According to Japanese industry reports a few days ago, Sony will lay off 250 employees in its recordable media manufacturing plant in northern Japan, due to the current reduced demand for media such as optical discs, as well as the continued rise of streaming services, and the production of recordable discs such as CD-R, DVD-R, BD-R will be shut down soon. Prior to this, Panasonic discontinued the production of Blu-ray discs for burning as early as February last year.
Blu-ray disc, which used to be the carrier of PS/Xbox games, is also an important medium for the dissemination of Japanese film and television content, and the "large-capacity" low-cost medium necessary for Chinese people to burn materials, the light is gradually dimming.
01
Thirty-five years of time travel: The rise of the PC optical drive
Once upon a time, after pressing the power switch of the computer, accompanied by the self-test sound of the motherboard "dropping", you can hear the sound of the mechanical motor of the hard disk and optical drive, and when I was young, I was somewhat tired of these cookie-cutter and somewhat noisy sounds, but now more than 20 years have passed, but I am somewhat nostalgic, just like nostalgic for my former partner.
"In those years, the installation system and games had to rely on it" - the friends of the post-80s generation are quite familiar with the optical drive and the CD, when the computer city from 20 yuan a piece to 10 yuan three selling voice, in a sense, also witnessed the development of the PC optical drive, and the story of the PC optical drive, the earliest can be traced back to the 70s of the 20th century.
In the afternoon, when I was sorting out the bookcase, I was surprised to find a stack of discs from the corner, which is a story about digital time......
In 1972, Phiips of the Netherlands showed the press a disc system that could play television programs for a long time, called the LV disc system (also known as the laser disc system), and it was put on the market in 1978. This product has had a profound impact on the world, driving the development of digital storage technology and kicking off this new technological revolution in the use of lasers to record information.
The researchers then turned the sound signal into binary numbers represented by "1" and "0" and recorded it on a metal disc based on plastic, which Philips and Sony finally succeeded in bringing to market in 1982. Because of its small size, the plastic-metal disc was named after the English Compact Disc, and the standard for this disc was established (1980), which is also known as the "Red Book" (ICE 908 standard), which is also known as CD-DA. Since CD-DA is capable of recording digital information, it is natural to think of using it as a storage device for computers.
The earliest appearance of modern optical drives can be traced back to 1982, when the technology mainly relied on optical storage technology. During this period, optical drives were still in their infancy, and there were only a few brands on the market, such as SONY, Philips, etc. Early optical drives were primarily used to read and write discs, but they didn't attract much attention at the time.
In the early days, the optical drive speed was slow, and the transfer rate was only about 150KB/s, which now seems to be simply "turtle speed", but for the post-70s and post-80s generations who have experienced the PC floppy disk era, the emergence of optical drives and optical discs is undoubtedly epoch-making.
In fact, the CD-ROM drives in the hands of consumers in the end market have undergone continuous iterations of 4X, 8X, 24X, 32X, 40X, 52X, and 56X. Many people know that the "X" is double speed, but we rarely delve into what it means, except that the bigger the better. In fact, this is based on the first generation optical drive speed of 150KB/s as a reference benchmark, and the 40X optical drive is expressed as 40 times this standard value, close to 6000KB/s. Another common label, "MAX", refers to the maximum speed achieved when reading the outermost ring of the disc.
In the process of continuous iteration of optical drive technology, in addition to SONY, Philips and other brands by virtue of the first-mover advantage to share the market dividends, the vast market brought by "PC standard" has also promoted the rise of many brands, such as pioneer, Jianxing, BenQ, etc., and Samsung, LG, Asus and other PC giants will also set up their own optical drive product lines.
After many giants entered the PC optical drive track, the technology and product iteration speed of the entire industry began to speed up.
In the early 1990s, DVD optical drives began to be introduced, and their speed and rewritable properties improved. And in 1995, the first generation of standard optical drives was widely used. Since then, optical drives have evolved from the original only two modes of reading and writing, to reading and writing CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, BD-ROM, and HD DVD-ROM.
Behind the rise of the PC optical drive market, it has a lot to do with the network and information content environment at that time.
In the 90s, with the popularization of the Internet and the increase of bandwidth, more and more people began to download and share various digital content through the Internet. However, in those days, web downloads were still relatively slow, and a lot of content still had to be distributed via discs. As a result, the optical drive still retains its vigorous vitality.
At the same time, with the prosperity of the game industry, more and more games have begun to adopt discs as carriers. These game discs are not only large in capacity, but also fast in reading, giving players a smoother gaming experience. Therefore, in that era, having a high-performance optical drive became one of the must-have conditions for gamers.
02
Quietly Exiting: The Era of Diverse Storage
The development of optical drives marked a change in the storage medium from floppy disks to optical discs, however, with the advancement of science and technology, optical drives and optical discs have also completed their historical mission and began to retire.
The first is the impact from the USB flash drive, in 1998, a number of companies claimed to have invented the USB flash drive, including China's Langke Technology, Israel's M-Systems and Singapore's Trek. In 2000, Trek released the world's first commercial USB flash drive (USB flash drive), which marked the official entry of USB flash drives into the market and the beginning of the journey of replacing optical discs.
From 2008 to 2021, USB flash drives have undergone significant development. From SLC, MLC to TLC, the continuous progress of flash memory technology has greatly reduced the cost while increasing the capacity of the USB flash drive, during this period, the PC optical drive and disc are not without counterattack, Blu-ray BD ROM originally wanted to win back a city with storage capacity, but even the 299 yuan Blu-ray Combo, 5 yuan BD format empty disk has not been able to catch up with the speed of the U disk price reduction, especially when the U disk enters the 1GB/yuan "cabbage price" era, the PC optical drive and disc began to accelerate the exit.
In fact, in addition to the emergence of U disk and rapid iteration of price reduction to achieve the replacement of optical discs and optical drives, around 2012, the rapid rise of network disks, but also had a great impact on optical drives and optical discs. With the improvement of the broadband speed of residents' homes, the convenient and huge storage mode of network disk has made many people choose to completely "abandon" optical drives and optical discs.
Perhaps a few years later, in some museums with the theme of science and technology, our descendants will be able to see the style of optical drives again.