Looking for an alternative to mechanical drives when backing up large amounts of data? Hitachi and LG have teamed up to develop a prototype NAS-like device that, in addition to using four hard-disks for storage, adds two slots for cartridges that hold eight Blu-Ray disks for up to 1TB of data storage per cartridge.

These discs are based on the new BDXL format which offers 128GB of storage on write-once discs and 100GB on rewriteable discs with several layers on each. The system moves little used data from the hard drives to the cartridges during automatic back-ups. The cartridges even include RFID chips that can be read by a handheld scanner to easily find out what data is on each cartridge while it is not in the device. No price is set as of yet, but LG and Hitachi hope to hit the market with this device sometime in 2011.