Green (Cheap) Backup, Hope was Blu-Ray, What’s Next?

Storage is increasing becoming a green topic.  Archiving is usually thought of last.  Here are a few thoughts on what was a hope, but what next?

With the rapid data growth, DVD backup are not realistic, a hope was Blu-Ray Storage Mojo’s Robin Harris has a few posts.

He hit a nerve as he is 713 comments on this post discussing Blu-Ray is Dead.

Blu-ray is dead - heckuva job, Sony!

Posted by Robin Harris @ 12:31 pm

Categories: Disk drives, Marketing

713 TalkBacks

Blu-ray is in a death spiral. 12 months from now Blu-ray will be a videophile niche, not a mass market product.

With only a 4% share of US movie disc sales and HD download capability arriving, the Blu-ray disc Association (BDA) is still smoking dope. Even $150 Blu-ray players won’t save it.

16 months ago I called the HD war for Blu-ray. My bad. Who dreamed they could both lose?

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory
Delusional Sony exec Rick Clancy needs to put the crack pipe down and really look at the market dynamics.

In a nutshell: consumers drive the market and they don’t care about Blu-ray’s theoretical advantages. Especially during a world-wide recession.

Remember Betamax? SACD? Minidisk? Laser Disk? DVD-Audio? There are more losers than winners in consumer storage formats.

It’s all about volume. 8 months after Toshiba threw in the towel, Blu-ray still doesn’t have it.

The Blu-ray Disc Association doesn’t get it
$150 Blu-ray disc players are a good start, but it won’t take Blu-ray over the finish line. The BDA is stuck in the past with a flawed five-year-old strategy.

Then he continues the discussion of cheaper/greener backup storage.

What is a storage hungry consumer to do?

Massive removable/transportable storage
Together cheap CD/DVD media, thumb drives and ever-growing file sizes killed floppies, Zip drives and all the other removable magnetic disk media. Removable optical media may be next.

Historically, successful PC removable media have stayed in a fairly narrow capacity band relative to hard drives - somewhere between 10x and 50x. If the average PC has a 500 GB hard drive then a removable media between 10 GB and 50 GB is needed.

Dual-layer DVDs are just on the ragged edge of that number while dual layer Blu-ray could handle hard drives up to 2.5 TB. If Blu-ray will never achieve the ubiquity and low cost of DVDs what will fill the gap?

and, he closes with

The good news: consumers will want to archive. There is a huge opportunity for the company that can figure it out.