Ritek to Produce 300GB Optical Archive Disc in Taiwan for Panasonic

Taiwan recordable optical disc company Ritek Co. has become the current only one oversea Archive Disc professional production partner that outside Panasonic Corporation group.

Such mass production of 300GB Archive Disc (AD) will be started in July.

It has also become the first professional optical disc manufacturer in the world to have AD production lines and technologies, besides the two specification developers of AD. It is officially moving toward the highest field of B2B professional market, which commencing the production of large-capacity AD archive discs.

The Archive Disc is a generation of optical discs jointly developed by Panasonic and Sony, and was designed for large-scale cloud databases. Panasonic and Sony Corporation have a high-end optical disc and optical disc drive technology, invested huge technology development resources, have formulated ‘Archival Disc’, a standard for professional-use, next-generation optical discs. Both companies started co-development in July 2013 and completed a standard with recording capacity of 300GB per disc by the end of 2015, of which had constituted contribution. At present, specification of 300GB has been developed and plan to develop up to 1TB in the future according to a press release from both companies.

Data (cloud) centers require safe and secure storage for decades. AD archive disc is write-once storage media, and can prevent hackers from overwriting and forfeiting data.

According to accelerated testing, the mean lifetime of  Archival Disc is estimated to be 100 years or more at temperatures of 30ºC and humidity of 70% RH.

Compared to conventional media that have to migrate data periodically, long-life AD archive discs without data transfer costs. The special features can make the archiving operation Panasonic AD system at room temperature, it also reduce the electricity cost of data center facilities for temperature control.

The large capacity, high-speed access, anti-hacking, easy storage and long-life of AD archive discs will reduce the cost of data archiving in large-scale data center. It has been used by many businesses and government agencies that require long-term storage.

Atsushi Furukawa, director, storage business development center, Panasonic, said: “We are very pleased to work with Ritek as first oversea company for Archival Disc business. By utilizing Ritek’s technologies, manufacturing capabilities and infrastructure for optical disc, we will provide Archival Disc to meet the demand of data center which is estimated to grow rapidly from now on.“

Ritek said: “The AD, super large-capacity optical disc is the best solution for Data Center served to store data for decades. It will be the best storage media to replace LTO as a data archive. It will grow faster than expected. Ritek is the first and only overseas production partner outside Panasonic Group. It is the best affirmation for Ritek’s long term of dedication to the development of optical disc technology.“

With the rise of demand for high-tech threshold of B2B professional optical storage market, Ritek will continue investing in the technology development of this market, will also introduce bigger capacity optical storage media technology in the future，With Panasonic’s technology and business power, the company can create a brighter outlook operations in the B2B professional market.

Read also:
Panasonic Plans 1TB Optical Disc
For archiving 
2017.09.08 | Press Release
Panasonic and Sony Define Archival WORM Disc at 300GB
Roadmap to reach 500GB and 1TB 
2014.03.12 | Press Release | [with our comments]
Sony and Panasonic to Develop 300GB Optical Disc
By end of 2015 
2013.07.30 | Press Release | [with our comments]