Nanostructured Glass Could Provide Highly Durable, Deeply Dense Data Storage (phys.org) 118
Namarrgon writes: Using nanostructured glass, scientists from the University of Southampton's Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) have developed the recording and retrieval processes of five dimensional (position, size, and orientation) digital data by femtosecond laser writing. The storage allows unprecedented properties including 360 TB/disc data capacity, thermal stability up to 1,000ÂC and virtually unlimited lifetime at room temperature (13.8 billion years at 190ÂC) opening a new era of eternal data archiving.
Oh UTF8, where art thou? (Score:5, Funny)
190AC! That's .... either very warm, or reasonly high voltage. Now if there were only a character set that could help us distinguish an A from a degree circle symbol
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Character set looks like this: degrees
Hope that helps...
Unicode is a virus
Re:Oh UTF8, where art thou? (Score:5, Funny)
> Unicode is a virus
Yes. It is. But it is a virus with several cat faces in it (and possibly one cat feces in it) so all is forgiven!
Re: (Score:2)
Actually I just stumbled in here wondering on what planet 190 degrees centigrade is room temperature.
Re: (Score:1)
Post global warming room.
Re: (Score:3)
"Very warm", like a nuclear explosion is "quite loud".
Re: (Score:2)
Character set looks like this: degrees
Hope that helps...
Unicode is a virus
Language is a virus [youtube.com].
Re: (Score:2)
No, it's below specification. The permissible range is 253 to 216V.
Unless you live in North America or on one side of Japan (I forget which side).
The CD's big brother (Score:2)
This sounds like the CD's big brother.
Re: (Score:1)
I hope so.
CD became the ideal storage medium for a while. Cheap, ubiquitous, and mostly durable (I've had maybe 25 rot out a few thousand in the past 20 years). It was everything I hoped minidisc would be before Sony crippled it.
Bluray and the like increased density, but were a great deal more fragile and somewhat hamstrung by licensing. Storing on hard drives is workable for now, but you can't visually inspect a HD and know you should be replacing it soon. And should it become borked, data recovery isn't q
Re: (Score:2)
"DVD had far better durability."
Nope. I've played CDs with solid cracks from spindle contact to outer edge without a skip on way older 1-bit DAC CD players (specifically, the garbage known as the Limp Bizkit 3 Dollar Bill, Y'all album.)
Show me ANY DVD and player that can handle that sort of medium damage.
Re: (Score:3)
Minidisc could have been the ideal CD replacement. Archival-grade stability from the magneto-optical discs, rewriteable ~1 million times and protected from physical harm by a solid caddy.
Unfortunately Sony tends to fuck up more often than not, and MD is no exception.
Re: (Score:2)
"but you can't visually inspect a HD and know you should be replacing it soon"
Actually, some hard drives got hot enough over time that you could see the typical blue/purple heat discoloration on the top enclosure plate near the vent hole. You knew it was either time to fix your cooling or replace those drives, or both.
Scratches (Score:1)
Yes, the glass might be stable at room temperature and durable in that respect. However, it's also easy to scratch glass, so there will be issues with any small imperfections. I just don't think this is viable for data storage because of scratches.
Re: Scratches (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:1)
Those were cup holders, you dolt!
Before the tray-type CD players, the early CD-ROM drives had an enclosure you put the CD into, working much like a 3.5in floppy.
Re: Scratches (Score:3)
Also, it can be seen through so no porn there mates!
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Just don't the top 0.1mm of the glass. You lose a few TB of capacity, but now the data is below any scratches.
Re: (Score:2)
Scratches will diffuse a light beam and corrupt the data readings.
Re: (Score:2)
Let's the manufacturers don't cheap out, like they did with CDs and DVDs, and expose the glass to human touch. Even 1.44" floppies had a plastic/metal cover protecting the delicate media.
Re: (Score:2)
"Yes, the glass might be stable at room temperature and durable in that respect. However, it's also easy to scratch glass, so there will be issues with any small imperfections."
First, you fail at understanding Moh's hardness scale, secondly, you fail at understanding how we make and assess quartz crystals (essentially crystals of silicon dioxide) today.
