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Australian scientists are developing a revolutionary new "super DVD" that will be theoretically capable of holding up to 10 terabytes (TBs) of data.
Img: DVD drive. Credit: aussiegall/flickr
The futuristic discs have been developed at the Swinburne University of Technology, where experts say they will have a storage capacity 2,000 times that of current DVDs discs.
Findings from research by Mr. Peter Zijlstra, Dr. James Chon and Professor Min Gu from the university was published in Nature magazine.
“We were able to show how nanostructured material can be incorporated onto a disc in order to increase data capacity, without increasing the physical size of the disc,” Gu said.
Using nanotechnology, the team were able to introduce a "...spectral -- or colour -- dimension as well as a polarisation dimension," according to a university statement.
Professor Gu also said that "these extra dimensions are the key to creating ultra-high capacity discs."
Dr. Chon explained the process: "At the moment the current DVD and Blu-ray DVD technologies only use two-dimensional recording, which means that it only uses one thin layer of recording media inside of a vast DVD volume," he said to the ABC's The World Today program.
"And what we are proposing is that we can use up all the rest of the volume by stacking each layers. And on top of that, at each layer you have additional two ways of encoding -- one is colour, and the other one is, being polarisation."
"So this means that you could record much more full high-definition movies and archival, you can use this for archival purposes and so on," he said.
Though testing and development of the super discs is still at an early stage, the team is confident the discs will be commercially available within the next 5 to ten years.
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