Scientists manage to create an optical disk with 200 TB of storage

A technological breakthrough of great magnitude has been announced by a team of Chinese researchers, who claim to have developed an optical disk capable of storing up to 200 terabytes (TB) of data. This milestone represents a significant leap in storage capacity for this type of media, which could revolutionize the data storage industry in the long term.

The innovative optical disc, fruit of the joint work of the Shanghai University of Science and Technology (USST) and the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (SIOM), has been described in detail in an article published in the prestigious journal Nature under the title “A 3D nanoscale optical disk memory with petabit capacity.” The researchers have named this new storage medium “dye-doped photoresist” (DDPR), which uses aggregation-induced emission luminogens (AIE-DDPR).

Exceed all limits

The most notable thing about this advance is its ability to overcome previous limitations in terms of storage area density.. It is estimated that the density achieved by this optical disk is 125 times greater than that of multilayer optical disks based on gold nanorods and 24 times greater than that of the most advanced hard drives available to date.

The process of recording and recovering data on this optical disc requires the use of two specific laser beams. For optical writing, a 515 nm femtosecond Gaussian laser beam and a donut-shaped 639 nm continuous wave laser beam are used. These laser beams allow selective polymerization and deactivation to achieve a subdiffractive recording spot size, i.e. smaller than would otherwise be possible. For data reading, a 480 nm pulsed laser and a 592 nm continuous wave laser are used.

Researchers say manufacturing blank discs with AIE-DDPR film is compatible with standard processes used in DVD production conventional, which would facilitate their eventual commercialization.

When will it be available?

Despite this promising advance, the researchers acknowledge that There are still challenges to overcome, especially in terms of writing speed and energy efficiency. Improvements in the use of femtosecond lasers with higher repetition rates and more sensitive photoresists will be needed to achieve commercial viability of this technology.

Despite these challenges, products based on this nanoscale optical storage technology are expected to be less expensive than current next-generation optical disk and hard drive solutions, making them attractive to meet growing storage requirements. of data in the era of artificial intelligence.

This 200TB optical drive represents a significant advance in the field of data storage and could have a profound impact on various industries that depend on long-term, high-density storage capacity. Although there is still work to be done, this achievement marks an important milestone in the search for more efficient and cost-effective storage solutions.

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