14 DAY TRIAL // As humanity advances, the need for increased storage solutions becomes a critical issue, giving researchers something to work on. However, according to a recently published article by researchers at the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, today's DVDs could soon be replaced by “five-dimensional” discs with a capacity that is 10,000 times greater than what is currently available on the market. These upcoming discs could become available for consumers worldwide within 10 years.
According to a recent news-article on Reuters, the researchers, who had signed a deal with Samsung Electronics, claimed to have found a technique that allowed them to store 1.6TB of data on a disc with the potential of storing up to 10TB, as technology advances.
“We were able to show how nanostructured material can be incorporated onto a disc in order to increase data capacity, without increasing the physical size of the disc,” Min Gu, who worked on the research, said in a statement. “These extra dimensions are the key to creating ultra-high capacity discs,” he added.
Today's technology uses a three spatial dimension system, but with the use of nanoparticles, the researchers were able to introduce two more dimensions, namely a spectral and a polarization dimension. This technology enabled them to increase the storage capacity of the optical disc, with the possibility of even higher storage capacities being achieved as technology advanced. However, for the time being, there are some issues that require further investigating, and which are related to the speed at which data is being written on the disc, but the researchers said there were immediate applications where the technology could be of use.
According to the researchers, storing large medical files or financial, military and security files can take advantage of the increased storage capacity, especially for encrypted data.