or two were Seagate, so I just assume their bad anymore and go with other suppliers.
Every drive I’ve had fail, personally or professionally, has been a Seagate drive.
Every drive I’ve had failed was WD. My Seagates have been mostly fine
I’ve had both Seagate and WD drives fail. I just think drives fail rather commonly.
Seagate does seem to have a higher failure rate, but they are also cheaper. From this article:
The oldest (average age of 92.5 months) hard drive Backblaze tested was a 6TB Seagate (ST6000DX000). Its AFR was 0.11 percent in 2021 and 0.68 percent in 2022. Backblaze said this was “a very respectable number any time, but especially after nearly eight years.”
…
“In general, Seagate drives are less expensive and their failure rates are typically higher in our environment,” Backblaze said. “But, their failure rates are typically not high enough to make them less cost-effective over their lifetime. You could make a good case that for us, many Seagate drive models are just as cost-effective as more expensive drives.”
Their oldest drives are Seagate as well, so that’s saying something.
Whether a drive will be reliable for you is less related to the manufacturer and more related to capacity and luck.
Here’s an anecdote from Reddit:
I’ve had numerous hard drive failures over the years – nothing atypical, I just use lots of drives, and like almost everything else, they have stochastic failures. But between Seagate and WD, the Seagate drives all at least let me know they were going to fail soon, via SMART monitoring, and gave me (just) ample time to get all of my data off of them before completely dying. My WD drives that failed did so instantaneously, without any prior indication of problems.
But this could also be luck, idk. My takeaway is:
- Seagate has a little higher failure rate, which explains why they’re often cheaper
- Seagate may do a good job detecting errors with SMART
- all drives fail and whether one will fail before another is more likely up to luck than any systemic issue by a manufacturer
I genuinely don’t know. Their name was just the first one that came to my mind.
Eh, I doubt many people are burning their own Blu-ray discs - this does not apply to discs you buy that already have films on, those are manufactured differently, and are still being made.
But even if you do archive your personal data onto Blu-ray discs, there are still other manufacturers besides Sony.
This really isn’t a big deal.
This really isn’t a big deal.
Sure. One tiny bit at a time…
Really though, who burns Blu rays. Yes I’m sure there’s a handful of people out there doing it but I don’t know anyone who’s still burning discs in 2024. Storage space is large and cheap now and way less hassle than discs. Companies as big as Sony can’t keep producing products for a tiny market it just doesn’t make sense.
Yup. I use a NAS to not have to deal with disks. I’d rather buy a couple more drives than have to store even more stuff at home.
Who still burns discs (outside of retro gamers) in 2024, let alone Blu-Rays? They aren’t killing the whole format.
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What does a movie company not producing movies on discs have to do with ending production of rewrite-able discs?
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Nah, probably just didn’t sell enough, with USB sticks around and all.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone use the format. CDR saw a lot of use, but who needs bluray nowadays?
I believe they’ve said that this doesn’t change their production of non-rewritable Blu-rays.
Do you have a source for this? That was my worry tbh.
Just did a quick search and found this headline on a site that I’ve never heard of before. Unfortunately, I forgot where I initially read it, lol
Different divisions. This is more akin to when Sony decided to stop making floppy disks. The market is there for now, but it’s just not worth it from a financial perspective.
The amount of people burning their own blu rays is minimal. Even the type of people who emphasize owning their own content just use a NAS system.
This is more akin to when Sony decided to stop making floppy disks. The market is there for now, but it’s just not worth it from a financial perspective.
Ironically Japan is just now phasing out floppies, so there’ll still be a market for a while.
A NAS is mostly geared for online media storage, whereas disks are for offline.
That’s just the government though, similar to how a lot of the systems in the US still run on COBOL (including the IRS).
Ironically those who own their own NAS and hoarding data are amongst the more likely to be burning their own Blu-rays
I mean sure, but Jellyfin and HDDs exist, and are much more convenient than burning a Blu-ray that you have to put in a drive to watch.
Optical disks tend to be used for offline archival storage more than movies (IIRC they’ll still be printing out Blu-Ray movies, just not blanks).
This is not as big a deal as you think. Blu-Ray production itself isn’t ending, they just aren’t making any more rewritable Blu-Rays. Most people aren’t going to be burning stuff to Blu-Rays. You’ll still be able to buy Blu-Rays if you want a physical copy of a film.
