Optical disc with 2TB of storage !

Some nice invention comes from Western Reserve University which could open a new era of optical discs technology, a professor and his graduate student managed to design and create a new optical disc capable of storing up to 2TB of data! yeah thats true, and using the same plastic materials on the regular DVDs.

The key to achieve such a density is using an optical film with up to 64 data layers, currently we are using only two, the good news is that they companies are required to only do some light improvements, the new disc will be faster accessing data, specially to the laser beam, no more than that, to be capable of reading data from different layers.

At first step, the product would be offered to companies as an alternative to magnetic discs or magnetic tapes.

“A disc will be on the capacity scale of magnetic tapes used for archival data storage. But, they will be substantially cheaper and have one advantage: you can access data faster. You just pop the disc in your computer and you can find the data in seconds. Tapes can take minutes to wind through to locate particular data,” said Kenneth Singer, the Ambrose Swasey professor of physics, and co-founder of Folio Photonics.

To load what is the equivalent of 50 commercially available Blu-ray discs on a single, same-size disc, the scientists use similar optical data storage technology. But, instead of packing more data on the surface, they write data in dozens of layers; not the two or four layers used in Blu-rays. Using technology first developed by the center for layered polymeric systems at Case School of Engineering, the developers designed an optical film with 64 data layers.