This “super Blu-ray” stores 125,000,000 gigabytes of data.

In an era where data centers are filled with more and more SSDs and hard disksA team of scientists from the Shanghai University of Science and Technology has developed an optical disk capable of storing 1 petabit, or 125,000,000 gigabytes of data. The disk holds so much information that experts simply call it “the boy.”

Progress, described in the magazine Nature, perhaps thanks to the use of a new material – a photoresist film, on which data can be recorded using lasers at the nanoparticle level. So one of these new disks can contain up to 100 layers of data in just 54 nanometers.

“This could significantly reduce the environmental impact and energy consumption of future data centers, becoming a sustainable solution for the digital economy,” says Min Gu, one of the Shanghai University scientists involved in the development of the new optical disk.

“This technology will enable exabit-level storage media (125,000 terabytes) by combining nanodisks into arrays, which is critical in data centers with limited space,” adds Min Gu.

About 20,000 Blu-ray discs on one disc

To measure the level of progress made by Shanghai University scientists, consider that storing 1 petabit of data would require 18,626 Blu-ray discs, with a maximum capacity ranging from 50 GB.

If we used the highest capacity hard drives instead of Blu-ray discs (latest advances point to 50 TB), 1 petabit of storage would require more than 100.

Thus, this progress fits like a glove into the era of quantum computing and artificial intelligence applications. With the increase in artificial intelligence applications, data center capacity is expected to reach 21 zettabytes in 2027.

For reference: one zettabyte is equivalent to 1e+9 terabytes.

In addition, the so-called “boy” is also a more environmentally friendly storage medium, since it does not require rotation or cooling mechanisms. In addition, scientists claim that its service life is longer than that of other storage media, since it has shown greater resistance to changes in temperature, humidity and ambient light.