Sony and Panasonic team up in long-term digital storage development and announce "Archival Disc," a high-capacity optical disc format promising to initially hold up to 300GB of data.
The discs will be the same size as current Blu-ray discs, and should be readable for at least 50 years with 3 storage layers per side. According to the two companies larger capacity and higher playback quality is archived via crosstalk cancellation and high-order Partial Response Maximum Likelihood (PRML) technologies.
Aiding long-term storage applications further is the discs having no need for constant temperature or humidity, as well as reduced power consumptions compared to magnetic tape formats.
“As a type of archival media, optical discs have numerous advantages over current mainstream HDD and tape media, such as their ability to be stored for a long time while still maintaining readability,” Panasonic says. “We hope to develop demand for archives that use optical discs.”
Initial 300GB Archival Discs should be available from summer 2015, with 500GB and 1TB versions to be available further in the future.
