Sanyo this week announced that it has developed a new laser diode that emits a 450 mw (milliwatts) blue laser beam that can read information off of Blu-ray discs at 12X speeds — double what’s currently available. Best of all, it can also burn to Blu-ray writable discs at the same data rates, which is a huge time saver for heavy archival use.

Data throughput isn’t the only advancement that Sany claims. The company also said that because of its new diode design, it’s able to to read quad-layer Blu-ray discs, allowing manufacturers to produce Blu-ray discs that hold up to a whopping 100 GB of data. At this capacity, quad-layer discs can hold up to 8 hours of high-definition movies.

Currently, Blu-ray discs hold about 25 GB per layer for a total of 50 GB on a dual-layer Blu-ray disc.

Unfortunately, don’t expect to run to your nearest retailer and pickup a drive with the new laser. The development and standardization time required for Blu-ray devices are painstakingly long. Because of this, the likelihood of seeing the new high capacity Blu-ray drives out on the market is still one to two years away. By this time, who knows what will be available.