A new technology capable of storing the equivalent of 100 DVDs on a single DVD-size disc has been unveiled by researchers from London's Imperial College.

The storage medium, called Multiplexed Optical Data Storage or MODS, was revealed at the Asia-Pacific Data Storage Conference 2004 in Taiwan on Monday by lecturer Peter Torok.

The development team said MODS can potentially store up to one terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) of data on one standard-size disc--enough for 472 hours of film, or every episode of the Simpsons. It would also have applications in enterprise data back-up and distribution.

Folks, that's a terabyte. 1,000,000,000,000 bytes of information. For movies, there would be no need to compress ever again!!!

What makes me happy is the time to market has dropped considerably for technology like this. When my roommate first bought his 1 speed CD Burner back in 95, it was $900 and each CD was $10 (we made a lot of $10 coasters back then.) Less than 10 years later, the dual layer DVD burners hit the shelves at $140. I would assume the price for these burners / readers would be a bit higher based on demand, but I doubt they'd run more than $500 for the first units.

I currently have a little over a quarter of a terabyte (250 Gigs) of storage in all the computers in my house. Now, you can buy a 250 Gig drive for next to nothing. Storage is becoming cheaper and cheaper which allows people to have more and more. Holding a terabyte of info on a disk would allow me to practically never delete anything ever again!

I would say that as soon as these become more mainstream, there will be a big market for applications that can organize massive amounts of information and make them easily searchable. Anyone want to start a business with me?