facebook_logoWhen one talks about Blu-ray discs, most of the time we would figure out that these are the medium of choice for Full HD movies in your living room, as well as the place where PS3 games are stored. However, it seems that Blu-ray discs could have a potentially far reaching influence rather than being limited to mere movies and video games. Social network giant Facebook has announced that they are venturing into building a prototype for a new data storage system which will make use of 10,000 Blu-ray discs, which are capable of stashing up to one petabyte of data, alongside the very real possibility of increasing that amount of space up to five times the original intended figure.

This plan was announced as part of the Open Compute Project summit which happens to be held this week. It seems that this unique design for a “cold storage” system is not meant for data backups, but rather, to squirrel away duplicates of a user’s photos and videos just in case Murphy’s Law strikes. The implementation of Blu-ray discs in lieu of traditional hard drives might be able to reduce the company’s overall cold storage costs by up to 50%, in addition to a lowering of energy use by 80%. Not only that, there will be ample opportunity to increase the amount of data space as Blu-ray manufacturers are able to squeeze in additional storage space per disc in the future. Full production tests are expected to begin later this year.

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