Sony and Panasonic Announce 300GB Archival Disc

Goal is to increase disc storage to 1TB over time.

Sony And Panasonic Announced 300GB Disc 

Sony and Panasonic revealed this week the Archival Disc, a new professional-use optical disc with storage capacities ranging from 300GB at launch up to 1TB in the future. The companies plan to ship the next-generation standard in summer 2015.

The new disc standard is aimed at the archive market, with Sony saying it realizes that optical discs will need larger storage formats in the future. In addition to the data increase — for comparisons, a dual-layer Blu-ray can hold up to 50GB — Archival Discs will "have excellent properties to protect themselves against the environment, such as dust-resistance and water-resistance, and can also withstand changes in temperature and humidity when stored," according to the two Japanese companies.

Not much is said about consumer usage for the Archival Disc, as Sony and Panasonic say that they "plan to actively promote this next-generation high-capacity optical disc standard in the professional field in order to offer an effective solution for protecting valuable data into the future." The two companies aim to market the Archival Disc to the film industry and online cloud centers.

Logo

The following logo has been designed to represent the "Archival Disc" professional-use next-generation optical disc standard.

300GB Archival Disc Logo





Key Archival Disc specifications

Disc size (type)	300 GB (write-once)
Optical parameter	Wavelength λ=405 nm (nanometers), Numerical Aperture NA=0.85
Disc structure	Double-sided Disc (3 layers/side), Land and Groove Format
Track pitch	0.225μm (micrometers)
Data bit length	79.5nm (nanometers)
Error correction method	Reed-Solomon Code

Roadmap

Both Sony and Panasonic aim to launch systems with a recording capacity of 300 GB per disc from summer 2015, onwards. In addition, both companies plan to leverage their respective technologies to further expand the recording capacity per disc to 500 GB and 1 TB.

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