Today’s online streaming may have pushed physical media (DVD and Blu-ray) out of the limelight and into nostalgia shops, but Folio Photonics, an initiative we’ve covered extensively in 2022, wants to change that trend and open up a new market for optical media: Institutional.
Steve Santamaria, CEO of Folio Photonics, announced in an email conversation with TechRadar Pro that the company’s first drive will have “up to 1TB per disc,” with a target of 10TB+ capacity by the end of 10 years. So you’ll only need a few to back up your external hard disk drives or SSD, making it a great complement to cloud storage.
On its part, the startup has announced that the media will cost around $3 per TB, which sets the price of a single disk at $3. “While actual specs are yet to be released, we believe this capability and recommended price point are highly achievable due to our material/manufacturing innovations,” said Travis Johnston, Director of Market Strategy at Folio Photonics.
For comparison, a single blank 25GB BD-R blu-ray recordable media costs less than $0.40 when purchased in packs of 50. That’s $16 per TB, or more than 5 times what Folio Photonics predicted for its first generation products.
For its optical disc drive (ODD), Folio Photonics is unfortunately expected to charge a hefty $3,000 to $5,000 range, at least initially.
The long road to success
Thirty years ago, Philips introduced a desktop CD recorder system called the CDD521GN, priced at $8,495. Four years later, HP introduced the Surestore CD burner for 1/10 the price, and at the beginning of this century you could get a CD-burner for under $100.
Folio Photonics also wants to sell 10TB of media for less than $1 per TB by 2030, a symbolic base that neither LTO nor HDD can reach in the same timeframe. With commercial disk and drive availability expected only in 2026, we’re not at that point yet, with prospective customers in the data center and hyperscale market, which Folio Photonics calls “the first enterprise-scale optical data storage solution” and is far more lucrative than the consumer market.
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