As the technology world has been moving on from optical media to digital downloads, it would seem that DVDs are becoming a thing of the past. Only Blu-rays have really been able to withstand the change, and that’s largely thanks to the console gaming industry. However, scientists have created a new type of optical laser that could increase the data capacity of a single DVD to one petabyte. This would certainly bring back optical media in a big way.

Currently a single-layer DVD can fit around 4.7GB of data, while a dual-layer can fit double that. A single-layer Blu-ray can fit around 25GB of data, while each subsequent layer (up to four or so) adds another 25GB. Blu-rays are no slouch, but they require a special player that not too many people apart from PS3 owners have — and the PS3 essentially only runs games and movies, and doesn’t act as a Blu-ray writer either. Meanwhile, modern-day affordable hard drives are creeping into the multiple terabyte category, while SSDs are sitting around the 1TB mark. Hard drives and (especially) SSDs are much more expensive than a stack of DVDs, so if the storage capacity of optical media was somehow made so vast, that could outshine the format’s subpar efficiency and bring it back to the forefront.

A team from Swinburne University’s Center for Micro-Photonics has developed a technique that can increase a DVD’s storage capacity from that standard 4.7GB up to 1PB. The technique doesn’t change the size or shape of the disc, but instead changes the laser used to read the disc’s data.

Currently, in order to record data onto a disc, a laser basically shoots 1s and 0s — bits — onto the disc in the form of dots. These dots form the stored data, but there are only so many dots that can be put onto a disc due to the size of both the dots and disc. The team notes that there is a law — Abbe’s Limit — published by physicist Ernest Abbe in 1873, that states if a light beam is focused through a lens, the diameter of the resulting spot of light can’t be smaller than half its wavelength. This limits the read and write size of the bits stored on a disc. Now, the team didn’t break Abbe’s Limit, but they did find a way around it.

First, they used a laser of a standard shape to write data. Then, they placed a doughnut-shaped laser around the initial laser in order to limit the abilities of the first beam. This effectively made the standard laser’s diameter smaller, and it could then write smaller bits — roughly one-ten-thousandth the size of a human hair. Perhaps best of all, the method is portable and cheap, as it only employs the use of standard optical and laser equipment.

Unfortunately, a time frame for a public release was not disclosed, but seeing as how the team made the storage capacity of a standard DVD rise to one petabyte — and with conventional equipment — we hope this technique is made public soon enough.

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