1.6 terabytes of data ona DVD... soon?

[0iD]

Beyond Blu-Ray: 2,000 movies on one disc

Just as we were all getting used to watching movies on Blu-Ray, Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia has developed a DVD that holds 1.6 terabytes of data — or about 2,000 movies. There is nothing like having your entire movie collection on one disc.

James Chon of the Swinburne University of Technology holds up the revolutionary new DVD.

All this is made possible by adding a fourth and fifth dimension to an optical disc. By doing this, a range of different colored wavelengths can read the same physical location. Current DVDs use a red laser, while Blu-Ray DVDs naturally use a blue laser.

May be a repost, but it's pretty outstanding all the same.

[Singh400]

Nice, but imagine how long it would take to burn 1.6 TBs of info.

[Haiku32]

You could fight a huge music collection on that.

Say the average track encoded in FLAC is around 30mb, math time... that's about 56,000 songs. That's over 10 times the songs in my collection (all mp3 as well). Crazy!

[Tumble]

Nice, but imagine how long it would take to burn 1.6 TBs of info.

I would imagine that for a high speed application, you'd have a discrete laser for each wavelength, so they'd burn all at the same time - you can do it with one lens, like some colour laser printers which have a specially ground polygon mirror that takes the 4 beams (in the case of the printer) and writes them a set distance apart, in one pass.

[Will404]

Still, in 5 years time, wont there disk based storage probably become phased out, replaced with something like SD cards, meaning that you have your SD-player build into the side of the TV. You already get 64GB SD cards, and they are alot smaller, and cant be scratched.