[ufocia]

Optical made advancements beyond the DVD. However they caught on only in a limited manner. There is Blue-Ray, now 128GB 4-layer. However, due to the amount of data we generate and consume, long term storage is less of a concern at the consumer level, i.e. there is almost always more where that came from. Content has, simply put, been commoditized.

[blagie]

I never said they didn't, and indeed, cited 100GB optical media. I said they made _limited_ progress.

In 1982, a 20MB HDD was considered large, while a CD is 640MB. That's an almost insurmountable 20x advantage to optical.

By the late nineties, a DVD was 4.7GB, while typical HDDs were maybe 500MB-2GB, giving a more modest advantage to optical.

In 2024, a HDD is maybe 200 times bigger than optical (20TB versus 100GB), while an SSD is maybe 10x bigger (1TB versus 100GB).

Prices are also worth looking at. 100GB media is maybe $10/disk. I remember buying CD-Rs and DVD-Rs in stacks of 20-100, at maybe 10 cents-$2 per disk, depending on type, quantity, and year. The cost-per-byte for optical media has hardly changed in two decades.

So limited progress.