An Australian researcher has worked out how to store 1000TB on a CD

If this is real and can be commercialized it could lead to some pretty devastating fallout for the entertainment industry. You&#x27;ve got to know that there are a few obsessive archivists out there with pretty comprehensive collections of films spread across rooms of RAID arrays. When they can start backing those collections up for friends onto a single disc, ie a single disc that has more films than you could possibly watch in your lifetime the entertainment industry is going to pine for the days when torrents eve the big problem.<p>The same goes for rogue librarians, or Google Books employees dumping entire libraries onto discs and leaking them out.

The idea to break the diffraction limit by using the this doughnut-shaped excitation spot comes from the STED microscopy (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STED_microscopy" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;STED_microscopy</a>) developed by Stefan Hell (Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Goettingen, Germany). He actually showed that an additional intensity-dependent term can be added to Abbe&#x27;s diffraction limit allowing sub 100um resolution with light. I think this idea is awesome and it sure won&#x27;t be the last invention made possible by this trick.

&gt; With the $18,000 fellowship, Gan will collaborate with industry and researchers around the world to work on new breakthroughs for data storage devices, and also see how his existing research can be used on a larger scale to rapidly improve the capacity of optics-based information technologies.<p>$18K seems like a drop in the bucket for powering this kind of research. Dr. Gan needs someone to introduce him to Kickstarter.

I see where they mention writing the data, but does anyone see how&#x2F;if they are reading the data?<p>From his other pubs [1], it looks like a two-photon process is involved as part of writing in deep-subdiffraction limit for lithography. Will be fun to try and reverse that.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.swinburne.edu.au/engineering/cmp/profile.php?member=zgan" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.swinburne.edu.au&#x2F;engineering&#x2F;cmp&#x2F;profile.php?memb...</a><p>Edit: Paper that this PR refers to is here: <a href="http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/130619/ncomms3061/full/ncomms3061.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;ncomms&#x2F;2013&#x2F;130619&#x2F;ncomms3061&#x2F;full&#x2F;nco...</a>

A big problem with spinning disks is that storage grows inversely with the area of the dots, while reading and writing speed grow inversely with the diameter of the dots.<p>If you store 100 times as much data, all else being equal, time to write a full disk will be ten times as large.<p>Ways around that are increasing rotation speed (been there, done that. There is little to gain here without making the disk a lot stronger = heavier, if that is really possible at all) and using multiple heads (harder to do, but may eventually be the better solution, certainly if one can completely do away with head movements)

The print collection of the Library of Congress is estimated at 10TB. 990TB would be left on the DVD. Amazing.

Anyone remember the company from about 2000&#x2F;2001 called Constellation 3D? I do I lost my $3,000 investment when they went belly-up, doh!<p>They made a fluorescent multilayer DVD and a credit card shaped ClearCard the DVD which I believe the goal was to store several hundred TB of data.<p>And this was about 14 years ago!

That is pretty awesome. The solution seem so simple in retrospect. Just mask out the larger 500nm light you don&#x27;t want to hit the surface.<p>Certainly even 1TB CDs would be insanely awesome. It would open up a whole realm of mass storage. I&#x27;m just feeling how easy backups will be :)

&gt; A young Victorian researcher<p>Steampunk storage FTW.

This (interference) is how the feature size of semiconductors has gotten so small.

OK A) I think in this case the patents are justified :)<p>AND B) Are CDs gonna make a comeback? Can we have cool mini-CDs?

One hopes that the write speed of these disks will be proportionately faster than DVD write speed. A DVD writing at 16X transfers about 22MB&#x2F;s. At that rate it would take 1.44 years to fill up this disk writing to it continuously. Even at 1GB&#x2F;s (roughly the write speed of an SSD) it would take almost 12 days to fill up one of these disks.

Could Amazon Glacier use some pre-consumer form of this technology?

I would love a potential use case as a backup that is redundant dozens or hundreds of times over. I&#x27;m not sure the exact mechanism by which DVDs start to lose data over 10-20 years, but this tech might be a way to mitigate that risk (as well as scratches and other physical damage).

Awesome tech. I wonder how data will be written and read from such a disk? How long will it take? The transfer of 1000TB will be an interesting problem indeed. At current theoretical blu ray writing speed of 12x or 400Mbps [1] the time to read&#x2F;write such a disk would be:<p>1000 terabytes = 8,000,000,000 megabits 8,000,000,000 &#x2F; 400 = 20,000,000 seconds (7.6053 months)<p>[1] <a href="http://www.blu-ray.com/faq/#bluray_speed" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.blu-ray.com&#x2F;faq&#x2F;#bluray_speed</a>

&gt; Every day, humans are producing more data than ever before - around 90% of the world’s data was generated in the past two years alone - and there will come a point when our data storage centres and the cloud can no longer keep up.<p>Is this true? Can anyone point to a some kind of study showing convergence of storage capacity and data production over time? I was under the impression that we&#x27;ve got far more storage than we&#x27;ll need, at least in the near future.

Would this reduce the storage lifespan of the disc? Would this technique make it physically more brittle, if the current form factor is used?

This could be a DVD - it would be an easy enough thing to perform tests on, and they say they&#x27;re using a red laser for the actual writing. If the dye can handle the very small writes, that is. (And I wouldn&#x27;t trust Memorex for this ;) )<p>Error correction for these is going to be interesting, even a speck of dust could obscure many megabytes of data.

This is technically old news. Here&#x27;s one from a year ago <i>with the same picture</i>: <a href="http://gizmodo.com/researchers-have-found-a-way-to-cram-1-000-terabytes-on-531549229" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gizmodo.com&#x2F;researchers-have-found-a-way-to-cram-1-00...</a>

Title says CD, but it&#x27;s actually a DVD. Still extremely impressive.

Can&#x27;t wait to back up my 12TB RAID on a single disc.

The Internet Archive would benefit very much from this! Does anyone remember the blueray based long term archive rack from facebook?

Expect Amazon Glacier price to drop dramatically in a couple of years :)

It&#x27;s hard to believe they are only giving this guy $18k.

Wow this seems huge If it&#x27;s practical to implement everywhere. You could keep every picture&#x2F;song&#x2F;movie&#x2F;document&#x2F;game from your whole life on a disk, and hey, make a backup too.

He has announced that for his next challenge, he will store 4k video on betamax tapes. Impressive.

I know I&#x27;ve seen this like a year or more ago here or on slashdot... :&#x2F;

Oh great, another 1024-bit daisy-chained medium with a 20MB UeFI boot partition. We have watched this way too long and it was dragging us down...(cough)<p>Oops, accidentally implemented as a medium-hash CAMFS in disused packaging-and-optronics 45nm fab. Please write test, mind 5W limit if retaining cyano&#x2F;pyridene dye in media.

laser heterodyne :)

The CD is twenty feet wide!

Brilliant solution to a known natural limitation.

Have those guys sign up for Y Combinator!!

Seems a little past it&#x27;s prime. Why would you want this when you have the internet?

That will warm the hearts of the Ubuntu Unity team. Can you imagine the amount of bloat they can put on a single installation disk now?