US startup Folio Photonics has announced a major innovation in the world of data storage, promising to pave the way for affordable optical discs for less than five euros that can store up to 1TB per disc.
The company plans to release 10TB cartridges packaged with 1TB drives in 2024. Currently, a 1TB hard drive costs around €25, while Folio development is expected to cost less than €5 per TB. It really is a highlight of these optical discs that they can be produced at “radical low cost”
A new format of optical discs
Folio Photonics CEO Steven Santamaria boasted in a press release that the new drives, dubbed ACTIVE, offer ” a new approach to optical storage that overcomes historical limitations and puts cost benefits, security unprecedented cyber and sustainability.
While archival discs today employ three layers at most , active discs are created using state-of-the-art materials, proprietary polymer extrusion, and film-based disc construction processes.
How exactly does Folio Photonics go about massively increasing capacity while lowering the costs of its product? The answer is, for now, a secret (although it is already patented).
If the company is able to create low-cost, high-capacity discs, it could become a true successor to Blu-ray and rise as the savior of physical media that, right now, is slowly being phased out as storage requirements increase. storage.
According to Folio Photonics, 1TB per disk is not the limit for this new optical disk technology. They could further increase the storage capacity with multiple terabytes of storage in the future.
For now, if all goes according to plan, the first Active optical discs will be on the market, for the business field, from 2024.
