His Millennial Disks (say that 3x fast) can be read in regular DVD drives, despite being made with a secret sauce of "persistent" materials—he drops words like gold and obsidian, which makes it sound expensive. Indeed, they cost $30. For DVDs. That you can never rewrite. A Blu-ray version is in the works (will they cost $100?).

And it might be a lie! The plastic—his discs' weak point, your discs' strong point—could die before the disc reaches a thousand years old: "That plastic may limit us to a few centuries or a thousand years for now." Is there a warranty? Plus, shouldn't it be Millennial Disc, not Disk?

Also, will the slot-loading disc drives in the bellies of the invading aliens be able to read Millenniata's Millennial discs in 1000 years? These are the kinds of compatibility questions we should be taking seriously today, before they become a problem tomorrow, like with magnetic tape today.

If only there was a way to copy data to lots of different places, so that if it died in one place, it would still exist in another place. That would be really super great. [Herald Extra via Slashdot]

The question is, do these actually work, or is it just a bizarre casing for the real hardware housed inside? Furthermore, if it was a real product, would you actually want one? [Pete Verrando via Boing Boing Gadgets]

Vmedia believes that their 1GB mini optical disc (promised to hit 2GB if you just give them enough time), is worth a piece of the space and price in your next netbook.

A Vmedia disc has many advantages over flash storage, the company claims. For instance, when you stick an SD card in a computer, its video content may or may not play correctly. Vmedia will offer a codec standard, like DVD, allowing them to license the technology to Hollywood. Vmedia also claims that their discs are cheaper to produce than flash storage. That's probably true, but it's not a savings that would ever be passed on to the consumer. It's just to entice content providers into adopting the tech. You know, so they can sell you Spiderman 3 on yet another format with low risk.

You know what? I'm wasting my time. Everyone intelligent enough to be reading this article is intelligent enough to understand what a completely dated, desperate idea this is when both better physical storage and simpler data distribution both exist. Look at that picture. Consider the information density. Remember the MiniDisc, Laserdisc and HD DVD. Remember Zubaz Pants. Now let's move on. [Laptop]

OWC ANNOUNCES INDUSTRY’S FIRST BLU-RAY EXTERNAL DRIVES WITH “QUAD INTERFACE”

OWC Mercury Pro Features Quad Interface for FireWire800/400, USB 2.0, & eSATA – for Mac and PC 4X Speed Writes up to 50GB, Reads/Writes HD-DVD, DVD/DVD-R, CD-R/RW Discs

October 22, 2008 — Woodstock, IL — Other World Computing (OWC®) http://www.macsales.com, a leading Mac and PC technology company, announced today its new line of OWC Mercury Pro™ Blu-ray “Quad Interface” external drive solutions. The first Blu-ray external drives on the market offering a “Quad Interface” of FireWire 800, FireWire 400, USB 2.0, and eSATA, the OWC Mercury Pro drives feature 4X Blu-ray disc write speed for burning up to 1 gigabyte of data per minute; a data transfer rate up to 150MB per second; Plug and Play connection flexibility; and the convenience of compatibility with both Windows and Macintosh systems.

Burn up to 50GB per Blu-ray Disc and Read/Write to All Optical Media

Immediately available and priced starting at $499.99, the Mercury Pro Blu-ray external drive solutions are ideal for consumers with large amounts of High-Def or other video, photos, music, and data files that they want to archive or retrieve using optical media. Mercury Pro Blu-ray drives read and/or write virtually all optical media, including Blu-ray, HD-DVD, DVD-RAM, and CD-R/RW. The drives provide the well-known advantages of Blu-ray, such as high-capacity storage (burn up to 50GB per disc, enough space for a four hour High-Def movie); full high-quality HD Picture; and Surround Sound capabilities. In addition, the new OWC Mercury Pro Blu-ray drives now have write performance twice as fast as previous Mercury Pro Blu-ray external drive models.

Pricing for OWC Mercury Pro Blu-ray Write and Read external drive solutions:

* OWC Mercury Pro SW-5583: $499.99. Writes and reads Blu-ray, DVD, DVD-RAM, CD-R/RW discs. Includes all connection cables and two 25GB BD-R discs.

* OWC Mercury Pro SW-5583T: $579.99. Writes and reads Blu-ray, DVD, DVD-RAM, CD-R/RW discs. Includes all connection cables, starter media, and full retail version of Roxio Toast 9 Titanium (Mac OS X).

OWC Mercury Pro Blu-ray “Quad Interface” external drive solutions have been fully tested for compatibility with most Apple and Windows built-in and third party DVD/CD tools and players, including Apple iTunes, Apple Disc Burner, Apple iDVD 5, Apple DVD Studio Pro, EMC Retrospect Express, NTI DragonBurn, Roxio Toast, Roxio Easy Media Creator, and Nero Burning.

[OWC]

But while the idea may seem clever at first, can't we do better?

You may be wondering at this point, if we want to save the environment, why not just create a system that allows users easier OS downloads or integrated SD memory card support? You may also be wondering whether or not this smaller optical media is possibly in the works for smaller Apple hardware (an ultraportable, perhaps?)...which would probably lead you to wonder about the whole downloads/SD memory thing again. We're just generally confused about the entire idea, and hope it's one of those defensive maneuver patents—protection of ideas that will never come to light.

Because we sat through the MiniDisc era once before, and then it was reincarnated as UMD already. And neither time was exactly a party. [appleinsider via wired]