Sony whips up a box to store 1.5 petabytes of data on 10,000 Blu-ray discs

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Sony has built a prototype of a device that can hold onto a massive 1.5 petabytes of data for the long term — on good old Blu-ray discs.

The system, which stands more than 6 feet tall, contains 15,000 discs, distributed out onto 60 “platters,” with 10 stacks of 24 discs in each “platter.” It’s designed to consume just a teensy-weensy bit of power — 120 volts and 5 amperes.

The system takes 30 seconds to two minutes to retrieve information on a disk after retrieving the right one using a robotic arm near the top of the unit.

“You can see motion is not so fast — so very, very low,” a Sony employee said of the system’s power consumption at an exhibition booth at the Open Compute Summit today.

The demo follows moves on the part of Sony and other companies showing that Blu-ray discs could be a great medium for long-term, “cold” storage. Last year, Sony and Panasonic came forth with a new standard for this purpose called Archival Disc.

And at last year’s Open Compute Summit, a company called HIT Archive Corp. was demonstrating a Blu-ray box that could hold just a single petabyte.

Facebook was working with that company to do production testing of a prototype of that Blu-ray system. Now Sony is talking with Facebook and other companies about trying its system, Yuichi “Lewis” Hasegawa, general manager of Sony’s strategic business planning and marketing group, told VentureBeat.