As I was reading my news feeds, I came across something that blew my mind. It seems that TDK has been making bounds in the world of optical storage, showcasing a new prototype disc capable of storing 1 Terabyte of data. The last I remember reading, companies were working on 500GB optical discs, so this is an insane jump.
What helps this disc store so much is the number of layers to the disc. To create this new disc, TDK has managed to form a 16 layer disc, each layer capable of storing 32 GB on each side. Your standard Blu-Ray has up to four layers.
These extra layers do create a problem for this prototype, however.
“According to the specifications of the Blu-ray Disc, the thickness of a recording layer has to be 100 micrometers or less, but the recording layer of the new disc is 260 micrometers in thickness. And it causes the aberration of an optical lens.”
The discs use the same laser technology as the current Blu-Ray players, so the new media won’t require a complete reinvention. All they have to do is make it over half as thick and we can have even greater resolutions for home video. 🙂
To give you an idea what this means, TDK offered a display comparing 1TB in the most popular disc formats:
Read all the real tech nerd stuff HERE
< I geek out on large storage formats, and I know that doesn’t sound right 😛 >
