100 Years Archival Life!
After two years of development, this new Kodak optical disc is set to revolutionize the archival storage industry. Traditionally, the archival market has been dominated by the 24 karat Gold disc, marketed by Mam-A, Delkin, and Kodak themselves. While 24 karat gold reflective layers have been proven to be highly resistant to high temperature/high humidity conditions, the move toward DVD formats has exposed performance limitations when using a pure gold reflective layer. The use of a gold reflective layer on a DVD disc cannot match the electrical performance of a standard silver disc. As a result, 24 karat gold discs must write at slower speeds (max 8x) to be able to achieve the minimum electrical performance within the Orange Book (industry specification for recordable media). This is a real problem in that the drive base today is predominantly 16x, and these drives will attempt to write the gold discs at 16x write speed.
Knowing that use of a silver reflective layer exposes the disc to premature deterioration in high temperature/high humidity conditions, the new Kodak media has addressed both problems with a proprietary alloy that has proven to exceed the Orange Book standard for archival life by 10x while delivering superior electrical performance. The new Kodak discs boasts the same archival life as the 24 karat gold disc (100 years), but can write at 16x with a recording performance that is unmatched by the pure gold discs.
