Scientists over at Australia’s Swinburne University of Technology have managed to produce a DVD that can store 1000TB of data.
The media-hoarding disc should be good for somewhere around 40,000 high-definition movies, trumping current DVD fare that holds a comparatively paltry 4.7GB.
Dr Zongsong Gan and his team even won a Victoria Fellowship for their work on the super-saver disc.
With current technology, a single laser burns discs with bits of information 500 nanometers small – any teenier just isn’t possible.
Unless of course you use two lasers, in which case you can shorten the writing light all the way down to 9 nanonmeters.
The first beam writes the information at the usual thickness, but the second purple beam blocks the bonus light all the way down to a small 9 nanometer-wide point – voila, beastly storage in familiar disc format.
It all sounds great, but Dr Gan still reckons there’s a few hitches to work out before the discs will roll out for general public use.
“Putting so much information on a single disc makes it easier for people to destroy huge amounts of data and thus cost more to protect the disc,” he explained.
“Also, we are now working to speed up for data reading and recording. If we’re still using the current DVD speed, how long will it take to write 1000TB of data onto a disc?”
Despite data concerns, Dr Gan has high hopes for improved storage capacities in the future.
"In my mind, I have a vision for our society in the future where everyone will have a data bank account just like we all have a bank account today," Gan said.
"Well save all of our data in the data bank. Everyone no longer needs the same things today as phones, iPads or laptops. We only need a soft touch screen, any data processing, while storage is done remotely."
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Via: Fastcolabs, Pocket-lint
