SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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
(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?