ECMA International announced that its 99th General Assembly, held in Tokyo, June 17, 2010, has approved updates to its ECMA-379 standard (3rd edition) for estimating the archival lifetime of optical media as well as ECMA-382 (2nd edition), which defines the physical parameters of DVD-R Dual-Layer (DL) discs.

The ECMA-379 standard specifies an accelerated aging test method for estimating the life expectancy for the retrievability of information stored on DVD±R, DVD±RW and DVD-RAM discs. It includes stress conditions, assumptions, ambient conditions, controlled storage condition (e.g. 25° C and 50% RH using Eyring model), uncontrolled storage condition (e.g. 30° C and 80% RH using Arrhenius model), evaluation system description, specimen preparation, data acquisition procedure and data interpretation.

The methodology includes only the effects of temperature and relative humidity. It does not attempt to model degradation due to complex failure mechanism kinetics, nor does it test for exposure to light, corrosive gases, contaminants, handling, and variations in playback subsystems. This third edition of ECMA-379 is an editorial amendment including corrections of some calculations and the bootstrap method was deleted (to avoid miscalculation depending on the data set conditions).

ECMA also published the second edition of its ECMA-382 standard, which specifies the mechanical, physical and optical characteristics of 12 cm and 8 cm DVD-R Dual-Layer (DL) discs. This version updates the original standard with various editorial corrections and clarifications.

• ECMA-379 3rd edition – Test Method for the Estimation of the Archival Lifetetime of Optical Media

• ECMA-382 2nd edition – 120 mm (8,54 Gbytes per side) and 80 mm (2,66 Gbytes per side) DVD Recordable Disk for Dual Layer (DVD-R for DL)

For more information visit: www.ecma-international.org