Hitachi Maxell Whips Optical Storage Into Shape

May 8th, 2006: Hitachi Maxell has announced that it has reduced the thickness of DVDs while maintaining the standard storage capacity of 4.7Gb, enabling the development of high capacity, yet extremely compact optical archival devices.

At 0.092mm thick, the new disc is 1/13th the thickness of current DVDs. This allows 100 to be stacked into a 6.5cm thick cartridge.

When both sides of the optical discs are laminated, capacity is boosted to 9.4Gb, bringing the cartridge to 940Gb. Hitachi Maxell says this dramatically boosts optical disc library capacity, while reducing physical size to 1/10th of traditional devices.

The company also says that when combined with next-generation blue laser technology, capacity could be blown out to 5Tb.

Hitachi Maxell are currently showing off the technology, and say that the discs will cost around US$325 per 940Gb cartridge. No release date for the technology has been announced.

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