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ISTOCK / GETTY IMAGES PLUS (disc)
Scientists at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology have discovered an optical storage device that has the similar shape and size as a DVD or Blu-Ray disc — but can store 1.6 petabits of data, or about 200,000 gigabytes.
That’s sufficient data to store over 40,000 DVDs, or about 100 years of seeing one movie a day. As IEEE Spectrum reports, that’s near about 4,000 times the data density of a Blu-Ray, and roughly 24 times of the highest-capacity hard drives available at present.
Rather letting you to survive out the rest of your life watching movies without need to swap out the disc, the scientists desires their invention could remarkably shrink the size of data centers — which still depend heavily on great numbers of conventional hard drives.
Best of all, the scientists say their discs could make use of conventional DVD mass production techniques, making a single disc in only six minutes.
Rather storing data in a single layer, the team purposed a way to encode data across 100 layers. As given in a paper published in the journal Nature last week, the data is also recorded in spots that quantify only 54 nanometers across.
To both write and read data, the scientists relied on nanometer-scale lasers. By finely timing the system, they were capable to remarkably pare down the quantity of the spots where the data is kept.
The light-sensitive material that allow all this, known as AIE-DDPR, has been a “ten-year hard work,” as coauthor and University of Shanghai for Science and Technology computer engineering professor Min Gu told IEEE Spectrum.
To be very honest, it’s maybe not possible that these super-high-capacity optical discs will bring Blockbuster back from the grave, given the decades-long and painfully drawn-out death of physical media.
Still, Gu and his companions think their optical discs can be produced at commercial scales, creating them an intriguing option to scale down the physical space covered by data centers.
