Sony has officially announced a new type of next generation Blu-Ray disc called the Archival Disc. This new type of optical media can store up to 1 TB of data. Currently Blu-Ray discs can only store up to 50 GB of data. Sony teamed up with Panasonic to develop the disc, and it will launch sometime in the summer of 2015.
Early Archival Discs will hold about 300 GB of data, but Sony will release higher capacity versions, 500 GB and 1 TB respectively, later. The discs are write once media, as opposed to all the DVD rewriteable we have come to know, love, and forget about in a world of digital distribution. The disc is double-sided, with three layers on each side.
Likely, these disks will only be used by businesses that need to archive large amounts of data, considering everything else we do is just cloud based or USB hard-drive based. “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,” Sony said in a statement. It is unlikely we will see movies or games put on these discs, as no game has come even close to needing this much hard-drive space.
Source: Sony