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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 stores and bargains, but Folio Photonics, a startup we covered extensive wants to buck the trend in 2022 and open a new market for optical media: the enterprise.
Folio Photonics CEO Steve Santamaria revealed in an email exchange with Tech Radar Pro that the initial capacity of the company’s first drive will be “more than 1 TB capacity per drive,” with a target of 10 TB+ by the end of the decade.
This means you only need a handful of them to back up your external hard drives or SSD, making it a great addition to cloud storage.
For its part, the startup has already revealed that media will cost about $3 (about £2.40 / AU$4.30) per TB, bringing the price of a single drive to $3. Travis Johnston, Director, Market Strategy at Folio Photonics added, “While actual specifications have not yet been published, we believe this capacity and proposed price are highly achievable thanks to our material/manufacturing innovations.”
By comparison, a single blank 25 GB BD-R Blu-ray recordable media costs less than $0.40 when purchased in a pie box of 50. That’s $16 per TB (about £13 / AU$23), or more than 5x what Folio Photonics expects for its first-generation products.
Unfortunately, Folio Photonics optical disc drive (ODD) will command a hefty premium of $3,000 to $5,000 initially. Like CD, then DVD and Blu-ray writers, cost savings from economies of scale — as Folio’s technology becomes more popular — and reuse of existing supply chains are likely to reduce that by at least an order of magnitude if all goes according to plan.
The long road to success
30 years ago Philips introduced a desktop CD recorder system, the CDD521GN, which commanded a price of $8,495, four years later HP introduced its Surestore CD writer for a tenth of the price and by the turn of the century you could buy a CD writer for less than $100.
Folio Photonics wants 10 TB of media for less than $1 per TB by 2030, a token floor that neither LTO nor HDD can reach in the same time frame. We’re not there yet, however, as commercial drives and drives are not expected to be available until 2026, with the data center and hyperscale markets being the likely customers for what Folio Photonics calls the “first-ever enterprise-class optical data storage solution.” which, unlike the consumer market, is much more lucrative.
Cartridges, disk carousel and disk trays provide low cost, low footprint and high capacity. Sony, one of the market leaders, launched a 5.5 TB cartridge – the ODC5500R – in 2019 consisting of eleven 500 GB WORM (write once, read many) drives and is the industry standard for long-term archiving/ cold storage.
These retail for about $275 or about $50 per TB, with the price of CD recorders much higher than what Folio Photonics suggests. In our interview, Mr. Santamaria confirmed that he feels comfortable pointing to the SONY ODA (Optical Disc Archive) stats as comparable, which – for the ODC5500R – has 375 MB/s read and 187.5 MB/s achieve write speeds.