While in October 2011 flooding in Thailand has forced manufacturers of hard disk drives in a few times to raise prices further to a new level of income, optical disks were considered almost an endangered species media. However, the industry still needs a long-term archival storage technologies of data that would allow the use of relatively compact, high-capacity and low-cost disk.
Recognizing the need to develop alternatives to Blu-ray and its version, Panasonic and Sony yesterday announced a new initiative to create optical drives with a capacity of 300 GB. It is expected that the new standard will be developed and implemented by the end of 2015. Optical discs, according to developers, have the following advantages: they are resistant to dust and moisture, normally tolerate changes in temperature and humidity during storage. In addition, the evolution of storage formats of the optical disk is usually designed for backward compatibility, so that the old drive can always be read with modern equipment.
Sony currently offers technology information storage based on optical discs, implying their association in the cartridge. Twelve optical disks are in the same case, each container is equal to 25 GB, this allows to reach a total volume of 300 GB in the minimum configuration. In July this year, Panasonic has introduced a similar decision on behalf of LB-DM9, uniting in a single cartridge 20.8 mm thick twelve optical drives with a capacity of 100 GB each. The archiving system combines up to 90 of these cartridges, providing a total storage capacity of 180 terabytes. The system also supports RAID, providing data transfer rate up to 216 MB / s.
These attempts of manufacturers to increase the available capacity optical discs demonstrate the relevance of the problem of developing a new standard.