I find it kinda funny Sony tried so hard to own the standard so many times thought they eventually got it but then the Internet made it irrelavent almost instantly.
I don’t like Sony.
Am with you. Their midrange phones still have headphone jacks, though. I like that.
Yeah their phones do generally still do things like microsds etc which is very nice I also like the psp but I’ve bought so many Sony products that develop weird faults straight after the warranty and the fact they alway push propriety cards etc.
Its a weird company where divisions seem to actively sabotage each other I just don’t trust them at all.
I also like the psp
I like it too. I’ve even made a few calls with the Skype version for it.
Lots of Star Wars and Forgotten Realms and Russian fantasy books and lots of porn stories have been read in its web browser.
The music player felt nice.
In general, I feel like that’s how “smartphones” should be.
PSP is probably the best thing Sony ever made even considering the Walkman when they were a a+ Company. Psp has some super gems the sad fact is the Vita could have easily been even bigger if Sony themselves didn’t jump through hoops sabotaging the thing.
The things they did that ruined it was using their own very bad card that barely lasted 6 months over microsd and they gave all the big title game releases to absolute garbage company’s like Nihilistic who have now renamed themselves several times because they make pure trash so they have to .
I’m also pretty bitter over their top of the range Bluetooth speaker which for me began switching between bass mode and treble mode every two seconds straight after the warranty I mean maybe two days after . The fault make no sense at all if it was the button there would be a normal mode in there and I’d barely used the thing at all I’d used it maybe 6 tines. So to me that’s the killer how could such a fault happen if it wasn’t designed to.
I mean if the fault made any real sense I would have bought it but it was ridiculous and then I started reading about the Sony kill switch etc.
Vita
PSP-2008 (slim) is the best IMHO, fewer things to break mechanically, immortal buttons, big enough for my clumsy hands.
and they gave all the big title game releases to absolute garbage company’s like Nihilistic who have now renamed themselves several times because they make pure trash so they have to .
We-ell, I played a few Star Wars games on it, and some more. Would like plain Battlefront II there, though. And playing KotOR II: TSL on PSP lying in grass in summer in sunny windy weather would be glorious.
Sony kill switch
That’s the company that would distribute trojans on official CDs.
One of the reasons I was sympathetic to Apple at some point (EDIT: in the sense that them being malicious didn’t frighten me off) was that I liked PSP and Sony was just as bad. Then I realized that Apple simply doesn’t offer anything interesting though. Eh, neither did Sony after PSP.
Sony phones are pretty great for stuff like this tbh
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MicroSD
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dual SIM
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headphone jacks (this is despite Sony being one of the biggest names in Bluetooth audio and therefore more likely to benefit from getting rid of 3.5mm)
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they stuck to notification LEDs longer than anybody (sadly stopped on their newest gen IIRC?
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dedicated 2-stage camera shutter buttons
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no notch, no hole punch
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stereo, front-facing speakers
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first to embrace water resistance on smartphones
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an OS that doesn’t treat you like a complete baby. It shows some relatively advanced options in the settings app and actually explains what they mean and why you’d want to use them. I appreciate that.
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shockingly FOSS friendly, even going as far as providing bootable AOSP builds on their GitHub, as well as contributing more to AOSP code than anybody other than Google themselves, despite being a niche OEM. A lot of the battery optimisations in Android are actually a Sony contribution, for example.
There’s a few things that suck. They need to extend their software support, their naming is dreadful (yes I know it follows the camera division naming, it’s still dumb), and they try to charge Apple/Samsung prices despite not being in the same dominant market position. But overall their Xperia division actually puts out some good stuff IMO.
Can you recommend any specific model of Sony phone? I’m thinking it’ll be my next one. I have an older Sony Vaio that I loved, and it ran Linux like a charm. Need a new phone and will only buy one with a microSD slot so…
Depends how high end you want to go tbh. Of their current lineup I only have experience with the Xperia 5 series, and it was great. I believe the current gen is the Xperia 5 V (still the dumbest naming scheme I’ve ever heard…)
I’m not really treating it as a proper recommendation, though, because I’ve not seen any reviews or anything. This is based on a slightly older model I had as a work phone.
