The monster "Five-dimensional" discs with a capacity up to 1.6 terabyte was developed by a team from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne and can significantly increase the size of a current disc without having to increase the size.
Already Korean manufacturer Samsung has cut a deal with the team to commercialise their invention which works by harnessing nanoparticles and a "polarization" dimension to existing technology. It is believed that the disc can be manufactured for a cost only fractionally above the cost of a current 500GB disc.
The researchers claim that the technique has allowed them to store 1.6 terabytes of data on a disc with the potential to one day store up to 10 terabytes. One terabyte would be enough to hold 300 feature length films or 250,000 songs.
In a statement issued by the team Min Gu, who worked on the research, said "We were able to show how nanostructure material can be incorporated onto a disc in order to increase data capacity, without increasing the physical size of the disc. These extra dimensions are the key to creating ultra-high capacity discs."
Reuters wrote, discs currently have three spatial dimensions but using nanoparticles the researchers said they were able to introduce a spectral -- or colour -- dimension as well as a polarisation dimension.
