TECH NEWS – While it’s true that digital media is on the rise, there are still those who want to keep their data on discs.

Netflix often removes series from its offerings, and Steam warns us that we don’t have the digital games we bought. Digital content has these negatives. It makes preservation a little difficult. Except that in Tagayo, in Japan’s Miyagi Prefecture, Sony has shut down the country’s last production line for optical media formats. It produced MiniDV cassettes, MiniDiscs and recordable Blu-ray Discs. But Verbatim and I-O Data have responded by announcing that they will continue to manufacture optical discs!

The Verbatim-I-O Data duo will be looking to serve the Japanese market in any way they can, but interestingly their announcement does not appear on the English version of the press room, so we may be in a slightly more difficult position with recordable Blu-ray discs in the West. Blu-ray discs are also surprisingly durable. According to a technical analysis by a Canadian institute, recordable and erasable Blu-ray discs could have a lifespan of 20-50 years. Hard drives, on the other hand, are not in such a good position. Arcserve, a data protection company, estimates that something is likely to fail in 3-5 years.

Last year, researchers at Shanghai University developed a disk that can store up to 200 TB. It’s safe to say that optical storage is definitely not over. It is possible to store data in the cloud, but that costs money, and if you want to store something locally, it may not always be the case that an external SSD, HDD (or NVME) will fall in two. And let’s not forget that the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 also have Blu-ray drives, and not everyone likes to buy games digitally (since the discs can be resold later).

The closure of Sony’s Japanese factory is not good news, but hopefully Verbatim will think about the Western audience.

Source: PCGamer