Sounds like you liked it! I currently have a Samsung Note 8 and it’s getting long in the tooth. I’ll take a look :)
(this is despite Sony being one of the biggest names in Bluetooth audio and therefore more likely to benefit from getting rid of 3.5mm)
What’s fun about that is the bluetooth sucks in many experia phones. So if someone wanted to use a bluetooth device they’d be better off just getting a new phone. My friend has fun with his Tesla where his wife has to turn bluetooth off on her phone before they get in otherwise the car will only connect to her phone and not load his profile/get angry if she gets out.
Sounds like a Tesla issue
Bluetooth sucks with everything else, and is unusable according to him. It’s definitely the phone’s fault not the car.
It might suck with everything else. And Bluetooth is a pretty junk “standard”.
But not letting you pick a connection is 100% the fault of the car.
Nah I’ve had the same exact issue with my Xperia 5 iv and my Sony(!) car stereo. If there are other options to connect it will disconnect from my phone and connect to the other one
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I’ve never had a need to burn a blu-ray. When bd-r’s hit the scene with their obscenely priced recording drives, it was only maybe a year or two before flash memory had already become cheap and fast enough that any volume of data large enough to justify a BD was better served on a 16/32gb thumbdrive unless it needed to be distributed in volume, and I’ve never needed to make enough identical copies of something to justify the $200-$300 that the first drives cost.
It sucks losing an option but I actually doubt most anyone will notice. 3rd party manufacturers will keep making disc’s for a while anyway, Sony is far from the only company doing this technology.
I use archival blurays for cheap, deep storage for decade plus usage, not something I’d trust to flash memory or even a hard drive. Tape is an option of course but that’s pricey.
Don’t fret, Verbatim will still be making recordable BD-Rs. However, this will mean that there will be no more 128GB BD-Rs, we’ll be stuck with only 100GB BD-Rs (Sony is the only company that makes 128GB Blu-rays).
I recently ordered a pack of 128GBs from Japan. I’d recommend you do the same, because the prices are gonna skyrocket.
May I ask what uses you have for them?
Backing up personal data, mostly stuff from my childhood that is irreplacable. Sure, I could just put them on a HDD, but then I’d have to replace it every 5-10 years. Data stored on Blu-ray can last a long time.
Data on hard drives also generally lasts a long time. Much longer than 5-10 years.
And make sure you’re constantly monitoring those discs, disc rot is very much a thing for all optical medica.
MDiscs are ISO rated for hundreds to thousands of years.
https://www.ecma-international.org/wp-content/uploads/ECMA-379_3rd_edition_june_2010.pdf
Rated for, but that doesn’t mean they’re all actually manufactured to that standard.
CDs were rated for like 50+ years originally I think. We found out real quick that was an optimistic number, especially when you buy the cheapest thing around.
The international organization for standardization has rated them for archival use in the hundreds of years. This is not a maybe and the Wikipedia page/link I shared above goes over the testing methodology
“Archival use” means a commercial climate controlled environment. Not a plastic tub in your basement or garage.
ISO certification does require a bit more effort than just the bare minimum necessary to legally advertise specific claims about a product.
That doesn’t mean all M-Disc manufacturing is immune to shitty business practices of a manufacturer, but they do have to meet certain manufacturing specifications.
Assuming the drive spins back up after being left in a cupboard for 15 years, if you’re still even able to find a computer compatible with whatever cables it used back then. But yeah.
If proper SATA ever goes away, I’d wager that there will still be SATA-to-USB adapters on sale. Heck, people still find ways to connect floppy drives to their modern PCs.
Whose to say you’d have a computer compatible with the disc and the drive in 15 years?
And even if the platters are irreparably stuck you could go to a data recovery service and still pull the files off that way.
The 128GB blurays have always been very expensive. The smaller discs are cheaper per GB.
For the price of 128GB BD-Rs you would probably benefit from buying an LTO-5+ drive.
I wish I could afford an LTO-9 drive, but $5K is a bit steep. $90 per 45TB for media is phenomenal though.
Will this mean PS5 games in coming years would come in two disks?
