Japan's Mainichi Shimbun reportedSony will lay off approximately 250 employees at its optical media plants in Japan, phasing out production of consumer-grade recordable discs, including CD-R, DVD-R, and BD-R. However, Sony stated that it will continue to produce commercial-grade products, and this will not affect demand for commercial pressed discs or the audiophile market for disc-based content.
However, although Sony emphasizes that it will continue to produce commercial-grade products, current storage media has gradually shifted from physical optical discs to fully digital and cloud-based storage. At the same time, although optical discs have the characteristics of long-term storage, there are still potential risks such as disc scratches, peeling layers, and deformation of the disc itself. Therefore, a lot of cold data is still stored on devices with lower capacity costs such as tapes and hard drives.
Many companies, such as Microsoft, have actually begun to consider other ways to store large amounts of cold data more stably, such as using lasers to micro-engraving data on small-sized quartz glass.Project Silica, and it claims to be able to store large amounts of data with higher stability, and then restore the data by optical reading when necessary.
As for the general consumer market, due to the widespread and convenient storage media such as SSDs and USB flash drives, the use of burnable optical discs as storage media has long been eliminated. Even the current game market has gradually shifted to prioritizing the sale of digital versions, resulting in a gradual decrease in the demand for optical discs. As a result, companies such as Sony and Panasonic have decided to discontinue consumer-grade burnable optical disc products.
With the continuous development of network transmission technology, the amount of data generated is growing at an explosive rate. Therefore, even if traditional optical discs continue to increase their storage density, they still cannot keep up with the demand for data storage. In addition, burned optical discs still cannot be plug-and-play like SSDs and USB flash drives through unified connection specifications. In fact, they even require optical disc devices to read and use. As a result, they are facing the fate of being gradually eliminated under the current technological development trend.
Therefore, even though there is still demand for optical disc media in the current market, it cannot change the fact that optical disc media will fade out of the market in the future.
