A petabit of data can be fit on an optical disk by storing information in 3D. They say that's 125,000 gigabytes on a single DVD-sized disk.

"Optical disks like DVDs and Blu-rays are cheap and durable but can't hold much data. Until now, optical disks store data in a single layer of information that's read using a laser. Well, you can kiss those puny disks goodbye thanks to a new technique that can read and write up to 100 layers of data in the space of just 54-nanometres, as described in a new paper published in the journal Nature."

How do they do that? The research paper is paywalled but the abstract says:

"We develop an optical recording medium based on a photoresist film doped with aggregation-induced emission dye, which can be optically stimulated by femtosecond laser beams. This film is highly transparent and uniform, and the aggregation-induced emission phenomenon provides the storage mechanism. It can also be inhibited by another deactivating beam, resulting in a recording spot with a super-resolution scale. This technology makes it possible to achieve exabit-level storage by stacking nanoscale disks into arrays, which is essential in big data centres with limited space."

Femtosecond lasers, eh? How much is this reader/writer going to cost? I have a feeling it won't be showing up at Micro Center any time soon. But might be good for Google, etc, to back up the massive amounts of data they have in their data centers.

Meet the Super DVD: Scientists develop massive 1 petabit optical disk

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