All your movies on a single DVD: study

May 20, 2009

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A laptop with an HD DVD reader. Scientists unveiled new DVD technology on Wednesday that stores data in five dimensions, making it possible to pack more than 2,000 movies onto a single disc.

Scientists unveiled new DVD technology on Wednesday that stores data in five dimensions, making it possible to pack more than 2,000 movies onto a single disc.

A team of researchers at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, used nanotechnology to boost the storage potential nearly 10,000-fold compared to standard DVDs, according to a study published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature.

"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," said Min Gu, who lead the team.

Discs currently have three spatial dimensions. By using gold nanorods Gu and colleagues were able to add two additional dimensions, one based on the colour spectrum, and the other on polarisation.

Because nanoparticles react to light depending on their shape, it was possible to record information in a range of different colour's wavelengths at the same physical location on the disc.

Current DVDs record in a single colour wavelength using a laser.

The fifth dimension was made possible by polarisation. When light waves were projected onto the disc, the direction of the electric field within the waves aligned with the gold nanorods.

"The polarisation can be rotated 360 degrees," explained co-author James Chon.

"We were, for example, able to record at zero degree polarisation. Then on top of that, were able to record another layer of information at 90 degrees polarisation, without them interfering with each other," he said in a statement.

The researchers are still working out the speed at which the discs can be written on, and say that commercial production is at least five years off.

They have signed an agreement with Korea-based Samsung, one of the world's largest electronics manufacturers.

Last month, US technology giant General Electric said its researchers had developed a holographic disc which can store the equivalent of 100 standard DVDs.

Dual-layer Blu-ray discs hold the equivalent of 10 standard DVDs.

(c) 2009 AFP

• Mombo_Dogface - May 20, 2009
  • Rank: 1.3 / 5 (3)
  Is this the same thing as the holographic disc recently reported? http://www.physor...435.html
  
  It sounds a bit different and much larger capacity.
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• holoman - May 20, 2009
  • Rank: 2 / 5 (5)
  The capacity will never approach Colossal Storage
  infinite rewritable Holographic / Spintronic drive of min. 10 Terabyte to greater than 10 Petabytes
  on 1- 3.5 in. disk which is said to be out in 2012.
  
  Also this drive is another WORM.
  
  Look for it on or after 2014.
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• earls - May 20, 2009
  • Rank: 3 / 5 (4)
  Oh man, 2014, that's right around the corner!
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• Bob_Kob - May 20, 2009
  • Rank: 4.6 / 5 (5)
  Sure we can store heaps but how fast can we read it? Id rather have a 1 gb disc that could read 1gb / sec than a 1000 terrabyte disc that only reads at 1 mb / sec...
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• Arikin - May 20, 2009
  • Rank: 3.4 / 5 (5)
  Of course read speed will be slow. But once it is out there others will figure out a way to make it faster. Speed is a great selling point.
  
  Look at Blue-Ray. It was really slow at first too but now it has some really involve optics to make it faster.
  
  Also, could silver be used for the nano-rods to bring the product cost down?
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• dhughes - May 20, 2009
  • Rank: 2.5 / 5 (4)
  It reminds me of the Fluorescent Multilayer Disc (FMD) which used a similar concept; it used fluorescent dye and various layers so the light could write in the same location but in a different layer.
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• docknowledge - May 21, 2009
  • Rank: 2.3 / 5 (3)
  That's really going to change my life. And the lives of so many other people. There was so much shelf space being taken. I didn't know what to do. Bless you Swineburne.
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• Sirussinder - May 21, 2009
  • Rank: 5 / 5 (1)
  I am waiting for the 2 TB scandisk memory cards, by the end of 2009........no moving parts.
  
  go google it.
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• earls - May 21, 2009
  • Rank: 1 / 5 (1)
  BUH WUT ABOT THA PURTY ARTWERK ON THE BOXES, docknowledge?!
  
  That's what I hate about digital downloads, they don't come with pounds of physical trash.
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