Hyperdimensional DVDs: A 5D-Disc Enough for Everything You Ever Thought of Recording
Sony will tell you that the DVD is dead, but then again they're trying to sell Blurays. Because if there's one thing we truly need from technology, it's reasons to buy a fourth copy of Full Metal Jacket. With legal channels now available digital downloads are truly the future, but instead of prolonging the agony some scientists are helping the DVD go out with a bang - a seven terabyte bang, aka "enough to record everything you've ever even thought about thinking."
Dr James Chon and colleagues of Swinburne University are working on hyperdimensional DVDs, which sound like something out of Doctor Who's stereo. They increase the storage capacity of the discs by adding three new dimensions - and before the nit-pickers start saying that's more dimensions than there actually are (quiet, superstringers), note that dimensions in storage aren't necessarily spatial.
The first two dimensions are those you'd expect - the 2D shape of the disc. The third is understandable as well, if not as wide across - the depth of the disc, reading and writing across several layers. The fourth dimension is polarisation, the idea that light can be oriented in certain directions - so the same region of disc can record more than one set of data, and you move across the polarisation "dimension" to access different information. The final dimension is color, which might sound hyper-hippy but is solidly physical - different wavelengths can affect the special recording medium differently, and be read differently as well.
The key to this 5D-disc is its construction, a special multi-surface of gold nanoparticles. It might sound expensive but you don't need that much, and gold's special properties mean it's often used in nanotechnological work. Melting gold nanorods into nanospheres changes their reflectivity, and the difference can be measured by lower power reading lasers which don't risk re-melting the surface.
The scheme is ambitious - as in "most advanced that human technology will permit" ambitious. The system requires femtosecond lasers which are well within the range of research labs, but are still far beyond commercial pricing. Dr Chon and colleagues rightly assume that advances in technology will bring the cost down, but whether anyone will want a disc - or even need independent storage media of any kind - by their target years around 2020 remains to be seen.
Posted by Luke McKinney.
Looks like we're finally moving closer to being able to download our brains onto non-volatile storage!
Posted by: Tux | June 04, 2009 at 12:59 PM
"Looks like I'll have to get THE WHITE ALBUM again..." Wait! I don't even have the LP!
I can't wait to see what shortcomings these things will have: LPs got scratched and broken, 8-track and casette tapes stretched and broke and lost their sound quality over time and CD technology was SUPPOSED to take care of all tha- tha- tha- tha- tha- tha- tha- that! Oh! Save all those formats to your harddrive (then the drive crashes!) This may have so many bugs in it that you'll wish you had kept all those LPs and tapes. Some things in life can never be replaced.
Posted by: Marty Ferguson | June 09, 2009 at 12:01 PM