for the last few years Ive been doing backup on dvd-r. It is still the cheapest way to backup data (maybe tape backup is better but the tape drive at 5k$ make it less attractive...)

at something like 0,10 or less per gb with high quality disc I can say everything work fine: no lost/corrupt of data on the TB that were written.

however dvd-dl are still x10 the price and don't even think about blue ray disc. Plus i must say read speed is rather crappy on optical disk.

on the near futur optical disc WILL disapear... HD are juste becoming way too cheap, along with flash. I dont think we'll ever see those 5D disc...
HD will be at like 50TB or more were these will be affordable really...

No matter how much information can be packed on an optical disk, there is still the matter of fragility relative to solid state storage, plus the rather awkward disc size. 5-1/4" is just not pocket-sized. Plus it needs to be rotated, hence moving parts.

I think a better avenue is T-RAM's thyristor-based RAM, or the memristor, when it reaches commercial stage.

Solid-state storage will be the future, not optical-based or even magnetic-rotating storage.

This is a good thing, finally the optical media is starting to catch up with harddrive technology.

Now lets just hope that it will become avalible before 5 to 10 years have passed. because if it takes that long im a fraid that by then SSD's might run laps around this one for both capacity and writing speed.

There are many SSD's which have MTBF's better than most HDD's. With SSD's you can do RAID0 without having to worry about data loss.

SSD's last about as long bread in a duck pond so we need better.

We allready have MicroSD cards storing 8Gb, and it's a far better storage medium than optical - no scratches, throw it about, etc... With 16 and 32Gb MicroSDs on the way, and even bigger standard sized SDs, who needs opticals?

Long live solid-state :-)

Even if the torrent sites get closed down, there's a good chance people can carry on by distributing these things. Just put everything you have on a disc, put it in a cd case of a popular band, and if the cops are around, be like,"I don't like this band any more, why don't you try it out. Hand it over to your friend, and he suddenly has a whole bunch of stuff to look over. And if a regular size dvd can store, say, 1TiB(yes, I know they said 10TB, but I'm going to lowball it), then a little minidisc-type thing(sorry, didn't mean to jolt you like that ;) ) could store 5-10GB in an extremely small form factor.

Fun times ahead.