The new Blu-ray disc technology will be introduced December 10th  2009 in the Science Archive Facility for the distribution of Service Mode (SM) PI packages to begin with. Blu-ray discs will be offered later in 2010 for archive requests. The ISO9660 file system with Joliet/Rock Ridge extensions will be used.

Besides FTP transfer for small volumes of data, the archive is currently offering its users the following media for data distribution: CD, DVD-R, and USB disks for data requests larger than 60 GB. The reasons for the change are of course the adoption of the most economical technologies and the adaptation to data volumes. A Blu-ray disc has about ten times the capacity of a single-layer DVD.

Parallel to the introduction of the Blu-ray discs, the archive will also stop offering CDs as archive data distribution medium. Therefore, archive users anticipating large data requests and Principal Investigators (PIs) expecting significant data deliveries from their observing programmes are advised to make sure that they have available Blu-ray disc readers.