DVD storage gets bigger!

Fancy watching the entire collection of the Simpsons on 1 DVD? Some guys have come up with a cool idea to create a DVD disk that can hold 1 TB (terabyte) of data - which is "quite a lot" in non-geek speak.

Here's the speel: A normal DVD has a lots of tiny grooves running around it. Inside these grooves are a channel of pits that the laser scans. Whenever a laser scans a groove it records a 1 if it encounters a pit, and if it doesn't see a pit it records a 0 (or vice-versa I don't actually know). Now imagine a pit that is a bit deeper and has some jutted edges in it. If its a jutted edge and a pit then record a 11, if just a pit then a 01, if a pit and a jutted edge on the other side then 10 and so on (the 11 and 10 are binary 1's and 0's). By doing that you've already increased the storage capacity by 4 times.

There are also multilayer surfaces on a DVD disk that work because you shine a laser of different wavelength onto the surface so that it penetrates deeper into the disk and records a different set of grooves.

The difficult bit is getting the technology to write these wierd pits and juts. So they don't reckon it'll go commercial until 2010. Here's the link for more details.