If you’re a fellow member of a certain generation, you remember DVDs – and you probably had a pretty sizable collection yourself.

Or you still have one, languishing in your basement or storage unit because what else are you going to do with them?

Well, according to these scientists, you could put all of them – and a lot more – on one single disc.

According to researchers at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, the optical storage device (the same size and shape of a DVD) can hold around 200,000 gigabytes of data.

Nature research paper: A 3D nanoscale optical disk memory with petabit capacity https://t.co/iUi0lxB2L5

— nature (@Nature) February 23, 2024

That’s around 40,000 DVDs or 100 years of movies if you watched in one a day.

It’s also around 24 times the hightest-capacity hard drives that exist currently.

They’re hoping for more than just movie storage, though, because currently data centers rely on a large number of conventional hard drives.

The team came up with a way to encode data across 100 layers instead of the old, single layer, and is recorded in 54-nanometer spots.

AIE-DDPR, the light-sensitive material that made this possible, has been in the works for a decade.

These researchers believe it’s finally paying off, and will able to be manufactured at commercial scales, reducing the necessity of large amounts of physical space.

I think everyone loves a good purge.

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