Jump to content

Optical Media RIP part teuw ...... is Taiyo not really going anywhere far away?


bookumdano4

Recommended Posts

  • Members

I've been digging into this Taiyo thing from the other thread Craig started. Spent a lot of time on it. At least six minutes so far. After connecting the dots between Taiyo, and JVC Advanced Media, and Start Lab Inc.... all co-owned by Taiyo and relatively new entities...here's what I get from the situation. My own opinion. Not confirmed by anyone anywhere.....

 

Taiyo manufactures in Japan. Way high overhead. With declining demand, Taiyo is bailing on optical to concentrate on other things. However..... via its JVC and Start Lab arms (who use Taiyo and its recipes), there is no intention of ditching optical media. Biz as usual.

 

During 2016, the Taiyo recipes will be relocated to elsewhere in the world....ie:.... third party factories..... maybe/likely owned by Taiyo and/or the partners. QC'd by JVC/Start Lab, and by default, by co-owner Taiyo. That's MY take on this. Nothing is changing except where these products will be made and whose name is on the box. With Taiyo not having to keep its name attached, but keeping ownership percentage, it ditches the overhead, and still makes its cut via its partners.

 

As JVC Advanced Media currently makes a point of its product being made in "one" place with Taiyo being the source.. and with no doomsday scenario in sight for JVC, I expect the JVC pr will quietly change during mid 2016 to still show the quality source being their factory in "x country". With dirt cheap labor, the Taiyo recipe, and qc control, the partners and Taiyo gain some nice margin... even probably for producing 3rd party stuff.

 

I wouldn't care one way of the other about this, but the reminder of the existence of 50gb optical disks... and maybe higher caps, made me revisit my thoughts about using optical backups as a companion to hard drives.

 

Sort of a sideline thing that made me think about optical media... and this is no lie... I was spouting off on the other thread about how I use piles of hard drives for backups. Which I do. On Tuesday, I fired up one of the old remaining win98se systems so that I could do a more recent backup of the c drive. The other thread put me in the mood for nerdy things. Machine wouldn't boot up (a fine vintage 1997 Packard Bell with all the trimmings). No drive recognition during boot. No recognition in bios. Dead drive. In all fairness, I haven't booted up that system since 2011 and the drive itself is probably from 2004.

 

I could've popped in a new ide drive and restored an image with ghost.... or placed the dead drive in the freezer overnight to bring it to life (which often works), but INSTEAD, I remembered something Mike Rivers posted on the other thread.....

 

So, I slid the c drive bay tray out of the win98se machine, removed the WD 80gb drive from the caddy, and.........thwacked it against the floor (concrete). Really really hard! Then turned it on a side and thwacked it again a second time. Really hard that time too. I mean like an awkward hammer. I was actually hoping to see it shatter..... a new sight experience.

 

Just as a hoot, I placed the drive back in its caddy and slid it back into the win98 machine.

 

Machine started right up. Works fine for two days now. No bad sectors. Amazing. As Mike said, I must've thwacked the cobwebs off the heads or something.

 

Point? In all my years of handling hard drives with care (like picking up my cats), I've never slammed one so hard. Maybe the key to a long ide life is regular abuse.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Members
I've been digging into this Taiyo thing from the other thread Craig started. Spent a lot of time on it. At least six minutes so far. After connecting the dots between Taiyo, and JVC Advanced Media, and Start Lab Inc.... all co-owned by Taiyo and relatively new entities...here's what I get from the situation. My own opinion. Not confirmed by anyone anywhere.....

 

Taiyo manufactures in Japan. Way high overhead. With declining demand, Taiyo is bailing on optical to concentrate on other things. However..... via its JVC and Start Lab arms (who use Taiyo and its recipes), there is no intention of ditching optical media. Biz as usual.

 

During 2016, the Taiyo recipes will be relocated to elsewhere in the world....ie:.... third party factories..... maybe/likely owned by Taiyo and/or the partners. QC'd by JVC/Start Lab, and by default, by co-owner Taiyo. That's MY take on this. Nothing is changing except where these products will be made and whose name is on the box. With Taiyo not having to keep its name attached, but keeping ownership percentage, it ditches the overhead, and still makes its cut via its partners.

 

I hope you're right, but according to this statement from Victor Advanced Media (Taiyo Yuden is the parent company), JVC and Victor Advanced Media are bailing as well. I guess there is a possibility that manufacturing will be moved to less expensive places and the expertise sold to a different company, but the reason this is raising concerns is that Taiyo Yuden always had a reputation of making exceptionally high-quality products.

 

Of course what's also driving this is computers no longer having optical drives. In this day for 64 GB thumb drives, I can see why a 4.7 GB DVD may seem archaic. But I've had such good luck with optical media keeping data intact for decades that I've come to rely on it...Blu-Rays are even better. I do store a lot of files on hard drives that sit on a shelf and spin up occasionally, but I've had far more hard drive failures than optical disc failures over the years.

 

If you look at average hard drive reliability figures, they've gone down over the years. The ones that last are lasting longerl the problem is more drives are failing within a shorter period of time. On a related topic, check out this non-scientific but telling survey of hard drive failures for cloud provider Backblaze. Here's the money quote...

 

"​For a second year, the standout reliability leader was HGST. Now a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital, HGST inherited the technology and designs from Hitachi (which itself bought IBM's hard disk division). Across a range of models from 2 to 4 terabytes, the HGST models showed low failure rates; at worse, 2.3 percent failing a year. This includes some of the oldest disks among Backblaze's collection; 2TB Desktop 7K2000 models are on average 3.9 years old, but still have a failure rate of just 1.1 percent.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are Seagate disks. Last year, the two 1.5TB Seagate models used by Backblaze had failure rates of 25.4 percent (for the Barracuda 7200.11) and 9.9 percent (for the Barracuda LP). Those units fared a little better this time around, with failure rates of 23.8 and 9.6 percent, even though they were the oldest disks in the test (average ages of 4.7 and 4.9 years, respectively). However, their poor performance was eclipsed by the 3TB Barracuda 7200.14 units, which had a whopping 43.1 percent failure rate, in spite of an average age of just 2.2 years."

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • CMS Author

I haven't had trouble with optical disks (the media) but I think I've replaced the optical drive in every computer I've had, at least once. I don't know what happens to them, but after a while they just don't seem to read or write the disks. I've cleaned them but that doesn't help. Fortunately, new drives are really cheap (which may in itself be part of the problem).

 

Media Supply, which is where I've been ordering optical media when I need it, seems to have plenty of JVC/Tayio-Yuden stock. I recall reading an article on their web site a while back about the change in labeling from T-Y to JVC, but I don't see it there any longer. The bottom line was that the recipe is still the same.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 weeks later...

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...