Researchers Find Way to Put 1.6 TB on a DVD
1.6 Terabytes on a single disc.
With hard drives hitting 2 TB, our dual-layer DVD burners are starting to look mighty limited. While Blu-ray Disc burners will be making their way into high-end computers soon, it won’t be long until even 50 GB seems puny.
Researchers from Melbourne's Swinburne University of Technology claims to have developed an optical recording technique that it says can place a theoretical 1.6 TB on a DVD-sized disc. This is done by adding extra dimensions to the recording surface.
To be precise, the extra dimensions are the wavelength and polarization of light, which integrate with the familiar three spatial dimensions creates true five-dimensional recording within one volume.
According to the journal article from Nature, “The new system makes use of surface plasmon resonance (SPR)-mediated photothermal reshaping of a substrate of gold nanorods immersed in a polymer layer. Crosstalk-free readout is via two-photon luminescence. Immediate applications can be found in security patterning and multiplexed optical storage.”
According to a BBC report, the Australian research team is now working with Samsung to develop a drive that can both read and write using the new method.
“The optical system to record and read 5-D is very similar to the current DVD system,” says James Chon, a co-author on the research. “Therefore, industrial scale production of the compact system is possible.”
All-new equipment is needed to manufacture discs on the new format, which is a barrier for the technology’s adoption. The researchers cite the eventual industry investment into the switch Blu-ray Disc as an example of how their technology could someday be crowned the next optical format.
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1.6 TB on a DVD disc...wow!
Somebody did a marvelous job.I wonder how the industry would respond to this and how this technology is going to evolve.looking forward!
Didn't one of the major manufacturers already announce a 6-layer BD disc a while ago? Seems like old news!
That was a 20 layer one. Anyway, I think this technology is very...unstable. What I mean is, there could be frequent read/write errors.
information overload!
thats like taking a platter out of a HDD and covering it in a coat of plastic... good luck getting a cheep burner for one of those.
I have heard about multi-layer miracle discs at least 10 or more times over the years. They never come to pass. I remember Constellation 3d back in 2001. They had supposedly perfected fluorescent multi-layer writing and could do 5gb per layer. They were working on 100 layer discs (500GB per). The company was run by thieves who milked its treasury and took the investors for a ride. Take this one with a grain of salt. New battery technologies are also infamously fallible.
And yet my DVD burners (LiteOn, Pioneer, Samsung, LG) continue to make more coasters than I have cups. I'll believe this when they can at least make the current DVD burners more reliable.
i bet its not even reliable... like most discoveries .... 3-4-5+ layers.... im sure there is a lots of errors and 1 scratch... and its over...
great new DVD's still live
Article title misleadingly insinuates current DVD disc and recorders can be used.
1.6 TB on a DVD disc...wow!Somebody did a marvelous job.I wonder how the industry would respond to this and how this technology is going to evolve.looking forward!
more like... someone solved an equation. note that it says "theoretical"
whoa 5-D???
I thought 4-D was like getting into time travel or something
Conceptually similar to Fluorescent Multilayer Disc (FMD).
I think products for it exists, but not for the consumer. Conspiracy theories, anyone?
It sounds promising, but they did say it was theoretical which means nothing unless they have a working prototype. I would be willing to buy this new technology but it better be rewritable as I can't possibly write 1.6 TB on a single go or they can implement a unclosed means of writing to the format like Roxio does for "-R" medias (possibly others but I don't know). Another issue is speed... Is 5 minutes per 1.6 TB asking to much... Alright 30 minutes max for 1.6 TB, no exceptions.
blarrggg wake me up when i can actually use something like this, and at a decent price
blu-ray is dead.
I'd settle for those damn dual layer DVD's hitting anywhere near a reasonable price. Everyone and their grandma has a dual layer burner, but the discs are pure extortion. Now we have Blu-Ray and other technologies hitting the market that are supposedly harder to manufacture. How can we afford to burn even one coaster on these things?
I'd but the B-ray version.
I dont even have a B-ray drive yet.
