Optical Disc Archive Optical Disc Archive Optical Disc Archive is a storage technology that was introduced by the Sony Corporation. It uses removable cartridges, where each cartridge holds 12 optical discs. Each of the internal optical discs is similar to, but not compatible with, a Blu-ray disc. The latest version of the cartridge, that has a total capacity of about 3.3TB, uses discs that hold about 300GB each. The technology was publicly announced on 16 April 2012 during the NAB Show with the first units shipping in February 2013. Generation 2 of the Optical Disc Archive technology is scheduled for mid-2016. Generation 2
History of optical storage media History of optical storage media Although research into optical data storage has been ongoing for many decades, the first popular system was the Compact Disc, introduced in 1982, adapted from audio (CD-DA) to data storage (the CD-ROM format) with the 1985 "Yellow Book", and re-adapted as the first mass market optical storage medium with CD-R and CD-RW in 1988. Compact Disc is still the "de facto" standard for audio recordings, although its place for other multimedia recordings and optical data storage has largely been superseded by DVD. DVD (initially an initialism abbreviation of "Digital Video Disc," then modified to "Digital