Plasmon, the market leader for professional optical archival solutions, announced the successful demonstration of their new UDO drive and media technology at the COMDEX trade show in Las Vegas during the week of November 18th 2002.

Press, partners and analysts from around the world attended exclusive meetings with Plasmon CEO, Nigel Street, where UDO technology was demonstrated with two UDO form factor drives running on separate PCs writing and reading video data to 30GB media. As part of the presentation, media was exchanged between the two drives to validate the stability and interoperability of the UDO drives.

UDO is the next generation 5.25" optical technology and the world’s first blue-violet laser optical disk drive developed specifically for the professional data storage market. UDO media is available in standard 5.25" cartridges with an initial capacity of 30GB; growing to 120GB. Unlike previous technologies, UDO drives support both Rewritable and true "Write Once" formats. The combination of high capacity and flexible media formats makes UDO ideally suited to meet corporate and governmental regulatory standards for long-term data archival at a dramatically reduced cost per gigabyte.

"We’re very excited to be at this stage of UDO development, and able to demonstrate precisely what this technology can do," said Christopher Harris, President of Plasmon, Inc. "Successfully demonstrating UDO technology at COMDEX is a major milestone that shows our commitment to this project and, ultimately, our goal to bring UDO to market on schedule."

"Attending Plasmon's UDO demonstration at COMDEX 2002, I was pleased to observe a successful demonstration of the technology and reassured that UDO development remains on track for its scheduled release", said Wolfgang Schlichting, Research Manager for Removable Storage at IDC.

Plasmon is developing the UDO drive technology and Rewritable / Write Once optical media at its facilities in Colorado Springs, Colorado and Cambridge, UK respectively. Alpha shipments for UDO drives are scheduled for 2Q03, with production shipments beginning in 3Q03.