LTO drives are pretty cost effective for huge archivals, but given the recent developments with everything being so expensive.

Would you be interested in a miniaturized format of LTO?

Something like a Data8 cartridge, in a shell with magent protection, so you can have a singular terabyte or less in a safe and portable size.

I could imagine it running in two modes, fast or slow, with varying storage capacities, based on use case. Maybe 256 MBps slow, and 512MBps fast, just throwing a number out there.

I can imagine some use cases:

  1. PS6 physical games (as installation disks)
  2. Backup format for power users (instead of a full fledged LTO drive)
  3. Recording equipment (music, video)
  4. Became you like the noise
  5. Because you want to have cassette futurism
  6. Physical game ownership

Edit 1: Just learned that Accelis LTO is exactly what I imagine and was abandoned by the LTO foundation. ☹️

  • MalReynolds@slrpnk.netEnglish
    3·
    9 hours ago

    Just because it’s not your use case (and maybe you’d find a use if it was available), doesn’t mean it’s not a common one. Market opportunities get missed all the time. People have been making do with offline HDDs, which is a waste of their potential, and they’re now victim to the RAMpocalypse price hike too.

    Just as an example, people would probably take a lot more video with their oh so capable phones if there was somewhere to put TBs of it cheaply.

    • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.clubEnglish
      11·
      8 hours ago

      I’m not speaking to my use case, I’m speaking about the market as a whole.

      You can buy an Ultra Blu-ray burner along with 100 GB discs. There are alternatives already out there on the market and it likely wouldn’t be a major jump tech wise to get up to the TB range. People used to have binders full of data, this would continue that trend. Yet no one it’s developing it, including Chinese tech companies.

      I’m not doubting that there are use cases out there; I can even think of a use case for me. Yet, the market demand out there doesn’t seem to be worth it where any company wants to take that leap.

      That Sony is abandoning physical media for games when it won two generations for discs based on its gaming consoles is a giant red flag.

      • MalReynolds@slrpnk.netEnglish
        2·
        8 hours ago

        Sony has all sorts of other (evil) reasons. I’m saying it’d be a build it and they will come thing, as were CDs originally, it’s very existence would create use cases.