Recently SanDisc announced that, through a partnership with Toshiba, has presented a technical paper for a flash memory chip that stores 128 billion bits of data. This is on par with the current highest capacity Blu-ray format with the 128GB BDXL media.

At present, optical media has enjoyed a comfortable lead as the cheapest per byte method of data storage. Additionally, outside of hard drives, optical media has long held court as the largest capacity recordable media as well. With SanDisk’s announcement, this ups the ante in the battle between optical and flash for storage supremacy.

In an effort to better utilize the large capacity Blu-ray format as an effective archival media, Pioneer has announced the BDR-PR1. This Blu-ray disc burner was designed to offer reliable BD-R recording for reliable archival storage.

Considering the amount of data held on servers and the potential disasters that could cause that data to become corrupted or deleted entirely, it’s becoming more and more critical to have an alternative back-up. That’s why optical discs are still relevant as they are complete resistant to tampering or viruses and if one uses the correct media which is burned properly, can hold data for hundreds if not thousands of years.

Based on an article in CDRinfo;

“According to Pioneer, burning on MKM’s new 50GB BD-Rs at 4X CLV results low Burst Error Cound (BEC) and Random Symbol Error Rate (RSER). These parameters are among the basic signals related to digital errors of a Blu-ray disc and Pioneer’s results are well within the specifications defined for BD-R discs.”

The drive is expected to be released in Japan first and hopefully migrate to other territories soon after.

Vinpower announced the recent release of its Hard Drive (HDD) Duplicator, boasting the exceptionally fast duplication speed of max 150MB/sec. That’s all well and good, but what does that mean in real time duplication and will it really make a difference in the time it takes to duplicate a HDD?

When you look at many of the competing HDD Duplicators, you’ll find that most of them top out at around 90MB/sec. So if you look at it more closely, that means the Vinpower HDD Duplicator can copy approx. 9GB/min, while the competition can only copy at 5GB/min. So, if you extrapolate that out over a now standard 500GB HDD, in theory, the Vinpower duplicator can copy the entire HDD in less than 30 minutes while the competition will take nearly an hour to complete. Take that further to a 2TB HDD and the time gap between the two becomes even further apart. The Vinpower unit, using the same criteria, could take less than 4 hours to copy while the competition would take nearly 7 hours to complete.

I don’t know about you, but I can think of much better things to do with my 3 hours than wait for a duplication job to finish. So if your time and money is important to you, I would recommend you read the specs carefully and judge for yourself which type of HDD Duplicator you’d rather use, the one that saves you time or the one you’re constantly waiting on, I know what I’d choose.