Forget Blu-ray's 200 GB disc capacity. Say good bye to HD DVD's 1,024 GB (one Terabyte) storage capability. While you're at it you can cross out Hitachi-Maxell's 300GB holographic CD and InPhase's upcoming 1.6 TB rewritable optical disc.

Why even the 50,000 GB DVD couldn't hold a candle to the new Rainbow Versatile Disc's (RVD) 123.60 Petabyte capacity. Actually you shouldn't hold a candle to the RVD because it's made out of paper.

Yes, you read it right. It's made of paper and it holds 123.60 Petabytes of data.

A petabyte is 2 to the 50th power, or 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes. That's a figure only Stephen Hawking's mind can comprehend without going into shock so don't push your luck. Currently, the largest hard drives are measured in terabytes so you can only reach petabyte territory when measuring storage space of multiple hard drives or other collections of data. Until now.

According to its twentysomething Indian inventor, Sainul Abideen, the technology's so-called rainbow format was designed to be printed out in the form of images: circle or square, certain colour combinations and certain other forms. Each trigonometric form and color combination represents a complete pattern. The data which gets converted into an image form can then printed on paper, plastic or any other thing.

Using a scanner, the rainbow picture is converted into data. It also contains an efficiently-designed error checking system.

In his prototype, Abideen managed to store 432 pages of foolscap paper text typed on a 4-inch square of paper. He also demoed a 45-second video clip of a film stored on an ordinary paper. Because it is made of paper, RVD's cost a hell of a lot less. About 20 U.S. cents for 131 times more storage capacity than a CD which costs a hell of a lot more.

But size and price aren't the RVD's main selling point. Sainul says the biggest advantage of the new technology is its eco-friendliness. RVDs unlike other storage media are biodegradable. You may think that's not very reassuring, but paper can last a long, long time when stored properly. The Diamond Sutra, the world's earliest printed book, is more than a thousand years old. And that was kept in a cave.