Scientists have claimed they have produced a DVD that can hold 1,000 terabytes of data.
That's
a whopping 212,000 times more than a regular DVD's storage capacity of
4.7 gigabytes, meaning 40,000 HD movies could be stored on the new
ultra-DVD format.
The discs use lasers to write information down to a scale of just nine nanometres, allowing the high-storage discs to be made.
The DVD has become all but obsolete in recent years with the rise of the Blu-ray format and cloud storage.
But this new disc could herald a return for the discs, and they could provide a way to store huge amounts of data.
Previously DVDs were limited due to what's called the refraction limit of light.
WILL WE UPLOAD OUR ENTIRE MINDS TO COMPUTERS IN 2045?
In
just over 30 years, humans will be able to upload their entire minds to
computers and become digitally immortal - an event called the
singularity - a futurist from Google said last year.
Ray
Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, also claims that the
biological parts of our body will be replaced with mechanical parts and
this could happen as early as 2100.
Kurweil made the claims during his conference speech at the Global Futures 2045 International Congress in New York in June 2013.
Kurzweil
said: 'Based on conservative estimates of the amount of computation you
need to functionally simulate a human brain, we'll be able to expand
the scope of our intelligence a billion-fold.'
He
referred to Moore's Law that states the power of computing doubles, on
average, every two years quoting the developments from genetic
sequencing and 3D printing.
It
had been thought light couldn't be made smaller than 500 nanometres,
meaning DVDs had reached capacity for how much information could be
stored.
But
Dr Gan and his team at Swinburne University in Australia found that by
using two lasers they could reduce this down to just nine nanometres.
It's likened to writing with a felt tip pen, the old method, and a fine-tipped pen, the new method.
The innovative method involves using two beams of light to write data, both of which are 500 nanometres wide.
However
the second purple circular beam is used to block the first beam and
leave just nine nanometres to strike the surface of the disc.
This enables data to be written much more finely and greatly increases the storage capacity up to 1,000 terabytes.
For comparison, one terabyte is equal to 1,000 gigabytes.
'In
my mind, I have an vision for our society in the future where everyone
will have a data bank account just like we all have a bank account
today,' said creator Dr. Gan according to Pocket-Lint.
'We'll save all of our data in the data bank. Everyone no longer needs the same things today as phones, iPads or laptops.
'We only need a soft touch screen, any data processing, while storage is done remotely.'
The
team hasn't said when such a technology could become commercially
available yet, and note a high cost in its development that could prove a
problem.
'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,' Dr
Gan continued.
'Also,
we are now working to speed up for data reading and recording. If we're
still using the current DVD speed, how long will it take to write 1,000
terabytes of data onto a disc?'
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