4/17/2012 07:34:00 PM
dannzfay
Less than a year after renouncing the MiniDisc Walkman products and after a less than successful twenty-year long campaign for the wide adoption of the MiniDisc format, SONY reportedly announces another custom storage format.
It is called the Optical Disc Archive and it is likely that it uses some sort of cassette with a great number of Blu-ray discs crammed inside.
A single layer BD-R can store up to 25 GB of data, while a double-layer BD-R will fit up to 50 GB of data. The newer, more advanced formats like the triple-layer BDXL-R discs can hold up to 100 GB of data, while the BD-RE XL or XL4 discs with four layers will fit 128 GB.
SONY says that the cassettes will be available in capacities ranging between 300 GB and 1.5TB.
This means that, using XL4 type discs with four layers, such a cassette will contain 3 to 12 such Blu-ray discs inside.
Nothing from these cassettes will fit into your standard Blu-ray drive, may it be a 5.25” computer unit or a living room Blu-ray player.
The Optical Disc Archive unit will connect to your computer through a USB 3.0 cable, and data will be saved with a likely speed of 50 MB/s, or even higher.
Speed wise, 50 MB/s is quite acceptable, as this is double the average maximum writing speed of most of the USB 2.0 memory thumb drives out right now. But filling up a 1.5TB cassette will take more than eight and a half hours of continuous data transfer and recording, and that’s quite a lot.
There is no information yet on the type and capabilities of the cassettes, if they’re rewritable or not.
Availability is set for late fall 2012 and pricing has not yet been announced.
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