(Yicai) Feb. 22 -- A team of Chinese scientists has developed the world's biggest optical storage, equivalent to 10,000 Blu-ray discs to meet the rising demand for data storage.

The Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics and the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology joined hands in the study of a single petabit disc, according to an article published in Nature yesterday.

As the digital economy evolves, the global data output will reach 175 zettabytes, or 1.4 billion petabits, by 2025, and China's share of that is almost 30 percent, higher than that of any other country, data consultancy IDC predicts.

Optical storage, a class of data storage systems that includes DVDs, has the advantage of energy efficiency, safety, and reliability and a service life of up to 50 or even 100 years, which is very suitable for long-term, low-cost storage of massive data, Ruan Hao, one of the authors said to Yicai.

The team increased the capacity of the optical data storage by extending the planar recording architecture to three dimensions with hundreds of layers and breaking the optical diffraction limit barrier of the recorded spots. The diffraction limit is the smallest feature size that an optical imaging system can resolve.

However, because of the diffraction limit of light, the maximum capacity of common commercial optical discs can only reach 100 gigabits. This is why the field focuses on breaking through the barrier to enhance the capacity per disc in the era of Big Data, Ruan from the SIOM said, adding that next, the goal of the team is to create a super-large capacity disc that can be used by consumers in about five years.

Editors: Dou Shicong, Emmi Laine