OPTICAL JUKEBOX

An 'optical jukebox' is a robotic storage device that can automatically load and unload optical media, such as Ultra Density Optical or Blu-ray disc and provide terabytes of near-line information. The devices are often called optical disk libraries, robotic drives, or autochangers. Jukebox devices may have up to 2,000 slots for disks, and usually have a picking device that traverses the slots and drives. The arrangement of the slots and picking devices affects performance, depending on the space between a disk and the picking device. Seek times and transfer rates vary depending upon the optical technology.
Jukeboxes are used in high-capacity archive storage environments such as imaging, medical, and video. Hierarchical storage management is a strategy that moves little-used or unused files from fast magnetic storage to optical jukebox devices in a process called migration. If the files are needed, they are migrated back to magnetic disk.
Jukeboxes typically contain internal SCSI based recordable drives (CD-ROM, CD-R, DVD-ROM, DVD-R, DVD-RAM, UDO or Blu-ray) that connect directly to a file server and are managed by a third party jukebox management software. This software controls the movement of media within the jukebox, and the pre-mastering of data prior to the recording process.
Jukebox capacities have greatly increased with the release of the 50Gb dual layer Blu-ray (BD) format, with a road-map to increase to eight layers and 200Gb per disc. The current format allows 35Tb of storage from a single 700 disc jukebox.