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Titanium Oxide For High-Density Optical Storage
Stoobalou and other readers sent along word of research out of Japan, using a new crystal form of titanium oxide for high-density data storage — promising discs that store 1,000 times more data than Blu-ray does today, up to 25 TB. The material transforms from a black-colored metal state that conducts electricity into a brown semiconductor when hit by light, at room temperature. Titanium oxide's market price is about one-hundredth that of the rare element that is currently used in rewritable Blu-ray discs and DVDs. The material is cheap and safe, and is already being used in many products ranging from face powder to white paint. The researchers successfully created the material in particles measuring as small as 5 nanometers in diameter.
This state change also changes its reflectivity, similar to how a CD-RW works.
The full 1000x potential won't be extracted straight away, we may see this technology in the next generation x2 or x5 the density. Now that Big Content has found a reason for more capacity with 3D, and a reason to make your existing movie collection obsolete, they will be looking for the sucessor for blu-ray 3-4 years down the track (because honestly it hasn't taken over from DVDs yet).
Interestingly in CD-ROM's heyday it wasn't uncommon for a PC to have a smaller hard drive than the amount of data that would fit on a CD-ROM. About the time DVD-ROMs were out I suppose hard drives were only a little larger. Blue-rays were fraction the size of a hard drive when the format spec was finalized (2005). Now hard drives are 20-40x larger than a blu-ray disc.
Carelessly extrapolating from the trend I predict we might not see this technology in widespread use until a common consumer hard drive is past the 25TB mark.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
I admit having no idea about the answer to that very interesting question but the fact that the surface changes "when hit by light, at room temperature" makes me suspect it doesn't have much chance on that front.
We need a disk that can only be writen by divine intervention at Hell's main furnace, temperature.
Titanium dioxide itself is ridiculously stable. It's what makes it so safe - we use it to whiten marshmallows for crying out loud. How stable the structure is is an open question though, it doesn't say what frequency or intensity of light.
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One wonders how light stable this system will be compared to existing DVD coatings. My suspicions would suggest that it may be worse.
Good news: The analog masters don't contain much more information than the 2 megapixels per frame that you get with 1080p. Typical digital cinema projectors are 2K, which means they project a 2048 pixels wide picture (1080p is 1920 pixels wide). 4K projectors are still rare and only digitally produced movies currently provide the level of detail required to make a difference when compared to 2K projectors.