Optical storage doesn’t have the same appeal as it did a decade ago with all the more users downloading their information and storing it on harddrives or in the cloud. But the optical technology will be around for quite some time and TDK shows what is possible in the future with a disc storing 1TB.
TDK showed a prototype of its optical media during CEATEC in Japan and it is based on technology used in current Blu-ray media. Both the material and the optical beams come from Blu-ray, but instead of up to four 25GB layers of data, as in Blu-ray XL with 100GB capacity, TDK has baked in 16 separate data layers with 32GB capacity each with each side of the medium – total 1TB.
If or when TDK gets 1TB media out on the market is hard to predict. According to the company it is up to the media manufacturers and with twice as thick data layer as current Blu-ray media it won’t be cheap to make. We don’t expect a launch any time soon, but it will be interesting to see what kind of solutions that could spawn from this.
218 DVD discs or 1 TDK disc, both holds 1TB of data
Source: TechOn
