Sony and Panasonic today announced the Archival Disc standard, which should become a standard for next generation, professional optical discs for long-term data storage. A basic agreement to develop this standard together was already announced last year but the company now provide more information. A roadmap shows that the company plan to launch 300 GB discs by Q2 2015 and they hope to increase capacity to 500GB and 1 TB per disc.
"Optical discs 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", state Sony and Panasonic on the website and go on with, "They also allow inter-generational compatibility between different formats, ensuring that data can continue to be read even as formats evolve. This makes them robust media for long-term storage of content. "
Both companies believe that optical discs need to be able to hold higher capacities of data as they anticipate a large growth in the archive market, hence their initiative for the Archival Disc standard. The discs can be written once, are double sided with three layers on each side. More technical details can be found in Sony's press release.
