Japanese Hardware Makers, Sony and Panasonic have teamed up to create a new archival optical disc standard, dubbed the Archival Disc, aimed at long-term data storage, to make it readable for at least 50 years.
Archival Discs will hit the markets in summer 2015 with storage capacities of up to 300GB. Both the companies have planned to expand the capacity eventually to 500GB and 1TB through inter symbol interface cancellation technology and multi-level recording technology.
“Recognizing that optical discs will need to accommodate much larger volumes of storage going forward, particularly given the anticipated future growth in the archive market, Sony and Panasonic have been engaged in the joint development of a standard for professional-use next-generation optical discs,” read the press release.
“These efforts resulted in the formulation of “Archival Disc”, a new professional-use next-generation optical disc standard.”
The disc, with the same dimensions as current Blu-ray discs, will have three layers per side. The laser wavelength to read the new Archival Discs is also identical to Blu-rays at 405 nm, although the track pitch has decreased from 320 nm to 225 nm.
The companies also mention “Crosstalk cancellation technology” and “high-order Partial Response Maximum Likelihood (PRML)” signal processing tech to have been used for the Archival Disc to achieve both larger capacity and higher playback signal quality.
Archival Discs are water and dust resistant, and can also withstand significant changes in temperature and humidity. Sony as well as Panasonic claims the new optical disc to have “inter-generational compatibility between different formats.”
The companies note that they plan to promote this disc in the professional space as “an effective solution for protecting valuable data into the future.” Currently there is no plan of releasing the disc in consumer market space.
