James Delahunty
4 Sep 2007 20:01
A Jerusalem-based company wants to solve your craving for higher-than-Blu-ray capacities on discs the size of DVDs within the next few years. Mempile has developed a disc around the same size as a standard DVD disc (although a little bit thicker) which it says could store up to 1TB of data, or up to 5TB when the move is made to blue lasers after it reaches its red laser goals. For comparison, a dual-layer Blu-ray disc stores 50GB, HD DVD can reach 30GB and the standard DVD stores up to 8.5GB.
The 1TB of data would be stored on 200 layers of 5GB each, but do not think of the layers as being the same as layers in today's widely available optical discs. Mempile's solid discs use a specially developed variant of the polymer polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA)—a mixture of Perspex, Lucite, and Plexiglass—known as ePMMA. In DVD and Blu-ray, layers are stacked and stuck together.
Mempiles discs are comprised instead of "virtual layers" and during recording a photochemical reaction is used to modify the plastic, writing a "1" or leaves it unchanged to represent a "0". This 3D approach allows for much higher data storage than the 2D used by DVD technology. Right now, the technology is limited to "write-once" but the company hopes that read/write drives will be available in the future.
The company's prototypes for now reach around 600GB - 800GB capacity. The company claims that the discs have a lifespan of 50 years and that the technology could be brought to the market within three years.
Source:
Ars Technica