Sony, Panasonic Release Archival Disc

20 Mar, 2014 By: Chris Tribbey

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First promised in mid-2013, Panasonic Corp. and Sony Electronics this month released their new optical disc solution, Archival Disc, capable of holding 300GB of data, with plans to eventually increase that to 1TB.

Currently meant for professional uses, the format could prove to be a consumer-friendly way to deliver native 4K content in the future. Currently a single-layered Blu-ray Disc can handle only 25GB of data.

“In recent times, demand for archival capabilities has increased significantly in the film industry, as well as in cloud data centers that handle big data, where advances in network services have caused data volumes to soar,” the companies said in a press release. “Both Sony and Panasonic have successful experience working on the development of Blu-ray Disc technology. The two companies 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 companies plan on launching systems compatible with Archival Disc beginning in 2015, with the expansion of Archival Disc’s recording capacity increasing to 500 GB soon after.

Sony commercialized a file-based optical disc archive system in September 2012. In July of that year, Panasonic launched its LB-DM9 series of optical disc storage devices.

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