It's a pretty smart idea. just like how packets are compressed and digitalized.
maybe we can now get a Gb from 5 1/2" floppies. HD Beta tapes. Think of the possibilities.
i'm not excited because all the other surrounding technologies are lagging way too far behind to make use of this optical storage space. look at how blu-ray is failing because it is too far ahead of its time.
why just use the B-ray diodes the 5-D recording and the holographic disks and put them all in to one giant overpriced priced package, and have disks that can hold 20 Exabites. you keep hearing about new recording techs but they all hold around the same amount of data and will need new player. i will never be able to bring my self to buy any of them and ill be stuck with my DVD drive.
I'd be satisfied with 50 gb per disk that is really reliable.
worst 3 because then they'd have to share technology with Sony. If this works then Sony's Blu-ray could go bye bye. Now Microsoft as to put this in their new console.
This is done by adding extra dimensions to the recording surface.
To be precise, the extra dimensions are the wavelength and polarization of light, which integrate with the familiar three spatial dimensions creates true five-dimensional recording within one volume.
The team members described what they did as adding three "dimensions" to the two spatial dimensions that DVD and CD discs already have.
They say they were able to introduce a spectral - or colour - dimension and a polarisation dimension, as well as recording information in 10 layers of the nano-rod films, adding a third spatial dimension.
Is it possible mr. Yam to, eventually, get your act together (leaving m$ propaganda parroting aside) and report more accurately?
Funny marketing droid language from a scientists team:
"adding extra dimensions to the recording surface", "true five-dimensional recording", etc.
Traditional CD/DVD storage uses a single dimensional encoding , the parameter being pit/land length (see EFM/+). Multiple layers don't count as another dimension for encoding, just as an extension of space for the traditional one, being asynchronous, and usually accessed sequentially, not simultaneously.
So, the virtual encoding space could be, at most, theoretically extended (with polarization angle and wavelength considered) to a 3D one, considering each one being orthogonal to the other ones.
For example, WDM is already used to extend BW, squeezing more (independent) channels on one optical fiber.
But, it would be really hard to synchronize the streams, for the different discrete wavelengths, using several lasers and detectors, on different drive units (mechanics aren't sufficiently precise and reproductible), to consider them another coding space dimension. There would be just the "classic" dimension space extension, by sequentially tuning one laser to different wavelengths, similar to multiple layers usage (optical focusing on different layers). That would eliminate another "dimension".
Polarization angle could be supposedly much easier included in coding space, but as the current research is using just 2 states (this means just one supplementary bit), which hardly could be considered another "dimension". Most probably, the laser beam is polarized one way or another, for successive passes, offering just another "layer" for storage for the "classical" one dimension coding space.
All in all, we could consider the technology as an address extension (like in a MMU) - in which the current storage spiral can be selected by layer depth (current technology), wavelength, and polarization - to the effect of a much larger storage (single-dimensional) space, as it would be seen by the user.
"4D" mouse anyone? it sounds soooo cool to the noob...
consumers won't need another optical tech for data. i see no purpose in these devices except for high-res and low compressed movies.
of course, companies can benefit in such for archiving data.
has more capacity than my head.
"surface plasmon resonance (SPR)-mediated photothermal reshaping of a substrate of gold nanorods immersed in a polymer layer"
.... which means, basically, first reshaping the surface of the gold nanorods in the disk through heat, and then reading it using the different reflection angle of the laser, which happens due to the different diffraction number of the surface (thinner/thicker), caused by its thermal shaping. Not much different from normal DVD reading method, just the fact that there are electrons being resonated in the gold nanorods.
I'm just wondering if being able to read/write 5 different dimensions on a disk is not going to end up costing a us an arm and leg.
The article title is mis-leading. It says 1.6tb on a dvd disk but the article actually says dvd "sized" disc which makes a big difference.
Old news, this story was on local TV news two weeks ago.
And this will be available TO YOU in twenty years for the low low price of $2000!
And yet my DVD burners (LiteOn, Pioneer, Samsung, LG) continue to make more coasters than I have cups. I'll believe this when they can at least make the current DVD burners more reliable.
You may have already done this...but just for anyone else who doesn't know: Drop the write speed to ~1/4 of the max and many times the problems go away.
The results also depend on the application. With audio CDs you can write discs all day at full speed (with a ton of write errors) and only suffer a few audible artifacts. Doing the same thing to a data mode disc will quickly make the files on the disc useless.
optical media is lame