Sony has unveiled the second generation of its Optical Disc Archive System, which adopts a new, high-capacity optical media developed jointly by Sony and Panasonic.  This newest media, rated with a 100-year shelf life, doubles the capacity of a single cartridge to 3.3 TB.

Generation 2 of the Optical Disc Archive System also introduces an 8-channel optical drive unit and doubles read/write speeds over the previous generation at four times faster than that of Blu Ray.

Sony launched the first-generation Optical Disc Archive system  in 2013. Since then, there have been six drives released spanning a single-slot stand-alone drive to a model packed with 101 slots. Optical disc-based cartridges for these drives include both write-once and rewritable media, and range from 300GB to 1.5TB.

Optical Disc Archive technology is designed for use in near-line applications, deep archive storage or disaster recovery systems. Hardware configurations range from stand-alone to large, scalable robotic archive systems. The main components include: a standalone USB drive unit, an 8 GB fibre channel library drive unit, for use in robotic systems, and the Optical Disc Archive media cartridge.

A recent market research report says that the demand for recordable optical discs is diminishing due to the adoption of newer storage technologies such as cloud storage. Nevertheless, increasing demand for reliable archival solutions, especially for the media and entertainment industry to store classic works of art for future generations will lead to consistent growth. It expects that the recordable optical disc market will rise at a CAGR of 5.60% by volume from 2015 to 2025.

“Optical Disc Archive is one of our most modular technologies,” said Ellen Heine, Marketing Manager at Sony Electronics. “It can scale from a tabletop drive accepting a single cartridge at a time up to a library that supports petabytes of data. This technology crosses a number of markets and applications, and can be tailored to meet the unique requirements of individual.”

Sony Optical Archive Inc. (US), a fully owned subsidiary of Sony Corporation, recently announced a new library system called Everspan.  The new system incorporates the newest optical media and new drives for large-scale robotic systems targeted specifically at data centres.