Scientists Create DVD-Sized Disk Storing 1 Petabit (125,000 Gigabytes) of Data

Popular Science points out that for encoding data, "optical disks almost always offer just a single, 2D layer - that reflective, silver underside." "If you could boost a disk's number of available, encodable layers, however, you could hypothetically gain a massive amount of extra space..."Researchers at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology recently set out to do just that, and published the results earlier this week in the journal, Nature. Using a 54-nanometer laser, the team managed to record a 100 layers of data onto an optical disk, with each tier separated by just 1 micrometer. The final result is an optical disk with a three-dimensional stack of data layers capable of holding a whopping 1 petabit (Pb) of information - that's equivalent to 125,000 gigabytes of data... As Gizmodo offers for reference, that same petabit of information would require roughly a six-and-a-half foot tall stack of HHD drives - if you tried to encode the same amount of data onto Blu-rays, you'd need around 10,000 blank ones to complete your (extremely inefficient) challenge. To pull off their accomplishment, engineers needed to create an entirely new material for their optical disk's film... AIE-DDPR film utilizes a combination of specialized, photosensitive molecules capable of absorbing photonic data at a nanoscale level, which is then encoded using a high-tech dual-laser array. Because AIE-DDPR is so incredibly transparent, designers could apply layer-upon-layer to an optical disk without worrying about degrading the overall data. This basically generated a 3D "box" for digitized information, thus exponentially raising the normal-sized disk's capacity. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader hackingbear for sharing the news.

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