Storing data in 3D may allow cramming a million movies on single disc

Data storage has become one of the biggest problems of the modern world, thanks to the superfast internet and artificial intelligence. The existing data-storing technologies will eventually need an upgrade to be able to meet the demand for higher capacity. Scientists have now come up with a technology that can increase the data storage capacity of an optical disc. New research has paved the way for existing devices to store as many as a million movies without undergoing any changes to their physical space.

The new technology involves the use of the same light-based optical data storage (ODS) method to write DVDs, but the breakthrough in how the process works. Scientists at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology have managed to make this approach work in three dimensions. In other words, by creating hundreds of layers instead of one, the capacity of an ODS can increase significantly to the tune of petabits. That is a thousand trillion bits, which could be about the same size as a million full-length movies in standard definition (SD) quality.

Scientists said if you stack such discs together, the storage capacity takes a dramatic leap to store data in exabits, which is about a million trillion or a quintillion bits. All of that happens without adding so much as an inch to the existing physical disc. The new approach involves the use of a new storage medium called AIE-DDPR, short for aggregation-induced emission dye-doped photoresist. It is a thin film that allows data to be written at ultra-high resolutions. It is a complex process where scientists were able to store high-capacity data partly through light patterns on the surface, partly using the dye in the film, and partly by combining molecules in the film that can capture and react to the light falling on them.

“This technology makes it possible to achieve exabit-level storage by stacking nanoscale disks into arrays, which is essential in big data centres with limited space,” researchers noted in their findings published in the journal Nature.

Scientists said if the new approach to storing data can be successfully developed, it could solve the problem of maintaining huge data centres while reducing costs and the consumption of energy to operate them.