Hitachi Maxell have developed an ultra thin DVD with a thickness of just 92 microns, or roughly 1/13th the thickness of a conventional DVD disc, which can be stacked 100 discs high in a cartridge format.

Each disc is double-sided and features a native capacity of 9.4GB. The purpose of this optical media is for their specially made 100-layer cartridges. These are known as stacked volumetric optical discs (SVOD). A 100-disc SVOD cartridge features a capacity of 940GB and has dimensions of 65mm x 133mm x 161mm (2.56" x 5.23" x 6.34").

This optical disc based cartridge has a significant advantage over both DVD libraries due to its huge space saving as well as random-read access, which magnetic tapes cannot perform. The data cartridge will also offer support for next-generation blue-violet laser optical discs, which would bring the capacity up to 5 TB (using Blu-ray media).

Hitachi Maxell expects to start commercialising SVOD as early as from the start of 2007, with a 940GB cartridge costing about ¥40,000 (£192). The SVOD drive will be targeted at corporate users, hospitals as well as other professional users who need to store a vast amount of data.

Story filed 24.04.06