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from the what-if-the-readers-are-only-good-for-ONE-billion-years? dept.
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
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Thursday February 18 2016, @11:01AM
That's all nice, but how long will the reading mechanism survive? I mean, intact stored data is useless if you cannot read it any more. I mean, if I give you a perfectly readable 5.25" floppy disk, how many of you will still be able to read it? What about an 8" disk?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 18 2016, @11:05AM
For a lot of people a 3½" disk is already going to be a challenge.
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Thursday February 18 2016, @11:44AM
Probably this will be a problem, but I'm certain for really important data it would be possible to rebuild a 8'' disk drive. It's "only" a matter of money, the specifications should still be available somewhere. I usually do copy by data every couple of years to be on the safe side. Was thinking about pushing an encrypted archive to some cloud service as well, but didn't go through with it yet.
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(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 18 2016, @11:45AM
ok, so put the design of the reader in paper form next to the data cube.
every 200 years, make a reader, read the specs of the reader from the data cube, print out a new copy to replace the old one.
yes, you need to take care how you store that paper, but apparently you can let the kids play with the cube.
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Thursday February 18 2016, @11:58AM
tfa just mentioned temperature resistance, not general stability. It is still possible that the material is brittle or just soft.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 18 2016, @12:52PM
I just meant that as a joke.
in any case, temperature resistance is probably mentioned for the benefit of those who have put vinil in hot attics at some point in their lives...