Taiwanese recordable optical disc maker Ritek Co. has become the sole non-Japanese maker of Panasonic's Archive Discs.

The company plans to start mass production of the 300GB Archive Disc (AD) in July.

The Archive Disc is a new optical disc jointly developed by Panasonic and Sony, and was designed for data archiving in large-scale data centers. Panasonic and Sony have formulated "Archival Disc", a standard for professional-use, next-generation optical discs. Both companies started co-development in July 2013 and completed a standard offering a recording capacity of 300GB per disc by the end of 2015. The development of a larger 1TB Archive Disc is also planned in the future.

AD archive disc is write-once storage media. According to accelerated ageing testing, the mean lifetime of Panasonic Archival Disc is estimated to be 100 years or more at temperatures of 30 degrees Celsius and humidity of 70% RH.