High-Speed Laser Writing Method Could Pack 500 Terabytes of Data into CD-Sized Glass Disc
Researchers have developed a fast and energy-efficient laser-writing method for producing high-density nanostructures in silica glass. These tiny structures can be used for long-term five-dimensional (5D) optical data storage that is more than 10,000 times denser than Blue-Ray optical disc storage technology.
[...] In Optica, Optica Publishing Group's journal for high-impact research, [Yuhao] Lei and colleagues describe their new method for writing data that encompasses two optical dimensions plus three spatial dimensions. The new approach can write at speeds of 1,000,000 voxels per second, which is equivalent to recording about 230 kilobytes of data (more than 100 pages of text) per second.
[...] The researchers used their new method to write 5 gigabytes of text data onto a silica glass disc about the size of a conventional compact disc with nearly 100% readout accuracy. Each voxel contained four bits of information, and every two voxels corresponded to a text character. With the writing density available from the method, the disc would be able to hold 500 terabytes of data. With upgrades to the system that allow parallel writing, the researchers say it should be feasible to write this amount of data in about 60 days.
5 GB / 230 KB/s = ~6 hours
500 TB / 230 KB/s = ~69 years
500 TB / 60 days = ~96.45 MB/s
Funding for the research was provided by the European Research Council (ENIGMA, 789116) and Microsoft (Project Silica).
High speed ultrafast laser anisotropic nanostructuring by energy deposition control via near-field enhancement (open, DOI: 10.1364/OPTICA.433765) (DX)
Previously: "5D" Laser-Based Polarization Vortex Storage Could Hold Hundreds of Terabytes for Billions of Years (same university, Peter G. Kazansky on both research teams)
Microsoft Stores 75.6 GB on Glass Disc Designed to Last Thousands of Years
Related Stories
Researchers at the UK's Southampton University have created a storage scheme that could supposedly store hundreds of terabytes for billions of years:
Researchers, led by Martynas Beresna, in the university's Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) have built five-dimensional photonic structures in nano-structured fuzed quartz glass with femtosecond pulses of light; meaning one quadrillionth (one millionth of one billionth) of a second. Data is written in three layers of nano-structured dots, voxels, separated by five micrometres (one millionth of a metre).
A voxel is an optical vortex, a polarisation vortex using nano-gratings, and a paper by the researchers, "Radially polarized optical vortex converter created by femtosecond laser nanostructuring of glass" (pdf), explains how they: "...demonstrate a polarization vortex converter, which produces radially or azimuthally polarized visible vortices from a circularly polarized beam, using femtosecond laser imprinting of space-variant self-assembled form birefringence in silica glass."
When the femtolaser pulse hits the glass it causes polarisation vortices to be created which change the way light passes through the glass, modifying its polarisation. This polarisation can be detected using a combined optical microscope and polariser. The dimensions of the three-layered nano-structured dot voxel are length, width, depth, size and orientation.
We're told an optical disk, using this technology, could hold 360TB of data for 13.8 billion years at 190°C, meaning a virtually unlimited lifetime at room temperature. [...] Altechna, a Lithuanian laser optics company, is working on commercialising the technology.
This story is a bit of a throwback since the researchers originally published these claims back in 2013. However they are presenting their results under the title "Eternal 5D data storage by ultrafast laser writing in glass" on February 17, 2016 at the SPIE Photonics West 2016 conference in San Francisco.
5D Data Storage by Ultrafast Laser Nanostructuring in Glass
Why Microsoft and Warner Bros. Archived the Original 'Superman' Movie on a Futuristic Glass Disc
Microsoft has teamed up with Warner Bros. to store a copy of the 1978 movie "Superman" on a small glass disc about the size of a coaster. The collaboration, which will be officially unveiled at Microsoft's Ignite 2019 conference in Orlando, Florida Monday, is a first test case for a new storage technology that could eventually help safeguard Hollywood's movies and TV shows, as well as many other forms of data, for centuries to come.
"Glass has a very, very long lifetime," said Microsoft Research principal researcher Ant Rowstron in a recent conversation with Variety. "Thousands of years."
