This is what a 2020 vinyl update could look like

This is what a 2020 vinyl update could look like

Since the turn of the century, vinyl, thought by most to be a dead audio format, has experienced an amazing resurgence. Tens of millions of copies have been sold on both sides of the Atlantic, bucking the trend of substituting physical and tangible objects for digital formats. As we did with the venerable tape cassette a few weeks ago, we left our minds wondering and pondering what a 2020 vinyl update would look like. As it turns out, there was indeed an update to the LP, the 12-inch version of the vinyl backing, but it was used for video, not for audio. Laserdisc was all the rage in Southeast Asia in the 1980s and 1990s, where the ability to access any track on a disc in seconds made it a favorite in karaoke bars thousands before. the internet age. The technology used in Laserdisc has been improved over two decades to give birth to first DVD and then Blu-ray. The official successor to the Laserdisc, the archive disc, was first announced in 2013. However, it is primarily used, as the name suggests, for data archiving purposes (popular in cloud storage such as cold storage). A single disc can hold 300GB, triple-layer Blu-ray discs up to 200GB. Data is recorded on both sides for both media, and the Archival Disc roadmap features 500GB and 1TB models in the near future. They are stored in cases (called magazines) to mitigate the risk of physical damage (scratches, etc.), similar to floppy disks (or ZIP/Syquest).

Laserdisc updated to 2020

Even using the technology of a 200GB Blu-ray disc, a 2020 double-sided vinyl release would be a formidable rival to other archival media. A Blu-Ray disc has a diameter of 4,7 inches, while a laser disc has a diameter of 12 inches. Not taking into account the unusable areas (near the edge and in the middle), the "laservinyl" offers a much larger space, about 6x. So there you have it, if someone (Panasonic, Sony, Verbatim or Hitachi) decided to take a gamble and create a 2020 version of the Laserdisc, with a portable turntable/turntable/turntable, the shelf would hold approx. 1,2TB, and up to a staggering 6TB if they used the latest technology implemented in the archive drive. That's still a long way from the 100TB SSD (the world's largest SSD) or the upcoming 20TB hard drive, but the cost of production is likely to be much cheaper. A closet-sized cabinet with approximately 200 drives could store 1,2 PB of data. Additionally, optical discs are non-contact media, impervious to magnetic fields, and have a useful life of approximately 100 years when stored securely.