| Bofferbrauer2 said: Archival discs, as their name implies, are meant for long term archiving of media (like movies) and not intended for consumer level products: “The development is specifically for professional archiving,” the Panasonic spokesman said. “We are not currently considering optical discs for household consumer use.” In other words, those are probably too expensive to make or too fragile to warrant consumer products with them. In any case, I don't expect any consumer products, like consoles, with those. Improved error detection and reduced crosstalk would probably work, but that would also make both the discs and the drives more expensive. Hard drives had to sidestep this by now and are using helium-filled cases (because helium has almost no air friction and is easier to handle than pulling all the air out, creating a vacuum) to allow for faster rotation speeds, and no dust and more discs inside the casings. So yeah, like I said, more than those 100GB don't seem practical right now. It's technically possible, but very unlikely to be used in consumer products anytime soon. |
Indeed it is possible, they can take features like the error correction and cross-talk reduction and use that to bolster current optical disk capacities.
It won't have an effect on disc prices, drive prices certainly, at-least initially. Most of the work is done on the firmware/software side.
Hard drives before they took the helium road also took the same road as Archival disks, aka. Employed error correction and cross-talk reduction to bolster capacities. (And are still improving on those fronts even today.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive#Error_rates_and_handling
And before that... We moved from Linear to Perpendicular to now having Shingled layouts. - This is to get around the Supermagnetism issue which limits the physical amount of bits you can have per inch on a disk.
In short, if you cannot make the pitches in the disk smaller, then you work around that.
As for Helium, it's not a necessary requirement to increasing capacities, we are now entering the era of next-generation mechanical disks, so we will have multiple actuators and heat/microwave assisted recording techniques.
| Medisti said: Since we clearly have a lot of engineers here, I'm curious what the genius solution is instead of cartridges, given the Switch's size and form factor. A full-sized BluRay player is right out. And, mini-discs could possibly end up smaller than 16GB anyway, aside from the potential for failure and scratching from a portable. Or, would you lot rather it was wholly digital only? |
Optical disks for portable devices is never a good idea.
They are slow, power hungry and generally not as durable mechanically.
NAND/ROM is probably the best form of media for portable devices other than purely digital.
| thetonestarr said: I believe the read speeds for AD are subpar for gaming use, too - at least, if the game is going to be utilizing the medium's space appropriately. Besides that, AD is designed to be highly durable - which means the discs are indeed expensive. |
Archival Disks are an extension of the Blu-Ray format. So similar read speeds should be achievable.
It would help reduce piracy if the next-gen consoles leveraged that technology whilst retaining backwards compatibility with older disk formats.
In saying that, the read speeds are inconsequential anyway, games get installed onto the internal mechanical drive thanks to it's speed and latency advantages.
--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--
