Imagine storing 10,000 standard-definition movies on one disc. Sound impossible?
Not to a team of Australian researchers. The team recently published a report in the journal Nature in which it details its development of a five-dimensional storage medium that promises to store up 10 terabytes on a single disc.
Peter Zijlstra, James W.M. Chon, and MinGu of the Swinburne University of Technology found a way to combine addressing data using wavelength, polarization, and three spatial dimensions, creating the so-called five dimensions of addressable space. The approach allows for a storage density of a terabit of information in just a cubic centimetre of space.
Mixing and matching different methods of addressing data has been tried using individual methods, the researchers said. In fact, writing data to a three-dimensional storage medium has been one of the hallmarks of holographic storage. But for five dimensional storage, the team projected information into the material using different colour wavelengths. Additional information was then added by polarizing the light, first at a fixed orientation and then by rotating the filter 90 degrees. Data was read using a technique called longitudinal SPR mediated 2-photon luminescence.
It’s difficult to say, however, how easily a solution like this might be moved into production, since the medium used to store the information is a network of gold nano-rods. “The major hurdle is the lack of a suitable recording medium that is extremely selective in the domains of wavelength and polarization,” the researchers wrote in an abstract. Nonetheless, companies such as Samsung have already expressed interest.
Source:JULY 2009 PC MAGAZINE
