Japanese hardware maker Pioneer has developed a technique which will allow optical drives to store 500GB of data.

That's according to the Nikkei Business Daily, which reported that the technique will use ultraviolet lasers, which emit shorter wavelength rays than blue lasers. The paper reported that Pioneer uses the beam to write data holes in a master disk, each separated by 70 nanometres.

That gives a data rate 20 times more than the blue laser Blue-ray disk. While there are technical problems creating data cavities so small, Pioneer has, apparently, solved problems associated with scattering of the laser by developing a carbon mask using photosensitive resin.