Exclusive: Blu-ray successor will cost $3 per 1TB disc… but you’ll need a $3,000 drive as well
Obscure startup aiming to replace tape and hard drives with 1TB DVD successor
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Despite the rumors, it seems that optical media is not dead - at least not yet.
Streaming might have pushed physical media (DVD and Blu-ray) out of the limelight, into dollar shops and bargain buckets but Folio Photonics, a startup wecoveredextensivelyin 2022, wants to buck the trend and open up a new market for optical media: the enterprise.
The CEO of Folio Photonics, Steve Santamaria, revealed in an email exchange withTechRadar Prothat the initial capacity of the company’s first disc will be “upwards of a 1TB capacity per disc” with 10TB+ being targeted by the end of the decade.
Meaning that you’d only need a handful of them to backup yourexternal hard disk drivesorSSD, making it a great complement tocloud storage.
The startup has already disclosed on its side that media will cost around $3 (around £2.40 / AU$4.30) per TB, which puts the price of a single disc at $3. Travis Johnston, Director, Market Strategy at Folio Photonics added, “While the actual specs have not yet been published, we believe this capacity and suggested price point to be highly achievable due to our materials/manufacturing innovations.”
In comparison, a single blank 25GB BD-Rblu-rayrecordable media costs less than $0.40 when purchased in a 50 pack cakebox. That’s $16 per TB (around £13 / AU$23), or more than 5X what Folio Photonics is projecting for its first generation of products.
Folio Photonics optical disc drive (ODD) will unfortunately command a steep premium in the range of $3,000 to $5,000 at least initially. LikeCD, thenDVDandBlu-ray writers, cost efficiencies through economies of scale - as Folio’s technology gains adoption - and reusing existing supply chains are likely to slash that by at least one order of magnitude if things go to plan.
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The long road to success
30 years ago, Philips introduced a desktop CD recorder system, the CDD521GN, that commanded a price of $8,495, four years later,HPintroduced its Surestore CD writer for a tenth of the price and by the dawn of this century, you could get a CD-writer for under $100.
Folio Photonics wants 10TB media for less than $1 per TB by 2030, a symbolic floor that neither LTO nor HDD can achieve in the same timeframe. We’re still not there yet though as the commercial disc and drive availability is only expected by 2026 with data center and hyperscale market being the likely customers for what Folio Photonics calls, the “first-ever enterprise-scale optical data storage solution”, which unlike the consumer market, is far more lucrative.
Cartridges, disc carousel and disc trays will allow for low-cost, low-footprint, high-capacity footprint.Sony, one of the leaders in the market, launched a 5.5TB cartridge - the ODC5500R - consisting of eleven 500GB WORM (write once, read many) discs back in 2019 and is the standard in the long-term archival/cold storagemarket.
These retail for around $275 or about $50 per TB with the price of CD recorders far higher than what Folio Photonics is suggesting. In our interview, Mr. Santamaria confirmed that he is comfortable pointing to the SONY ODA (Optical Disc Archive) metrics as comparable which - for the ODC5500R - reach 375 MB/s read and 187.5 MB/s write speeds.
Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled inwebsite buildersandweb hostingwhen DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.
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