DVD is dead, long live “Super DVD”.
According to a new article Nature magazine, Chinese researchers have been able to create a DVD-like disc with hundreds of layers—expanding the disc’s capacity to the petabit level.
Researchers from Shanghai University of Science and Technology published their results a few days ago. Using a 54-nanometer laser, the team was able to write hundreds of layers of data onto an optical disc, with only one micrometer separating each level of the three-dimensional stack.
The result is a DVD-sized optical data storage (ODS) solution with a capacity of 1.6 petabytes—that’s about 200 terabytes (Tb) or 200,000 gigabytes (Gb).
To put that in perspective, a regular DVD only has 4.7Gb of capacity per layer, Blu-ray maxes out at 25Gb (single layer) or 50Gb (dual), and a 4K UHD disc maxes out at 100Gb multi-layered. A movie like “Blade Runner 2049” in UHD runs around 70 Gb in file size.
That would mean a single drive could hold thousands of 4K-length movies. Such technology is seen as a potential game changer for archivists and large data centers.
The advance also comes as retailers scale back or outright eliminate their physical media offerings.