Optical storage goes deep: 1TB stored in three dimensions
The Server Room, Ars Technica’s community for IT professionals, is sponsored by Dell’s Future of Storage. This article is part of our ongoing series of topics and discussions related to IT and storage technology.
When you drop an optical disk into your computer, gaming console, or player of choice, the machine reads information off the surface of the disc. The density of data is limited by the wavelength of the light used to read and write the data. Currently, available technology allows us to store around 25 GB of data on a single layer, so up to 50 GB of data can go on one side of a dual layer disc; some future formats are promising even more. A new research paper in this week’s edition of Applied Optics describes a method of storing data throughout the volume of a disc, and its authors have built a demonstration system that uses a standard-size (120mm x 1.2mm) optical disc to store 1 TB of data. Read More