The Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) has developed a new specification for the Blu-ray Disc format, which allows storing up to 200GB of data in double-sided Blu-ray discs placed into cartridges. The new BD-DSD (Blu-ray Double-Sided Disc) format is expected to be used mainly in data centers and for data archiving.

The BDA says that systems that use multiple cartidges with 200GB BD-DSD discs will be able to access petabytes of data faster than before, with each cartridge to be moved to the laser read / write head using a robotic arm faster than the typical systems that use tape media. The Association also touts some advantages of the optical discs compared to the tape such as the read/write operations on disc without a physical contact of a recording head on the medium. Other advantages of the BD-DSD include the reduction of operating costs, power consumption and CO2 emissions in data centers that typically use s tape-based or HDD-based storage systems, BDA says.