Manipulators
So I was reading about the Sony XL1 Vaio HTPC system and my mind started to fill up with ideas for the IEEE-1394 200 disc changer DVD+-RW burner. Well, that and lamentations for Sony’s amazing lack of vision beyond the narrow compartments they segregate everything into…
The very first thoughts were why in the world didn’t Sony go all out, and have the XL1 system configurable on the web so one could make it the ultimate base for high-end home theater/gaming… the ability to buy it with over 1TB of HD space, extra tuners, additional changers, a better gaming graphics card… even at $3k – $4k it’d be more capable and half the price of things out in the high-end market…
But then the IT guy in me started thinking about the possibilities of automated burning of 900GB (DVD-R) to 1.7TB (DVD+R DL) on a format everybody already has the hardware to read…
In the VFX/Entertainment world the clients often want all the data from their project once it completes (probably common to other industries as well…) but they never have the same backup tape infrastructure and it seems wasteful (and not entirely reliable) to permanently use an external hard drive for that kind of thing. But with the right software a system based on a 200 disk DVD+-RW changer could really be something.
All it needs is for Sony (or somebody else) to sell the changer or a similar one plus some fairly simple software that optimizes the files to fit as much as possible on each disk then catalogs the location of each file and burns that database plus basic software to read the database onto a CD-R when the set is complete (actually I think Roxio or somebody like that already pretty much has this software). Or you could go a little more complex and write the data in such a way that you keep data parity, so if a disk is unreadable down the road you’re still covered (though in this case you’d have to use the software for the restore itself). Another thing the software could be used for is compression, at the low-end the tape backup formats assume 50% compression rates, so that’s “up to 3.4TB”! (That’s on DVD+R DL disks, per disk price doesn’t sound as bad now, does it?) Or, since we’re starting with Sony hardware we can use their pie-in-the-sky AIT assumptions “up to 5.1TB”!!
So for $80 (200 X $0.40) you’d have a 900GB (/1.8TB/2.7TB) archive on DVD-R disks, that’s about the price of a single 160-200GB (native) SDLT or LTO cartridge, but everybody could read the archive with hardware they’ve already got. Also seems like this kind of thing would be a great solution for Sarbanes-Oxley requirements…
The only thing it could use, other then the software, is maybe a way to automatically LightScribe (normally a technology I don’t care for, but perfect for this) the disks so they come out labeled.
Why doesn’t this exist already? Or does it (just jacked up in price beyond all reason)? The pieces are out there, somebody just needs to polish the interface, package it all up nicely and let the market know it’s available.