New technique for optical storage allows petabyte of data on a DVD

It seems the optical disc is not quite dead yet.  Researchers in Australia have developed a new process for optical data storage that increases the possible storage on a dvd sized disc to one petabyte (1000 terabytes).  If you are wondering just how much data that would be, in the researchers' terms, that is enough to store 50,000 high definition movies.

ADVERTISEMENT

This huge advance in storage capability  was made possible by reducing the size of the burned areas of the disc.  Reducing the size of the burned pits in optical media has been difficult, due to the nature of light itself, and the limits of the width of light beams.  But these researchers have combined two different light beams into one mechanism, and reduced the size of the effective burning area.  The focal spot of this combined laser is nine nanometers, or one ten thousandth the diameter of a human hair.

You can read more on the story at The Conversation

No posts to display