New optical disk substrate, new perpendicular-recording tape

[unixronin]

Japanese researchers have discovered that titanium pentoxide can be used as the foundation of a storage medium to create optical disks that could store 200 times as much data as a Blu-Ray disc, while costing about a hundred times less than the germanium-based alloys used to make the data layer on DVD and BD discs.  That's about 9TB on a single optical disc.

Though the article doesn't mention it, a 200:1 increase in data density would also facilitate the development of new optical micro-disks small enough to fit into pocket devices.  A 1" 1TB optical disk would be something not to be sneezed at.

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In related news, Hitachi Maxwell has just demonstrated a new tape medium that uses perpendicular recording to get a starting native capacity of 50TB per LTO-class tape.  That's almost four times the capacity of the planned endpoint of LTO tape technology, LTO-8 (at a planned 12.8TB).  For reference, LTO-5 just hit the market this year, with 1.6TB per tape.

Comments

[unixronin]

Yes, I did. Fixed. Thanks for catching it.