back to article Boffins build basis for 9TB DVDs

Aussie scientists have devised a digital disc design capable of holding the content from 2000 DVDs - more than nine terabytes of data - in a unit physically no bigger than a DVD or Blu-ray Disc. In a paper entitled Five-dimensional optical recording mediated by surface plasmons in gold nanorods and published today in the …

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  1. M7S

    You can bet it will still come region coded

    That is all

  2. Simon Neill

    "The best bit: all this extra data comes at no cost to the disc's size, said Gu."

    What about the owner's wallet? I can't imagine a disc that is using gold to store data is going to be cheap. Then the idea of HEATING to read the data can't be good for the electricity bill....

  3. Lionel Baden

    awww

    im gonna have to get a bigger hdd

  4. Eddie Edwards
    Boffin

    @ Matt

    Even on the Tardis you still have to go through the door.

  5. JP Strauss

    9TB?

    Imagine trying to rip a 9TB movie. to your harddrive.

  6. Matt
    Boffin

    @Eddie

    A tardis irl would have an evanescent effect projected slightly beyond the boundary of the door. It just so happens that this effect is perfectly tailored to allow a 12cm disk to fit nicely through the door of a 3.5" drive.

    I can do science!

  7. Rosco

    @Simon Neill

    Just what I was thinking. Can this really be a commercial reality if it has to be made of gold? The article suggests that the technique harnesses special properties of gold. I would have thought that making it happen in a cheaper medium would be at least as high a priority as improving the read/write speed.

    Or perhaps it doesn't use all that much gold? More info please ...

  8. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    Hmm, let's see

    2000 DVDs worth of data, that works out to about 13750 CDs of information, or the equivalent of 5.83 million floppy disks.

    That could also translate to 3,645,812,500 pages of A4 text, or 364,581,250 high-quality images (although, with today's HD and pr0n, those numbers most certainly should be re-evaluated).

  9. Luke McCarthy

    Scratches anyone?

    How many GB would you loose to a single scratch? They should take advantage of the density by making smaller discs (say, 5x5cm) and packaging them in sturdy cases to prevent stratching...

    I doubt this will be any use to the movie industry, they simply don't need that much data, 5400p resolution is pointless, and will definitely not want to sell discs with 100s of movies since they would not make much money that way.

  10. Flocke Kroes Silver badge

    @Simon Neill

    Take a look at the back of your computer. Have you noticed that the contacts on almost all the sockets are gold plated. Same with the connectors on the cables. Take a look inside, and you will find gold plated expansion cards, gold plated socket for those cards, and gold plated pins on the CPU and its socket. Next, go to the factory where the computer was built. If any of the chips are Ball Grid Array then the circuit board is probably gold plated. The older style chips with pins around the edges use gold to connect the pins to the chip.

    A 500nm layer of gold covering the area of a DVD is US$1.40 at today's (high) prices. I doubt that they would need so much gold, or that the mass market would want 9TB in a 12cm disc when they could have 1TB in a 4cm disc, or whatever flash and hard disks look like 10 years from now.

  11. John70

    Why are we still bothering...

    ...with spinning media?

    Shouldn't everything now be solid state?

  12. Dave
    Boffin

    I'm wondering

    given the size of the chip on my microSD card and the fact that it holds 16GB of data (larger ones I believe are available). how much data would I be able to store on a card the size of a CD?

    Lots I'd bet!

    In case the scientists are reading, DVD will be my final optical format. There is no need to keep developing them.

  13. Albert Gonzalez
    Boffin

    One simple use

    Just record in HD a whole year of the view from the top of a mountain / forest clearing / garden / whatever you like , and use a 100in HD screen as a window in your beedroom / living room / kitchen.

    Choose full immersions with the ceiling, walls and floor projected.

    Awake every morning to a different dawn in your favorite place, go to bed with a beautiful sunset, as if your house was planted there.

    When this sales as cookies, remember where you read it before ...

    Albert.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    .gov

    Imagine how easy it would be to loose hundreds of databases in the post....

  15. Dave
    Black Helicopters

    Ooh

    to answer my own question, it would seem quite a lot!

    a CD is 120mm in diameter, without the need to spin we can use the whole surface area so

    60^2*Pi = 11310mm^2

    I estimate the chip in my microSD to be around 8mmx8mm = 64mm^2

    11310/64 = 177 chips on the CD

    177 x 16GB = 2832GB

    Obviously I've done a bit of rounding, and assumed that microSD can be somehow hooked up to create larger storage. CDs are thicker than microSD too so I'd say we're better off just making a 9TB SD card than mucking around with gold and lasers.

    Now I've done that calculation, it's making the 128GB SSD hard drives look a little small for current technology, or is that just me? Ooh, a black helicopter, you don't see those eve..

  16. Simon Heffer
    Alert

    The BBC

    are reporting this story as 1.6 terabytes (or are there two Aussie scientists doing 5D recording?).

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    More data = awesome!

    "I doubt this will be any use to the movie industry, they simply don't need that much data, 5400p resolution is pointless"

    Seems you haven't heard of Red's upcoming cameras Epic and Scarlet, these discs would be perfect for archiving all that data, of course it's not for consumers in the end we'll just have to wait for 4k displays to become affordable in 20 years :-)

  18. Darryl

    In the words of Agent K from Men In Black...

    ...I'm going to have to buy the White Album again.

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