Dr. Zongsong Gan at Australia's Swinburne University of Technology claims to have found a way to store 1,000 TB of data on a disc the size of a DVD. His technology works by dramatically decrease the size of the laser beam used to read data from a DVD. Currently the smallest beam used in commercial optical drives is 405 nm for Blu-ray. The technology Gan has developed is able to create beams of just 9 nm. Gan was recently awarded a price from the Australian government called the Victoria Fellowship for his work.
To achieve the 9nm beam, the researchers use two light beams of 500 nanometers each. One beam is used for writing data while the other beam is used to block all but a point of light 9 nanometers in width. Using the technology it should be possible to store 40,000 HD movies on a disc the size of a DVD.
"Putting so much information on a single disc makes it easier for people to destroy huge amounts of data and thus cost more to protect the disc," says Dr. Gan. "Also, we are now working to speed up for data reading and recording. If we're still using the current DVD speed, how long it will take to write 1,000 TB of data onto a disc?"
Besides the possibility to store movies on the disc, Dr. Gan also wants the discs to be used as cheap data storage.
