Toshiba is as you perhaps know the driving force behind the optical format HD DVD and in the war against the competing Blu-ray format the perhaps biggest drawback has been the storage capacity. A dual-layer HD DVD disc offers only 30GB of storage while a Blu-ray dual-layer disc offers 50GB. Toshiba has now revealed a new HD DVD disc with a higher storage capacity than Blu-ray. It has namely designed a disc with three layer at 17GB each, which results in a total capacity of 51GB. It has earlier spoken of a 45GB media with three 15GB layers, but the temptation to beat the Blu-ray format’s storage capacity seems to have grown too big.
Toshiba has sent in the specifications for its new disc in hope of getting the new format standardizes before the end of the year. This would mean that HD DVD all of a sudden offers more storage, that is if Blu-ray doesn’t launch a triple-layer disc of its own. Or why not a quad-layer disc at 100GB, which TDK has presented at several occasions.
