Boffins working for electronics maker Pioneer have emerged from their smoke filled labs with a new optical disk, which has an additional layer.

Like Blu-ray the disk has 25GB of data in a single layer, but while a blu ray disk has 15 layers, Pioneers can create an additional one. This means that about 400GB of data capable of being stored on a single disk.

Pioneer said that because the lens specification for reading the disks is similar to the new disk is easily compatible. The disk is read only at the moment.