After just close to two years after Sony's launch of its professional blue-laser optical drive, they have already decided to discontinue its development. The Professional Disc for Data (PDD) media holds 23.3GB on a single side disc and while it has similar features to Blu-ray, the format is totally incompatible as it is targeted at professional data storage. Sony plans to sell its PDD drives until the end of 2007 and will offer technical support until 2014 as well as UDO media for another while.
As Sony was unable to gain enough of a market share for this format, they decided that it will market Blu-ray in its place, particularly since Blu-ray is expected to launch May 23rd this year and will offer at least the same capacity as the Ultra Density Optical (UDO) media this professional blue-laser drive uses.
When it comes to server backup drives and professional storage solutions, in my opinion, the best storage solutions to go for would be mature systems that are widely used as well as expected to last well into the future. For example, even though DAT tapes seem like a sluggish format to use for data archival, chances are that if one loses a server in a catastrophe several years down the line, they will have no problem obtaining a DAT drive to read back their tapes. However, if one thought they were doing the right thing by buying a Sony PDD drive and several years down the line they lose their server's contents and drive in a disaster, no matter what backup solution they may get for their replacement server, they will still need to get hold of a Sony PDD drive just to recover their media's contents.
Source: TG Daily
