Blu-ray has been available for about three years now. Despite being the replacement to DVD I’ve not seen a big shift toward this technology, which I expected with Stores such as Hi-Fi Corporation and Game offering more “affordable” Full-HD Ready TV’s

The format battle with HD-DVD seems to have stunted the growth of Blu-ray as it spent it’s infant years proving it’s the superior technology. HD-DVD lost. End of the story? I don’t think so, into the picture steps the soon to be released USB 3.0 aka “USB Super Speed”, which will offer Flash media a major boost in Data Transfer. I would have loved to add Video streaming/Download but this transfer technology can really only be comparable in the US and Euro regions, we have some way to go here in South Africa.

The argument I  forward is that the next generation of hardware devices will should look to the Flash Media format to replace the now aging optical reader options. The Apple Macbook is a good example of how Hard Drive technology has moved to Solid State Drives (SSD).

Teardown any Blu-ray player or Game Console and you’ll see that other than the motherboard the optical drive takes up prime space. Annoyingly with optical media are the delays and noise associated with spin up as the drive reads data from the disk. Sony made a good move with Blu-ray in it’s release of the PS3, Microsoft it seems has lucked out by sticking with the now dying DVD Format. So the we look again to the Game Console manufacturers for when they release their specification of their next generations, albeit 3 years away. For now the Sony Fanboys will continue to bash the xbox die-hards over at LazyGamer.

My money’s on Flash Media For The Win, here’s a summarised breakdown why Flash Media will own Blu-ray at some point:
- Faster Data Transfer:  Bluray = 54 Mbit/s  | USB3 = 3.2 GBit/s
- Smaller Form Factor both for Media and Reader
- Capacity: Bluray = 50Gb | USB = 128Gb

How many of you already have USB flash drives anyway?
-A-

Edit: I’ve updated this article to correct some errors, USB is a BUS Technology where Bluray is a STORAGE Technology. I put forward that USB 3.0 will give Flash Media the edge over Bluray Optical media. Perhaps this was not clearly described in the original post, my apologies