A team at the University of Tokyo has found that using titanium oxide could mean that we gets discs with storage capacities more like hard drives. And guess what? The material is cheaper than the stuff used in Blu-ray discs.

Titanium oxide is ideal for disc manufacturing because of the way it reacts to light. At room temperature the material is capable of switching between metal and semiconductor states, which makes it “promising as a material for a next-generation optical storage device,” according to the eggheads.

If it works the way they believe it will, it means that these new “super discs” would hold 1,000 times more than a DVD, which hold an average of 5 gigs. We’re talking 5,000 gigabytes, or five terabytes.

[Dvice]