A new optical scribing technology was used to make it happen

Jun 22, 2013 09:27 GMT  ·  By

Normally, DVD disks can hold only 4.7 GB of data, with Blu-ray units capable of going all the way up to 128 GB (BDXL 4-layer).

Now, however, researchers from Swinburne University claim to have developed a method of optically writing data on the disks in a way that allows for 1,000 TB to be stored on a single one.

Obviously, one petabyte is no mean feat, and definitely a goal worthy of striving towards.

In the picture above, the red beam writes the data, while the purple beam inhibits a portion of the red.

That way, the size of the 1 and 0 dots used to store data is made much, much smaller.

The key was getting around Abbe's limit, which states that a spot of light cannot be smaller than half its wavelength.

The beams shown above follow Abbe's law, but the partial blocking reduces the size of the dot to nine nanomenters.

I don't really need to list all the potential benefits of petabyte-level DVDs.