Cleveland, Ohio's Case Western Reserve University physics professor and his graduate student have launched a company aimed at making an optical disc that holds 1 to 2 terabytes of data - the equivalent of 1,000 to 2,000 copies of Encyclopedia Britannica.

The technology they have developed would provide small- and medium-sized businesses an alternative to storing data on energy-wasting magnetic discs or cumbersome magnetic tapes, the founders say.

"A disc will be on the capacity scale of magnetic tapes used for archival data storage," said Kenneth Singer, the Ambrose Swasey professor of physics, and co-founder of Folio Photonics. "But, they?ll be substantially cheaper and have one advantage: you can access data faster. You just pop the disc in your computer and you can find the data in seconds. Tapes can take minutes to wind through to locate particular data."

To load what is the equivalent of 50 commercially available Blu-ray discs on a single disc of the same size, the scientists use similar optical data storage technology. But, instead of packing more data on one or two BD layers, they write data in dozens of layers.

Using technology first developed by the Center for Layered Polymeric Systems at Case School of Engineering, Singer and Valle, in collaboration with their colleague Professor Eric Baer, make an optical film with 64 data layers.

A thick, putty-like flow of polymers is repeatedly divided and stacked, then spread into a film and rolled onto a spool. They estimate they can make a square kilometer of film in an hour. To make the final product, the researchers cut and paste film onto the same hard plastic base DVDs and Blu-rays are built on.

Valle said they need to make only slight adjustments to a standard disc reader to enable it to probe and read the data on each layer without interference from layers above or below.

The Case Western Reserve scientists aren?t the only ones pursuing terabyte-storage discs. Other companies are "looking into a holographic technology, which requires two lasers to write the data and will require a whole new writer/reader," Singer said. "Ours has the advantage of lower manufacturing costs and is more compatible with current readers and writers."

Singer and Valle are specifically looking to provide an affordable option to computer centers that now regularly purge data due to the prohibitive costs of current storage technologies.

They are also trying to fill increasing needs in the fields of pathology and genomics. Pathologists are starting to store not just slides of tissues but the digital images they make, which can be manipulated to gather more information about disease or damage. With the plummeting costs of genetic sequencing, companies and institutions are generating enormous amounts of data and are seeking alternative ways to archive the data.

Story filed 22.10.12