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.

MODS will be laser-based like DVDs, CDs and the new Blu-ray system but uses much more subtle variations in the way light reflects from the discs. Where existing schemes have patterns of pits that reflect the laser as a series of ones and zeros, MODS can encode and detect more than 300 variations per pit. After error correction and encoding, this leads to 10 times the data density of Blu-ray Disc, currently the record holder for consumer optical storage.