Sony and Panasonic Announce the High-Capacity 300GB Archival Disc

Sony and Panasonic revealed the Archival Disc, a new professional-use, high-capacity optical disc with storage capacities ranging from 300GB at launch up to 1TB in the future. The reason for such a high-capacity format is to expand the market for long-term digital data storage.



According to the Japanese company, the Archival disc has “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.” They are also created to with the intention of “inter-generational compatibility between different formats.” Generally speaking, this will allow the data to be read as formats evolve in the future. It should be noted that currently, disc data can only be written once.

Sony and Panasonic explained 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,” due to recent demands in the film industry and online cloud centers.

Gaming After Hours perspective

At this time, it doesn’t seem likely that this will be used for consumer use as single disc would more than likely not have a friendly price point. Rather it seems to be aimed toward companies that are in need for a safe and (hopefully) reliable, high-capacity storage medium. As noted that this Archival technology is designed to write-once and can’t be re-written afterwards, seems that it won’t be used for the general public. The site did explain that the Archival technology is “inter-generational compatibility” so the idea of having such a high-capacity format that both resistant to many of the worldly elements and re-writable isn’t out of the question. But for the purpose of storing important data, providing a write-once disc format is far more reliable than re-writable.

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