Sony announces a 128GB disc format

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JAPANESE ELECTRONICS GIANT Sony has developed a quad layer HD DVD storage capacity of 128GB, giving up to four hours of recording.

Sony's own XDCAM Professional Disc line will get this new quad layer burning format, which doubles current generation discs and is over five times faster than single layer discs at 23X. At the moment this XDCAM is write only but at least Sony has also upped the transfer speed so you don't have to sit up all night in front of your PC archiving.

The disc, otherwise known as PFD128QLW, was built with Sony's latest laser and recording techniques. The company claimed its blue-laser technologies and high density recording mechanism made it possible to turn out the 128GB quad-layer disc.

That four hours of HD content recording can only be achieved if users record in MPEG HD422 mode at 50Mbps. Sony reckoned this can be bumped up to 7 hours 50 minutes of content recording in DVCAM mode.

"This new disc's unique combination of large recording capacity and high transfer rate opens a new frontier for this proven professional optical disc format in the area of video file archiving applications," said by Kazutaka Hasegawa, general manager of Sony media and peripherals Europe.

"Its write-once feature positions the media as an excellent option for long-term archiving, especially when you need to protect the original video files against tampering or unintended erasure."

Sony hasn't put a price on it yet. In fact, Sony was way ahead with this announcement because it's not due to ship until summer 2011. A year is a long time in storage disc technology so we'll probably see other vendors offering similar capacities by then.