Student invents 256GB sheet of paper

TechWorld.com - An Indian engineering student has developed a new method of storing up to 256GB of data on a very familiar medium: an ordinary sheet of paper.

Sainul Abideen, a 24-year-old who recently completed a master of computer applications degree in southern India, created a way of storing data that uses colored geometric shapes instead of zeros and ones and storing those shapes in dense patterns on paper. While the data storage format can store up to 256GB of data on an A4-size sheet of paper measuring 8.26 by 11.69 in., when tranferred to a DVD, the format can store up to 450GB of data, according to a story in the Arab News. By comparison, a DVD can store 4.7GB of data.

But experts refute the ability to store 256GB of data on a single sheet of paper, saying Abideen's methodology is flawed at best.

Abideen said he demonstrated a 45-second video clip being encoded on paper, which he called a "Rainbow Video Disk" (RVD), and then played back through a computer with an RVD scanner attached. Abideen said that smaller scanners could fit inside laptop computers or mobile phones and read subscriber identity module (SIM) card-size RVDs containing 5GB of data.

Files such as text, images, sounds and video clips are encoded in what Abideen calls his "Rainbow Format" as colored circles, triangles, squares and so on and printed as dense graphics on paper at a density of 2.7GB per square inch.

The paper can then be read through a specially developed scanner. The contents can then be decoded into their original digital format and viewed or played. The encoding and decoding processes have not yet been revealed.

Abideen cited advantages over other storage media including the facts that paper is biodegradable, unlike CDs or DVDs, and that sheets of paper also cost a fraction of the cost of a CD or DVD. The recording media could be either paper or plastic sheets.

However, not everyone agreed that Abideen's technology would pan out. An article in the online publication Ars Technica states that a sheet of paper using scanner-readable color dots can store only about 100MB of data, nothing even approaching the 256GB claimed by Abideen.

(Computerworld.com storage editor Lucas Mearian contributed to this article.)