Blu-Ray™ Technology

The Blu-Ray™ optical disc format was developed by the BDA (Blu-ray Disc Association Nonprofit Mutual Benefit Corporation). This group consisted of leading manufacturers including organizations such as: Hitachi, HP, JVC, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips, Sony, and TDK. The format was driven more in support of high-definition (HD) video for the consumer market, but with its ability to store large amounts of data, is applicable to the professional markets such as data archiving.

Blu-Ray™ media, like UDO media, provides data authenticity for regulatory compliance or other applications where archived data must remain unchanged and authentic.

Origins

The technology’s name comes from the use of a blue laser which reads and writes data to the media rather than utilizing a red laser. This is the same type of technology employed previously with the UDO optical technology. The benefit of using a Blu-Ray™ laser (405nm) is that it has a shorter wavelength than a red laser (650nm). Combined with the change of the numerical aperture to 0.85, a much more accurate focal point is developed, allowing data to be stored closer together, providing major increases in capacity over other media such as CD’s and DVD’s. Blu-Ray™ media capacities that are available include 25GB, 50GB, 100GB and 128GB, providing an excellent storage medium for Data Archiving.

Dependant on the Blu-Ray™ disc manufacturer, different materials can be utilized to achieve varying results. Typically, Phase Change technology is utilized for recording on Blu-Ray™ BD-R Write-Once-Read-Many (WORM) media as well as Blu-Ray™ BD-RE (re-writable) media. In some cases, as with Verbatim™ media, BD-R discs utilize an inorganic recording material rather than the phase change alloys utilized in rewritable media which allows conversion between crystalline and amorphous states (differing reflectivity).

For more information on Phase Change technology, see UDO Technology