The Stacked Volumetric Optical Disc (or SVOD) is an

optical disc In computing and optical disc recording technologies, an optical disc (OD) is a flat, usually circular disc that encodes binary data (bits) in the form of pits and lands on a special material, often aluminum, on one of its flat surfaces. ...

format developed by

Hitachi Maxell , commonly known as Maxell, is a Japanese company that manufactures consumer electronics. The company's name is a contraction of "Maximum capacity dry cell". Its main products are batteries, wireless charging products, storage devices, LCD/laser ...

, which uses an array of wafer-thin optical discs to allow data storage. Each "layer" (a thin polycarbonate disc) holds around 9.4 GB of information, and the wafers are stacked in layers of 20, 25, 100, or more, giving a substantially larger overall data capacity; for example, 100× cartridges could hold 940 GB using the system as announced. Hitachi Maxell announced the creation of the SVOD standard in 2006, intending to launch it the next year. Aimed primarily at commercial users, the target price was ¥40,000 for a cartridge of 100 thin discs, with the potential to expand into the home user market. When they announced the system, Hitachi Maxell publicly recognized the possibility that the system could be eventually modified for use with a blue-violet laser, similar to

Blu-ray The Blu-ray Disc (BD), often known simply as Blu-ray, is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 2005 and released on June 20, 2006 worldwide. It is designed to supersede the DVD format, and capable of st ...

discs, which could have expanded the capacity of the system to 3-5 TB. It is possible that they in fact developed this "second generation" SVOD for use with standard Blu-ray lasers, with each thin disc having a storage capacity of 25 GB, or a 100-disc cartridge having a storage of 5 TB. Hitachi Maxell developed systems both for burning to the media using standard DVD optical heads, and pre-recording to the media using a special heat imprint technique they called "nanoimprinting." Though nanoimprinting initially required 6 minutes per disc for pressing, they had improved it to 8 seconds, and intended to achieve a comparable throughput to standard DVD pressing. The primary application of the SVOD system seemed to be business data archival, replacing digital tape archives. In 2007, Japanese broadcaster

NHK , also known as NHK, is a Japanese public broadcaster. NHK, which has always been known by this romanized initialism in Japanese, is a statutory corporation funded by viewers' payments of a television license fee. NHK operates two terrestr ...

announced a similar system, based on Blu-ray discs, of stacked optical storage media specifically designed to rotate at high speeds, up to 15,000 RPM. SVOD was anticipated to be a likely be a candidate, along with

Holographic Versatile Disc The Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD) is an optical disc technology that was expected to store up to several terabytes of data on an optical disc 10 cm or 12 cm in diameter. Its development commenced in April 2004, but it never arrived ...

s (HVDs), to be a next-generation optical disc standard. However, as of 2021, little has been done with the format.

References

External links

Hitachi Maxell develops wafer-thin storage disc
details and interview from IDG News Service (dead link, archived) (4 October 2006)

details in Japanese language (dead link, archived) (19 April 2006) Vaporware Rotating disc computer storage media Audio storage Video storage 120 mm discs DVD Optical discs {{compu-storage-stub