U.S.-based Millenniata (www.mdisc.com) today announced it will offer Blu-ray M-DISCs in the second quarter of 2013, increasing both the storage capacity and the accessibility of the M-DISC.
The announcement, made at the Storage Visions Conference in Las Vegas, marks a major step forward in permanent data storage solutions for businesses and consumers by making the M-DISC available in all the standard optical disc formats.
The other major advance in the growing world-wide acceptance of the M-DISC DVD and the forthcoming Blu-ray M-DISC is the marketing and distribution partnership with Imation Corp. announced at the Storage Visions Conference by Millenniata. Millenniata and Imation, the leading world-wide distributor of data storage products, have agreed to co-brand and distribute both the M-DISC and Blu-ray M-DISC under Imation’s TDK, Memorex and Imation brands.
RITEK Corporation, the leading manufacturer of optical storage media in the world, will produce the new Blu-ray M-DISC as part of its manufacturing agreement with Millenniata. In addition, RITEK has signed a license agreement with Millenniata to distribute and co-brand both the DVD and Blu-ray M-DISCs through its established distribution and reseller channels as a secondary distribution channel for the M-DISC products behind Imation.
The new Blu-ray M-DISCs will be writable and readable on any Blu-ray combo drive – an enormous step for Millenniata and the convenience of this permanent storage technology. The Blu-ray M-DISCs will also offer at least five times the amount of storage as the standard 4.7GB M-DISC.
“This is very exciting news for us and the entire permanent data storage industry,” said Paul Brockbank, Millenniata president and CEO. “The new Blu-ray M-DISCs will not only open the doors to more storage space, but also allow users to employ our optical discs with virtually any Blu-ray drive.”
Millenniata produces the M-DISC, which provides data loss prevention by laser etching data (files, photos, videos, etc.) into an inorganic rock-like material that is not available from any other recordable media.
A recent study performed by the U.S. Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division at China Lake, Calif. tested five brands of archival-quality DVD discs, including the Millenniata M-DISC for data longevity and reliability. The test found that M-DISC was the only solution that suffered no degradation or data loss under the harsh testing environments. All other discs tested failed.
Currently, only M-DISC compatible drives can write to the DVD version of M-DISC, but it can be read in any DVD drive. Millenniata partner LG Electronics offers an affordable M-Ready optical drive for customers who want the peace of mind of having their important information stored forever.
Additionally, Acer, Inc. is now offering a permanent storage solution to its global customers with the integration of M-DISC compatible Hitachi LG Data Storage (HLDS) DVD and Blu-ray optical drives in Acer computers.
The M-DISC Ready drives are available on the recently launched M series of notebooks under Acer’s Aspire range. Hitachi-LG Data Storage, Inc. (HLDS) manufactures the M-DISC compatible drives in partnership with Millenniata.
