Pioneer has developed a technology that could allow it to cram 510G bytes of data onto a disk the size of a DVD, a company representative said.
The technology uses an electron beam to make templates from which optical disks can be stamped, Michiko Kadoi, a company spokeswoman, said last week.
While Pioneer has no immediate plans to commercialize the technology, it believes it could be used to make both recordable and read-only disks with more than 100 times the capacity of today's 12-centimeter DVDs.
"We successfully recorded 348G bytes, 424G bytes and 510G bytes on 12-centimeter discs," Kadoi said.
As with other recent advances in optical disk technology, Pioneer's method relies on cramming data closer together to achieve a higher capacity.
Today's standard DVDs have a capacity of 4.7G bytes. The data is stored as "pits" in the disc which can be read as ones and zeros. The pits today are spaced 740 nanometers apart, Kadoi said. (A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.)
A newer disc technology that came to market recently uses a blue laser, which has a shorter wavelength, to achieve about five or six times the capacity of DVDs. The shorter wavelength means the size of the pits, and the spacing between them, can be made smaller.
Pioneer's electron beam allows the spacing between the pits to be made even smaller - as little as 70 nanometers - allowing the company to make disks with a capacity of up to 510G bytes.
That amount of disc storage may be overkill for the consumer market, but it could be useful for the enterprise market, according to Yasusuke Suzuki, a research manager for storage at IDC Japan.
"It's very interesting, especially if they can make it available in 2006 or 2007, and the market impact could be significant," he said.
In fact, even 250G bytes should be enough to make the technology competitive, he added.
Pioneer's technology is more advanced than the laser technology used for newer types of optical disk formats, including HD-DVD, Blu-ray Disc and Ultra Density Optical (UDO), the company said.
Single-layer versions of these disks can store between 20G bytes and 30G bytes of data, while dual-layer versions store about 50G bytes. Several companies have roadmaps to take the technologies out to 200G-byte disks by adding more storage layers.
If Pioneer brings its electron-beam technology to market it will compete with Plasmon, among others, which has used blue lasers to develop UDO discs a little larger than a DVD that can store up to 30G bytes of data. It should be able to increase the capacity of those disks to 60G bytes in mid-2006, and a 120G-byte version could be on the market by the end of 2008, Plasmon has said.