Update: never mind they were always using 100 gb
Bluray disk cost 25$ for 50gb and usb flash drive cost 5$ for 64gb
for 35€ you can get 512gb flash drive. kinda insane to think about that. maybe even cheaper but that was just what I found from my local store
Yes, flash memory came a very long way, when current nodes of 3nm going to be old enough for mass producing growth memory, there’s gonna be 5tb microsd cards probably, since we’re already having 2tb ones https://www.tomsguide.com/news/the-worlds-first-2tb-microsd-card-is-here-what-you-need-to-know
the storage density growth is so mindboggling that I find myself hesitant to trust it lol. 2tb?
fuck me running
It’s getting harder and harder to make things smaller, but they are making things thinner now, which means they can layer them, thus increasing density.
Damn, a 50gb blu ray costs 2€ in my country.
The 25GB disks are like 10¢.
Where? I see only 30$ for 5pack of 25gb bd-r
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004217228740.html true, now that you’ve showed me example, on Amazon it’s cheaper, i just didn’t bought Blu-ray disks before and this is what I’ve seen from advertisements
I’m not sure what country you’re in, but have you tried Amazon? I found Verbatim 50 packs of 25GB for $40 and Ridata (usually good quality discs) for $28. If you want small amounts there’s various 5 packs for less than $10.
How can I afford to buy Criterion Collection Blu-Rays for $14.99 if blu-ray discs cost $25?
That’s read-only, not read/write, plus they’re buying bulk.
Economy of scale and also slightly different, but related, media format. Criterion has them printed in bulk.
Yeah ok, but as we’ve established in this thread, Blu Ray discs don’t cost $25 a piece. At any level. So.
Again, writable Blu-ray is a slightly different format from what you would buy with a movie on it. They are not putting Criterion movies on the same discs you could burn them to in a drive.
This is just blank writable discs, movies and TV shows on bluray will continue to be produced… for now.
As long as there are people for whom streaming compression isn’t acceptable, there’ll be a market for Bluray movies/TV shows.
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It’s okay, in 75 years Japan’s government will still be keeping them alive. That’s why you can still buy floppy discs on Amazon.
Japan just gave up the floppy (officially), but there will still be other legacy users.
Until VERY recently the US nuclear arsenal required 8" floppies. Disks that went out of favor in the early 70s because they can only spin for a few hours before they start to corrupt.
The one that most blew my mind was that my local Walmart only stopped selling blank BetaMax tapes in the mid 00’s. By the time the store was built they weren’t even selling movies on VHS anymore, but the blanks were still worthy of limited shelf space.
Are you sure they were BetaMax and not Betacam SP? Beta SP (as it’s more commonly known) is a high quality format that was still being used by TV stations when I was working them as late as the 2010s. There were a few other later much higher quality formats like ED-Beta.
Also, I believe some camcorders also used Beta formats.
I’m sure camcorders were the reason. But no, they were BetaMax.
Nonsense. Plenty of American businesses still rely on them too.
I still use floppy disks from time to time. There are several USB floppy drives in my shop at work for when the network has issues and we have problems posting G Code to our mills.
Can you elaborate on this American businesses requiring floppy disks?
“Required” might not be the right word, but here’s an article about how the San Fransico Trains are updated via floppies - https://www.wired.com/story/san-francisco-muni-trains-floppy-disks/
In the US at least it’s not about required, but more legacy support. There are still a lot of old systems that work, but use old technology.
Shits crazy I can still buy compact flash cards, and zip cards
I sort of understand still selling CF cards. They were used in high end photo and video equipment until not too long ago, and they have storage space comparable with smaller SD cards and USB drives. Plenty of equipment using CF is still perfectly good and still worth using.
I’ve never heard of a zip card. If you mean the old zip disks (I think the largest was 250MB or so), I can’t imagine any reason someone would ever use one of these. Even new, zip drives were notoriously unreliable and not all that widespread. I had one, and I rarely used it in favor of CD-R or RW.
CF is still used in high-end DSLRs. Like, it’s still the “premium” storage option.
CD burning is still kinda useful for hifi. I wouldn’t use it for data these days.
Iomega ZIP disks. Those things just clicked all day.
Zip disk sounds right I saw one working on a machine when I had to reinstall windows NT off of 3 floppy’s. Then had to replace the hard drive with a compact flash cause I needed it to be 4gb to recognize. Lotta niche things that are still around that work perfectly well if 30 years out of date
I have a BluRay drive capable of burning but I’ve never needed it for that. I’ve been mostly using it for my ancient cd collection.
