Is this backward compatible or will I need a new stylus on my Blu-ray player?

will this make players even more expensive? I don't particularly care about the increased capacity, i want normal blu-ray players to get down to sensible prices.

Theres still no way this would be used for archive purposes, 100GB is NOTHING, and they are far more delicate than just having a nice hot-swappable RAID array.

You'd have to be frigging insane to push this as a backup medium nowadays.

Much as I love the mathematical elegance of a RAID, you'd be barmy to rely on its redundancy... redundancy is not backup! Optical disc longevity is a lot better with good discs in optimal conditions (i.e. not just the cheapest CD-R you could find, thrown onto the desk after you've burned a disc).

So, 100GB discs with a >1gbit/s write speed could be rather useful. If you've got massive data sets that need to be frequently back-up up, then a blu-ray drive, discs and a van is cheaper than a 1 gbps leased line to back-up RAID to RAID in another location.

As is frequently said, "never underestimate the bandwidth of a truckload of discs"!

Another movie collection refresh....yawn

Adam, how about 5 1.8 inch SSD's in RAID6.

Stop with all the opto/mechanical shite already!

Because of the tiny chip size, laser diodes don't make a beam. The light diverges in an oval-like shape at about 10 degrees by 20 degrees. This is a good thing for reading layered discs because the corrective optics focuses the light at exactly one point.

This is the peace dividend following the rather unbelievable fact that the good guys won the HD war.

A home one of these ? Yes please. I have easily less than 100Gb of stuff I'd like to archive out of the random Tb or so of junk filling various HDD.

PH? Even on bluray HD in closeup there's still not enough resolution to find a single pore or blemish on her unearthly smooth manufactured alien skin. She also eats those little dogs, just like in V but scarier.

If the format requries new media and a different laser how can it be classified under the Blu Ray name. The format would not be compatable with exisiting Blu Ray players meaning everyone needs to change their hardware setup again. This will confuse and annoy users and make it guaranteed to fail. Also doesnt 100GB look a little small these days when holographic discs and other technologies in development have well eclipsed the 100GB benchmark. I have to agree with other posters and say you can buy a 1TB hard drive for £70 inc vat these days so 100GB is not even a viable archiving option.

Optical is still an answer to a question no one is asking. The UDO write speeds are simply too low - 6 MB/sec. The reading speed is 12 MB/sec. The effective cost is still to high - a fully populated Plasmon 638 slot, 38.3TB optical library with six 60GB UDO2 drives, single SCSI Bus with a full set of media would cost about €112,000 or €2,900 per TB. Writing a TB would take over 46 hours. There is a manual over is managing removable media. You could buy two SANs and implement hardware replication for a lower cost per TB.

"If the format requries new media and a different laser how can it be classified under the Blu Ray name."

It's the laser for the writer dumbass, standard readers will be able to read the discs..

Please stop reading IT sites, you are clearly too thick to comprehend...