The Optical discs They are very far from living their golden years, to the point that Blu-ray, the largest capacity format of all that has been released, might go completely unnoticed if it weren’t for video game consoles. However, the current situation does not seem to have deterred Shanghai University of Science, as scientists from the institution have managed to develop A DVD-like optical disc with a capacity of 1.6 petabits or 200 terabytes.

To be more specific, researchers at Shanghai University of Science have developed an optical disc with a capacity exceeding a petabit, so it would exceed 100 terabytes. This DVD-like optical disc would hold about 2,000 PlayStation 5 games in Blu-ray format, a truly impressive development compared to what one might have at home.

Scientists have managed to significantly increase the storage capacity of an optical disc implementation of 3D recording architecture. It is a technology that uses a uniform photoresist film with aggregation-induced emission dye stimulated by femtosecond lasers, which has enabled packing dozens of layers one micrometer apart into a disc the same thickness as a DVD or Blu-ray.

According to the scientists, the three-dimensional recording architecture of the optical disk and the possibility of introducing many layers in a small space made it possible to achieve a total capacity of 1.6 petabit when recording one hundred layers on both sides. This is an impressive increase over Blu-ray, whose more advanced versions allow recording up to four layers with a total capacity of 128 gigabytes of data.

This new optical disc technology developed by Shanghai University for Science It is currently focused on enterprises and has the potential to reduce the size of data centers thanks to its huge capacity. In addition to reducing costs and space for businesses, this also opens the door for people to build home data centers that would minimize reliance on the cloud. In addition, scientists claim that its durability would be between 50 and 100 years.

It’s important to keep in mind that what Shanghai University for Science has announced is still a work in progress and that there are no plans to make it to the home yet, but in the tech world it’s wise to never say never in most cases. cases. Its increased capacity and predicted high durability represent not only a simple evolution, but perhaps open the door to new possibilities that revitalize optical discs in the home environment.

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