I really wish there was a viable alternative for physical backups. Blu-ray just doesn’t have enough storage space, tape is expensive, and hard drives need to be periodically read.
I’ve read about holographic WORM media, but I just don’t think there’s enough consumer demand for the hardware and media to ever be as affordable as blu-ray.
Once upon a time, I could back up all my important data to a stack of DVD-Rs. How am I supposed to back up a 100TB NAS, though? The “best” alternative is to build a second NAS for backup, but that’s approaching tape drive levels of cost.
How am I supposed to back up a 100TB NAS, though?
By spending money. 100T is a quite a lot of data and big data sets cost money to properly maintain.
Checkout AWS S3 “Deep Glacier Archive”. It’s perfect for data you only “read” in recovery events, since you have to wait up to 12 hours to retrieve the data. I backup my Plex this way.
Based on their 100T of data the .00099 per GB pricing will have them spending $99 a month, or $1200 a year, for backup.
You have to ask yourself if that’s worth it to you.
For me? Yeah, I don’t want to rebuild these datasets.
After a few years, it’d probably be cheaper to get a second NAS and store it at a friend/relative’s place.
I have a few friends that do that too!
Yup, that’s why I don’t bother backing up media to places like S3 or B2, I only back up important stuff like family pictures and tax documents. Replacing my DVD or Bluray collection is feasible, it just costs time and money, but I can’t replace pictures and whatnot.
A NAS is supposed to be redundant. You can use offline HDDs as NAS backup.
I just double my HDDs and put them in RAID1. Not foolproof against data loss, but I wouldn’t be heartbroken if I lost my Plex library. For important docs I add a cloud backup.
3-2-1 is the way to go.
It’s the answer. It’s the reason.
I’m trying to do a 3-2-1 but instead I’m doing a 4-3-0. Original is on SSD with scheduled backups to two separate HDs so that I have 3 copies on two different media (if SSD + HD counts as distinct enough) so then I added in BDR as an infrequent 4th manual copy for my most irreplaceable data (and I’m very strict with what counts as irreplaceable so that the total is just over 100GB at this point). Eventually I need to get a copy of the disks off site but for now they are in the basement.
I have no illusions about how long the BDRs will last. (Seems like it is anywhere between 100 days and 100 years).My aim is to just have another copy that is distinct from magnetic or flash storage. My plan is to burn new updated copies so that any data on an old disk will get burned to a newer disk at some point. Maybe in ten years I’ll abandon this approach but for now it makes me feel better.
You really should have offsite backup as well. If your home catches on fire, everything will be lost. That can be as simple as taking those BDRs to a friend’s house.
Cloud storage is relatively cheap if you limit your storage. You can get 1TB for $6/month from B2, and I think it scales down as well (e.g. 100GB should be $0.60/month).
25GB and 50GB disks written at blistering 10MB/s in the age of 100MB/s Gigabit Internet connected to storage (S3, Backblaze, etc. etc.) means that networks have completely obsoleted Blu Rays.
I’m surprised they still found a use of these things. Flash drives are also so much cheaper, faster, and more convenient.
I know for some secure purposes they still use CDs because they’re a lot harder to sneak around than a flash drive. There are still some uses, but they’re very niche. There’s essentially zero purpose for personal use.
One TB capacity in a sd micro flash disk equivalent to twenty Blu-ray discs at 50GB, just no comparison in the growth of technology.
Oh well. I use memorex anyway
I use Maxell. Because I’m a cool 80s guy.
Uhm sorry to rain on your parade, but all the cool people made fun of Maxwell guys back then. Our Nakamichi ‘gons got fed TDK exclusively…
RIP
No no, these are for burning.
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RIP rip
Is this just Sony’s own production of consumer writable Blu-ray discs, or is it like, Sony preventing other manufactures from producing them as well?
Just their own. Other manufacturers are fine.
It’s just consumer writeable. Blu-ray movies will be fine, and other companies will be manufacturing consumer writeable Blu-rays as well.
Good. Flash storage is everywhere now. Why go through an extra layer of proprietary hardware and DRM when you can have direct access to the video files which can be read on any platform?
The DRM is extra awful with bluray, its usefullness is dipressingly lmited. Being propriatary makes it worthless as an archive medium.
I mean, as long as there is a hard copy archive option out there this is ok (cloud is already flirting with copyblight).
