A new technique for recording data in Optical Discs can revitalize a physical format who lived his best days with the DVD and Blu-Ray. Scientists at the Shanghai University of Science and Technology have developed a technique that allows an impressive amount of 1 petabit of data to be recorded on this type of media. That is to say, 125,000 gigabytes.
Optical discs such as DVD and Blu-Ray have the advantage of being a medium cheap and durable, but with the drawback that the amount of information they can store is limited. Standard DVDs had 4.7GB and Blu-Ray 25GB. Traditionally, these disks store data in a single layer of information that is read by a laser, although double-layer versions were developed that in the first case reached the 17GB and in the second fifty. That is the 0.0136% and the 0.04%respectively, which allows the new technique to be stored on an optical disk.
An optical disc has a thickness of 1.2 millimeters. If the mechanical hard drives needed to store 125,000 GB are stacked, they would reach 2 meters high and its Blu-Ray equivalent would surpass it.
'This could greatly reduce the footprint and energy consumption of future large data centersproviding a sustainable solution for the digital economy', stated Min Guprofessor of Science and Technology at Shanghai University and one of the co-authors of the article published in Nature.
To bring the capacity of optical disks to the petabit, researchers extended the planar recording architecture to 3 dimensions achieving hundreds of layers. For this they developed 'an optical recording medium based on a photoresist film doped with aggregation-induced emission dye, which can be optically stimulated by femtosecond laser beams'.
This material, IEA-DDPR For its acronym in English, it is a very uniform and transparent film that researchers can work precisely using nanoparticle-scale lasersallowing for an unprecedented storage method.
The eventual commercialization of these 'super DVDs' would have a significant impact on both companies and consumers. From much larger and smaller devices to forgetting about cloud services and dramatically increasing data center capacities, as well as significantly reduce the environmental impact generated by the technology industry.