Scientists at Swinburne University of Technology, Australia, has released information on a new storage technology that makes even the most spacious of optical formats seem puny. Like DVD and Blu-ray the new technology use optics to store data but by using so called five-dimensional discs they have increased storage capacity 10,000 times over a regular DVD size disc.
The team claims that the technology could result in optical discs capable of storing up to 10TB and already today they have successfully stored 1.6TB on a single disc.
The new storage format uses a polarization technology for storing data on different layers by twisting the laser at different angles when writing to the disc.
16-layer 400GB Blu-ray disc from Pioneer
There are still some question marks that needs to be straightened out and current the write speed is one of the bigger problems. Writing several Terabyte of data can’t take too long. The university team has already signed an agreement with Samsung Electronics, adding additional credibility and expectations to the work.
