Better encoding = 9PB on a DVD

[rhoenix]

Yes - 9 petabytes on a DVD-ROM disc.

The current nanofabrication techniques including electron beam lithography provide fabrication resolution in the nanometre range. The major limitation of these techniques is their incapability of arbitrary three-dimensional nanofabrication. This has stimulated the rapid development of far-field three-dimensional optical beam lithography where a laser beam is focused for maskless direct writing. However, the diffraction nature of light is a barrier for achieving nanometre feature and resolution in optical beam lithography. Here we report on three-dimensional optical beam lithography with 9 nm feature size and 52 nm two-line resolution in a newly developed two-photon absorption resin with high mechanical strength. The revealed dependence of the feature size and the two-line resolution confirms that they can reach deep sub-diffraction scale but are limited by the mechanical strength of the new resin. Our result has paved the way towards portable three-dimensional maskless laser direct writing with resolution fully comparable to electron beam lithography.

This is a very technical article, with quite a few diagrams, and the above is just the summary quote at the top. The upshot is that by using a new technique on the same item, much greater compression can be achieved with standard optical DVD-ROM discs to currently achieve 9 petabytes (FYI, a petabyte is 1024 terabytes, and a terabyte is 1024 gigabytes).

[rhoenix]

Additional article, from Gizmodo:

Now that its bigger brother Blu-ray has stolen the spotlight, paltry 4.7 GB DVDs have slowly started to fade into obscurity. But could they be poised for a comeback? A trio of Chinese scientists have discovered a breakthrough process that could, at least in theory, allow a DVD to store a whopping 1,000 TB—or a full petabyte—of data. Suck on that, Blu-ray.

The exact science and technology behind the discovery is detailed in this paper, but here's the gist of it in layman's terms. The storage capacity of a DVD is limited by the size of the laser beam burning the small pits that represent the streams of data. Blu-ray increased this capacity by switching to even smaller blue lasers, but the storage capacity of that technology maxed out as well.

You see, back in 1873, a German physicist named Ernst Abbe found that a beam of light focused through a lens could not be any smaller than half of the light's wavelength. And for visible light, which is used to burn digital media discs, that's around 500 nanometers. So instead of breaking that law, the researchers found a way to work around it using two beams of light that cancel each other out. And by ensuring the beams don't completely overlap, a much smaller beam can be created to burn even smaller pits on a disc, massively increasing its capacity.

There's a still a lot to be perfected before this technology could reach consumers. Like how these incredibly tiny pits of data can be actually be read after they're created. And since writing 1,000 TB of data would take forever, developing faster ways to burn discs will also be necessary before consumers are ready to adopt the new technology. But the prospect of DVDs and Blu-rays taking a quantum leap in storage capacity is still incredibly exciting.