Tape drives came out in the 1950's and are still readily available and used... so you never knowIn hundreds of years you won't be able to buy or even source the devices to play them on.
Tape drives came out in the 1950's and are still readily available and used... so you never knowIn hundreds of years you won't be able to buy or even source the devices to play them on.
Also a big part of consoles keeping disc drives is allowing games to gifted physically and loaned and swapped, etc. Basically keeping high street gaming stores on life support.
I'm definitely impressed by the archival single write M Discs the more I read about them. They can take some beating and still be fine, use stone instead of dye in their construction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
http://www.mdisc.com/
http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag...-uk.org.uk/mag/artsep16/mol-mdisc-review.html
One 100GB M Disc could conceivably store a whole family's lifetime of photos for hundreds of years. So much better than SSD for long term storage it seems.
I'm pretty sure the Pioneer BDXL that OCUK sell does burn M discs, I plan to get a couple to try out after testing out the non M rewritable discs I'm getting sent from Japan.
Edit: Just an aside, one thing I really like about those M discs is that essentially the data is carved into stone at a microscopic level rather than just being ink like in normal discs, so like I saw in a comment on Youtube, there's a connection to truly ancient times and carving things into stone tablets.
What on earth are people still using optical media for?
I have a USB stick, that has done away with any need for disks in my life.
Bit odd that blu-ray drives are still £60-odd though... Thats the same as what I paid for mine about 9 years ago.
Must admit blu ray still looks great on my old Sony player compared to HD tv streams. Only have a couple though, and hundreds of dvds.