[Image] The piece of silica glass storing the 1978 "Superman" movie, measuring 7.5 cm x 7.5 cm x 2 mm. The glass contains 75.6 GB of data plus error redundancy codes.
Microsoft began to investigate glass as a storage medium in 2016 in partnership with the University of Southampton Optoelectonics Research Centre. The goal of these efforts, dubbed "Project Silica," is to find a new storage medium optimized for what industry insiders like to call cold data — the type of data you likely won't need to access for months, years, or even decades. It's data that doesn't need to sit on a server, ready to be used 24/7, but that is kept in a vault, away from anything that could corrupt it.
This is not the Superman memory crystal we need.
Also at The Verge.
Related: "5D" Laser-Based Polarization Vortex Storage Could Hold Hundreds of Terabytes for Billions of Years
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 02 2021, @09:57PM
This would be perfect for running Plan9 Fossil.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_(file_system) [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday November 02 2021, @11:23PM (2 children)
That's cool and all, but I don't really want to wait for two months while transferring all my Blue-Ray to this new-fangled tech. Can we cut that down to two weeks with the next-gen?
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday November 02 2021, @11:46PM
2 months is perfectly acceptable if done right. Better yet, make it so that you can write to portions of the disc without needing to fill the whole disc at once.
It doesn't sound like we could expect rewritability, but if it was cheap and large enough, you wouldn't care. Just keep writing files to it until you run out of space, even if there are duplicates.
The speed I came up with is actually a little faster than Blu-ray. The fastest Blu-ray writers [latimes.com] appear to be 72 MB/s (16x 4.5 MB/s [wikipedia.org]), usually for single-layer (25 GB) only.
Assuming the read rate is the same as the write rate, it should be more than enough for playing sequentially stored compressed 8K video endlessly.
Will this ever escape the lab (where it has been since at least 2013) AND become something consumers can easily buy at a reasonable price? Maybe not.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 03 2021, @06:24PM
You've got that much p0rn? Or do you just need that much memory to keep track of all your sock-puppet accounts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 03 2021, @12:17AM (2 children)
All these comments and zero notes of what the two added dimensions are. Polarity? Wavelength? ..?
My brain is too little to read and understand PhD level physics and pull the answer out myself.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday November 03 2021, @12:27AM (1 child)
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Informative) by hubie on Wednesday November 03 2021, @03:56PM
As I understand the paper, three of the dimensions are the physical x-y-z location of the voxel. The other two dimensions exploit the effects you get with a birefringent material. Birefringent materials act differently upon different polarized light, so what they do is to use the lasers to create birefringence in the voxels. Prior to this work you could do that using lots of femtosecond pulses to shape/change the material properties in each voxel, but the more pulses you use per voxel, the more thermal effects you induce (and it is also slower the longer you spend at each voxel location). Other work would achieve this by using other materials to help, such as nanoparticles, to create "near field" laser enhancements. What they do in this paper is create their own near field enhancements by first inducing a microexplosion with a focused laser pulse to create a void, then use a half dozen or so other laser pulses on/near that microvoid to create an elongated structure (nanolamella) which ends up being birefringent. The physical orientation of this nanolamella determines the direction of the "slow" wave and the overall "retardation" of the light, and it is these two properties which are the other two dimensions.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 03 2021, @02:15AM (4 children)
Imagine just never bothering to delete. Sure, un-link maybe, and if you could re-write you might want to do a security delete; but the kind of delete we normally do would be pointless. You could write to multiple parts of the disk for redundancy, and never delete. Keep revisions of everything you've got going back to the time you were old enough to use a computer.
(Score: 3, Touché) by FatPhil on Wednesday November 03 2021, @08:31AM (3 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Wednesday November 03 2021, @02:22PM (2 children)
On the other hand, if this became something real and cost-effective, it would enable one hell of a sneakernet.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday November 03 2021, @03:46PM (1 child)
I'm still in shock that something the size of my fingernail can carry 1000000 times the data the first random access mass storage device I ever owned. And is about 100 times smaller too. Storage has outpaced computation significantly. Long may it continue. At it, boffins!
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 03 2021, @04:40PM
That depends: are you talking about an African or European 747?