Sony discontinues production of select Blu-ray and optical recording discs as first step towards exiting optical disc business

[Redaktion]

Sony has discontinued the production of select Blu-ray recording and optical recording discs as its first step towards exiting the optical disc business as demand falls. The Tagajyo factory in Miyagi, Japan is the last remaining factory capable of producing 128 GB BDXL Blu-ray recordable discs. Sony is seeking voluntary, early retirement from 250 of 670 employees at the plant.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Sony-discontinues-production-of-select-Blu-ray-and-optical-recording-discs-as-first-step-towards-exiting-optical-disc-business.856092.0.html

[NikoB]

The saddest thing is that retail buyers simply have no alternative to single-layer BD discs for backing up valuable data for a period of up to 15-20 years. HDDs are extremely unreliable and fragile. SSDs with 3D TLC (not to mention the terrible QLC) quickly lose charge even with little wear. There are practically no MLC/SLC SSDs/flash drives left on the market, and what is available is too expensive.

And against this background, it is very strange that SSD manufacturers deliberately do not give buyers the opportunity to format 3D TLC/QLC SSD in pSLC mode (which is easily done in the firmware with a proportional reduction in capacity by 3 and 4 times, respectively, before use, with the ability to format also in MLC mode and the ability to return to its original state), where data safety is orders of magnitude longer...

There are no ceramic plates again and there won't be any in large quantities (the next fantastic promises of some startup have long been forgotten). Where to store an increasing volume of private photos/videos in 4k+? Terabytes are counting, recording on a measly 25GB SL BD (2-4 layer ones are extremely unreliable and recording on them is essentially a waste of money) has long been a problem. Tape drives also cannot be called an alternative outside of large companies.

There is a real clinch on the market with the safety of private data for ordinary people in the absence of a reliable storage device of 1TB or more, not fragile and storing data for at least 15-20 years.

Is this not being done deliberately and systematically to drive the majority of the population into clouds?

Why don't NAND manufacturers develop special cheap flash memory, sufficiently capacious (from 1TB) with a single or only a few rewrites, but with a storage time of 20+ years, guaranteed with an ambient temperature up to 60C? This would be a good alternative to BD discs...

[Roboto]

Interesting. Never would have thought to find someone who has the same line of thought as I do on this matter.

Most people don't care at all about the integritiy of their data, judging by the fact, that QLC SSDs become more and more popular or people buying 2TB MicroSDs for 5$ from wish. Size and price seems to be the most important factor for the avarage consumer, so that's where storage solutions are trending to.

I do value the integrity of my data very much, though.
For important archive-data I currently use Blu-Ray M-Discs (I have a big pile of them left and also five unused Blu-Ray drives as backup). Less important data is stored on multiple 3,5" Backup-HDDs including parity-Data and MD5 checksums. Main storage for daily use are multiple Synology NAS Systems with ECC memory, RAID6 and self-healing function (Btrfs using checksums and parity data to check and restore through bitflip corrputed data).
In my computers I use MLC-SSDs for important Data (User-data, OS installation and programs) and TLC SSD for Games.
I will switch the MLC to pSLC as soon as they become more available.

Gigabye revelead a line of SSDs with pSLC last month: AI Top 100E SSD
They confirmed they use TLC in SLC-Mode.