If you browse Desktop PCs on Newegg, or Amazon, you will be "hard pressed" to find one that includes an optical drive. I've never purchased a commercially built PC, but if it ever came to it I would insure that I include an optical drive either internal or external. For those who are diehard optical drive owners there's good news on the horizon. According to this February 26, 2024, article on Tom's Hardware, "Scientists just developed a 200,000GB (20tb) optical disc that could replace Blu-rays." Of course the possible downside is the cost of an optical disc that can compete directly with hard drives for storage. Personally I'm quite satisfied with the current BD and M-Discs because 100GB Blu-ray discs are enough for me, but it does show an interest in continued development of optical discs and ergo optical drives. https://www.tomsguide.com/tvs/scien...00gb-optical-disc-that-could-replace-blu-rays
Data storage and speed of data access is a priority for a lot of technologies, but I have to admit the notion of a 20TB disc seemed a little far fetched.
Interesting. We all know that CDs, DVDs, etc. can go bad with time. I guess that they would need to come up with a good scheme to prevent that from being a factor. I also wonder if these new discs would allow multi-session recording.
CDs and DVDs have an estimated lifespan of 20 years or more with proper care, Blu-ray discs between 20 and 100 years. I've recently been archiving data to M-Discs (advanced BD discs) which have an estimated lifespan of up to 1000 years, although there is no way to test their longevity. So it's probable the new 200,000GB discs will last at least as long as an M-Disc.
I'm familiar with the M-discs as a result of being in the Nero forums so long. From a personal viewpoint, I don't know why I would save that many files. I've got lots on my hard drive that were once relevant to me but now I have no use for. I haven't deleted them just because of the time it takes.
I use M-Discs to save old family videos and rare photos. Hard drives are great for local use short term storage only, but not a good idea for saving valuable family memories. The benefit of discs is they can store memories for long periods and are very lightweight. I store all my hard drive files in alphabetized categorized folders, and the files inside the folders in other alphabetized folders. I could clean a completely filled 4TB drive in a matter of minutes.
I'm saving a video collection on a portable 4TB hard drive, with an identical backup on another portable 4TB drive. Family video and photos I'm saving to M-Discs, but I have copies of those for immediate use on a 2TB hard drive. I have 20TB of storage in total.
That's a lot of storage. I have 4 big Photo albums full of photographs of my and my girl's family. Since I lost my girl a couple of months ago, I have no use for her family pictures and nobody to give them to (she only had one brother and he's not interested) so you know where they're going. I hardly ever look at the ones for my family. Three years ago I digitized all the slides (about 5000) I had taken over the years with the intent to put them on DVD for playback instead of using a slide projector. I never got them on disc and there's just me now to look at them so I probably won't bother.
I lost my wife on 04/06/2012, and so much of what I'm archiving are slices of time that we shared. My wife assembled a large number of photo albums, too many to digitize. I went through a number of them and saw a few that were starting to brown, probably from tannic acids in the paper. Thinking the albums took up too much space I removed them from the albums to photo archive boxes for storage, and discarded the old albums. This not only saved the photos and space, but it also made them more portable. You would be surprised how few photos there actually are in a huge photo album. A log of my home videos were on 8mm tape, Beta max tape and VHS tapes. I copied from the tapes and archived them to M-Discs. I've been looking at what it would take to build a home PC powerful enough to run AI programs to see if I can improve the video quality. If that works out then I will make a second backup also on M-Disc.
My condolences to you. I was coming back to write that I hoped I hadn't bummed anyone out with my comments. All of my photos (not slides) are from the early 60's and don't have noticeable deterioration with age. I went to slides in around 67. Since she had only one brother and most of the rest of here family is gone, there's not much interest in her family pictures (there's also patches from when her dad was in the army in WWII). I might keep them around just for a looksy once in a while, but, when I'm gone (I'm 80), they're gone. Never did get into tape. The Nero AI video upscaler tool has the following requirements (nothing excessive except maybe for RAM)
