New Optical Tech Lets DVD-like Disks Hold 20+ Million Images

March 1, 2024

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Even by the standards of modern digital storage technology typically used by photographers, 20 million photos is a lot for a single storage device.

Being able to store that many on a single optical disk is all the more impressive. However, this is just what researchers claim to have developed, letting a user hold roughly 24 times as much data as an SSD drive can handle.

The researchers, Miao Zhao, Jing Wen, Qiao Hu, Xunbin Wei, Yu-Wu Zhong, Hao Ruan, and Min Gu have published their work in the journal Nature.

According to the paper, they’ve developed an optical disk much like a Blu-Ray or DVD but with a storage capacity of up to 1.6 petabits.

If this unit of storage space seems unusual to all you photographers out there, a petabit equals to 125,000 gigabytes, or 125 terabytes. With those comparisons, you can easily see how the amount compares to any HDD or SSD available on the market today.

Given average digital photo sizes of 10 megabytes, the 1.6 petabit capacity of one of these disks equals roughly 20 million images.

Obviously, if you’re storing pure JPEG format shots taken with slightly older or non-full frame cameras, the disk could hold more than 20 million images. For example, with JPEG photo size from average APS-C cameras, this disk medium could hold as many as 40 million photos on one disk, which is just insane.

For a bit more perspective on just what this new optical disk technology is capable of, it’s worth noting that even an average Blu-Ray disk can hold only 50GB of data, which equals 5,000 10MB images or 10,000 5MB JPEGs.

On the other hand, special 3 and 4-layer BD-XL optical disks also commercially exist with 100GB and 128GB capacities. The new experimental 3D nanoscale disk leaves all of these in the dust by an immense margin though.

You’d need 4000 or so Blu-rays to store what the 3D nanoscale disk can handle. Or you could buy several dozen SSD drives for the same results in solid-state format.

The ODS disk has the capacity of dozens of 2TB SSD units

What the researchers explain in their “Nature” paper is that their optical disk format stores data in three dimensions instead of two as is the case with typical optical disks like Blu-Rays.

This is done on a nanoscale and thus lets the researchers not only store information (such as photos) in 3D but also do so with extremely high information density within the disk’s substrate.

Their main innovation within this context is a unique method of using precision lasers to apply light patterns to the surface of their disk.

This causes the dye used in the disks’ film of storage layers to molecularly react specifically for the sake of 3-dimensional data storage.

The layers of storage substrate along and in this disk’s surface are indeed nano-scale. According to its creators, each layer is separated from the next by one micrometer, or 0.00004 inches.

All of the above combines to create a disk with a 1.6 petabit capacity despite it being roughly the same size as a DVD.

As one of the researchers explains, “The ODS has a capacity of up to 1.6 [petabits] for a DVD-sized disk area through the recording of 100 layers on both sides of our ultrathin single disk,”

He further adds, “It will thus become possible to build an exabit-level data center inside a room instead of a stadium-sized space by stacking 1,000 petabit-level nanoscale disks together… resulting in a large number of cost-effective exabit data centers,”

This sounds almost revolutionary if it can be applied practically on a commercial scale. The obvious benefits for data centers and archives would be huge while potential uses for consumer data hoarders would be just as great on a smaller scale.

If you’re interested in reading more about the specifics of how this new and still experimental technology works, here’s the research paper in Nature.