Researchers tout 10 terabyte discs

 

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By Reuters

Posted on 21 May 2009 at 09:14

Researchers are claiming that a new type of disc capable of storing 10,000 times more data than DVDs could be on sale within five years.

A team from Swinburne University of Technology in Australia claim that by harnessing nanoparticle technology and adding a "polarisation" dimension to existing discs, storage can be massively boosted without increasing the size of current discs.

The researchers, who have signed a deal with Samsung Electronics, claim they can store 1.6 terabytes of data on their new discs with the potential to store up to 10 terabytes within ten years.

One terabyte would be enough to hold 300 feature length films or 250,000 songs.

The researchers, who published their findings in the journal Nature, claim the key to the extra space is the ability to record information onto two new aspects of the disc: colour and polarisation.

The colour dimension is created by using gold nanorods which form surface plasmons when hit by light. Because nanoparticles react to light according to their shape, this allows the researchers to record information in a range of different colour wavelengths on the same place on the disc.

Current DVDs are recorded in a single color wavelength using a laser.

The researchers also created an extra dimension using polarisation, a technique in which they projected light waves onto the disc, to record different layers of information at different angles.

"The polarisation can be rotated 360 degrees," says research team member James Chon. "So for example, we were able to record at zero degree polarisation. Then on top of that we were able to record another layer of information at 90 degrees polarisation, without them interfering with each other."

Some issues, such as the speed at which the discs can be written on, need further work but the scientists say their research could have immediate applications in a range of fields.

For instance, they could help store extremely large medical files such as MRIs as well as financial, military and security areas by offering higher data densities needed for encryption.

The figures dwarf the findings of German scientists, who claimed last year that a new holographic recording technique would allow them to squeeze 1TB of data onto a DVD by 2010.