A patent issued to Iomega describes a disc that could store almost a terabyte of data — 40 to 100 times more information than a conventional DVD.

Iomega’s proposed Articulated Optical Digital Versatile Disc (AO-DVD) technology would use sub-wavelength surface bumps that slope at slightly different angles. This could be used to encode up to 100 times more information. The angles would be detected by analyzing light after it had bounced off several ridges –calculating which combination of slopes would have produced the result.

Iomega claims the technique could also improve data transfer rates by a factor of 30.