Sony (SONY -2.01%) is partnering with Panasonic to create the next installment of optical drive storage for both businesses and the entertainment industry, the company announced today. The new discs will store at least 300GB of data, a tripling of the maximum storage now offered in the companies' discs.
The new disc technology would increase the amount of data storage compared to current offerings, while allowing inter-generational compatibility between different formats. Sony said in it press release that, "In recent years, there has been an increasing need for archive capabilities, not only from video production industries, such as motion pictures and broadcasting, but also from cloud data centers that handle increasingly large volumes of data following the evolution in network services."
In September of last year, Sony introduced a commercial optical drive archival system that incorporated discs that each had a maximum capacity of 25GB, and just this month Panasonic created a similar disc system that used 100GB per-disc storage. The new optical discs Sony and Panasonic are working on would increase per-disc storage by at least three times the amount of current disc technology offered by both companies.
Sony said the new discs will be available by the end of 2015.
