Pioneer's New Blu-ray Discs Are Guaranteed to Last a Century

From PC Mag: Japanese manufacturer Pioneer developed a new BD-R discs that is guaranteed to store data for at least 100 years.

As PC Watch reports (via Tom's Hardware), a revision to the Electronic Book Preservation Act in Japan means there's currently a big shift among Japanese businesses and government agencies to store records digitally rather than on paper. In order to do that, a large-scale data storage medium is required that can be relied upon for decades to come.

Pioneer's solution to this problem is a new external USB 3.0 Blu-ray optical drive called the BDR-WX01DM and 25GB BD-R discs called IPS-BD11J03P. When used together, they produce discs that conform to the JIS X6257 standard for guaranteed long-term storage of data, which Pioneer claims is a world's first.

Pioneer is using the label "DM for Archive" on the discs and player. What you're getting is an optical drive capable of writing discs at 12x that will then retain their data for a 100 years or more. The drive is made to a higher standard than typical Blu-ray burners, but I'd be surprised if they will still be working 100 years from now, especially if they are being used to burn discs on a daily basis.

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