Storage innovator, Iomega has just received a patent which threatens to change the face of digital media storage. Iomega will talk about its new patents at the Information Storage Industry Consortium symposium in California next month.

What it seems to have done is worked out how dots of light change their appearance when tiny nano structures are raised on the surface of a disk making it possible to store more than one bit of data for each nano change to the disk.

It was issued US patent number 6,879,556 entitled Method and Apparatus for Optical Data Storage which it says means optical disks will be able to store between 40 to 100 times more information than today’s DVDs, with data transfer rates 5 to 30 times faster.