How much more can a DVD hold?
29 September 2004
by Richard
Conan-Davies
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If you thought a DVD holding a whole movie plus all those extras was impressive, what about a disc that could hold the entire series of the Simpsons, which is around 8,080 minutes. In digital terms that about 1 terabyte or 1000 gigbytes. Normally DVDs hold the information (sound and images) on the disc using tiny pits that act as a I or O , on a DVD there are often two layers that the laser can focus on to detect the pits. Now researchers from Imperial College in London led by physicist Dr Peter Török are using some extra properties of light (using blue lasers instead of red) and putting those pits at different angles to increase the amount of information on a disc. These new discs called MODS - for Multiplexed Optical Data Storage may be available by the year 2010 according to the Imperial College. |
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