Today’s online streaming may have pushed physical media (DVD and Blu-ray) out of the limelight and into nostalgia shops, but Folio Photonics, an initiative we’ve covered extensively in 2022, wants to change that trend and open up a new market for optical media: Institutional.
CEO of Folio Photonics Steve SantamariaIn an email conversation with TechRadar Pro, the company said that the capacity of the first drive ” up to 1TB per disk” and targeting 10TB+ capacity by the end of 10 years. So you will only need a few to back up your external hard disk drives or SSD, making it a great complement to cloud storage.
On its part, the startup has announced that the media will cost around $3 per TB, which sets the price of a single disk at $3. Travis Johnston, Market Strategy Manager, Folio Photonicsin particular, “While actual specs are currently unreleased, we believe this capability and recommended price point are highly achievable due to our instrumentation/manufacturing innovations.”said.
For comparison, a single blank 25GB BD-R blu ray recordable media costs less than $0.40 when purchased in packs of 50. That’s $16 per TB, or more than 5 times what Folio Photonics predicted for first-generation works.
For the optical disc driver (ODD) of Folio Photonics, unfortunately, at least initially $3,000 to $5,000It is expected to demand a high price in the range.
The long road to success
30 years ago, Philips, $8,495 It introduced a desktop CD recorder system called CDD521GN at a low price. Four years later, HP introduced the Surestore CD burner for 1/10 the price, and at the beginning of this century you could get a CD-burner for under $100.
Folio Photonics also wants to sell 10 TB of media for less than $1 per TB by 2030, a symbolic base that neither LTO nor HDD can reach in the exact timeframe. Commercial disc and driver availability but expected in 2026, Folio Photonics’ ” The first enterprise-scale optical data storage solutionWe are not at that point now, as there are potential customers of the information center and hyperscale market, which he calls “, which is much more beneficial than the consumer market.
