How much storage does a USENET newsgroup subscriber need? If you’re answer is in the range of 300GB, you’re in luck!
First there was the CD, which held 700 megabytes. Then the DVD, which held 5 gigabytes. Then the Blu-ray disc, with 50 gigs. What’s next? Sony and Panasonic hope it will be a 300-gigabyte disc they’re jointly researching that could hit in 2015.
The new discs will be tough, like most disc-based storage currently available, being not only water- and dust-proof to an extent, but also able to resist changes in temperature and humidty when stored for long periods of time. Flash storage and hard disk drives don’t have the same sort of long-term reliability you can expect from an optical disc, which is why developing a 300 GB disc still remains important for some industries.
The two companies were among those that created the Blu-ray Disc format. The companies pointed to the growing need for archiving, from video production industries that store motion pictures and broadcasting, to cloud data centers.
Sony and Panasonic touted their existing breakthroughs in optical drives, including Sony’s file-based optical disc archive system from 2012 and Panasonic’s series of optical disc storage devices, which houses 12 100GB discs for a total storage capacity of 180TB. Both have also contributed to the development of Blu-ray format technologies.
