Toshiba Is Working On 1TB Optical Discs

In July this year, TDK announced BDXL Blu-ray discs with 100GB capacity. And now TDK is working on optical discs that even boast 1TB capacity. The company says the current prototype has 16 layers (four times more than on a Blu-ray disc), each with 32GB on each side (equaling 1,024GB).

The disc has a light transmittance of 72.6%, with each layer having a transmittance of even 95.1%. It’s the one you see in the middle on the picture above. Piled up on the left are 21 BD-Rs with 50GB capacity and 41 BD-Rs with 25GB capacity the new disc might replace one day (or the 218 DVD-Rs on the right).

According to TDK, the prototype was developed by applying a range of existing technologies used for Blu-rays; the only problem being that in its current form, the disc is too thick to comply with Blu-ray specifications.

Those specifications dictate that each layer can be up to 100μm thick, but the recording layer of TDK’s disc is 260μm thick. The company says commercialization depends on the plans of disc makers, but we can only hope they’ll be faster than Pioneer, for example. We still wait for their 400GB disc that was announced way back in July 2008.

Via Tech-On