Making these storage discs is absolutely fucking trivial. We make equally-pure quartz for smoking purified cannabis extracts (quartz nails, which takes heat
Is that write-once? Or rewritable? (Score:2)
Re:Is that write-once? Or rewritable? (Score:5, Interesting)
Archiving suggests write-only, but this paper [researchgate.net] shows that the technology can be used for rewritable storage as well.
Re: (Score:2)
"Archiving suggests write-only"
Remember Iomega? That company released a number of write-only formats, but for some reason none of them caught on.
Re: (Score:2)
Who cares? With that density, you just use a logging filesystem. Only incremental changes - very handy for rollback as well.
"a new era of eternal data archiving" (Score:4, Insightful)
As long as our descendants have the high technology to read it!!!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: "a new era of eternal data archiving" (Score:2, Insightful)
"I still have perfectly good floppy disks lying around. No way to read them."
If you have no way to read them... How do you know they are still perfectly good?
(Let's not let the discussion degenerate into a debate over whether the floppy disks are currently Shrodingered.)
Re: (Score:2)
USB floppy drives can be had.
Re:"a new era of eternal data archiving" (Score:4, Funny)
USB floppy drives can be had.
Well, USB 3.5" floppy disk drives can be had. I've /never/ found a 5.25" or 8" floppy drive with a USB interface. And - believe it or not - some people still use those.
(not me though; I saw the way the wind was blowing and wisely converted everything to Zip disks [wikipedia.org] :-)
Re: (Score:3)
I've /never/ found a 5.25" or 8" floppy drive with a USB interface
Well, there's this: http://www.deviceside.com/ [deviceside.com]
Re: (Score:2)
I hope you got the external model that connects to the parallel port, because we all know that port is going to be around forever!
Re: (Score:2)
Where they get desktops with a parallel port on, I neither know nor care. someone else's problem.
Re: (Score:2)
Any good data-recovery outfit will read those floppies for you.
Re: (Score:2)
First they have to recognize that it's something that can be read.
Re: "a new era of eternal data archiving" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: "a new era of eternal data archiving" (Score:5, Interesting)
You underestimate archaeologists.
Hang on, there seems to be something embedded in the glass. Let's point a microscope at it.
The Long Now foundation [rosettaproject.org] has found a nice solution to this. Put some writing around the edge of the glass disc. Make the initial few words large enough to be readable without magnification, and then make the text progressively smaller to encourage people to grab a magnifier.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You assume no-one educated will ever look at them. Once the news gets out that this sort of glass disc can contain information, every single glass disc found by experts or amateurs will be examined for ancient writing.
Re: (Score:1)
BRB burning this argument to a glass plate so the next era will assume we are all idiots that can't be helped but to argue over nonsensical topics like this one.
Re: (Score:2)
Congratulations. Your world view has succumbed to charismatic picaroon survivorship bias.
Re: (Score:2)
Or grab a grandkid to read it to ya.
YA cheap shot at the soft sciences (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Luckily you can etch human-readable labels into the discs as well, as per TFA. Which could include micro-scale text describing how to read the really small stuff.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Therefore, we should chisel all data onto stone tablets!!
Way to leap to wholly unwarranted conclusions, Gerry!!!
great but not 'eternal' (Score:2)
this is all excellent news, but 'a new era of eternal data archiving' !
anyone for a sign of human hubris.
I have tons of questions on this... (Score:4, Interesting)
Very interesting technology but I have many questions on its utility. First of all, how does it compare to existing technologies? Put it in terms of terabytes per dollar, kilogram, cubic centimeters, or joule, and then give the same specifications for storage we have now like hard drives, SSD, Library of Congress (had to work that in here somewhere), microfilm, or even the human brain.
The data density is important but then so is the rate that the data can be stored and retrieved, and put this in terms that people understand. Compare it to IDE, PCI, or station wagons full of digital tapes. Knowing some of this would give us some idea on how useful this technology would be.
If we are going to discuss storing data for extended periods of time then I'd think that the data should be in a form that is human readable with some very basic equipment. Nanoscale etchings on glass that are written in a commonly written language that can be read with a proper microscope sounds near ideal to me. Better yet have it in multiple languages, this gives not only redundancy of the data but gives a better chance that it could be read by a future civilization.
While human readability is a must so is having a method that eases machine readability. We can assume that any civilization that can read nanoscale text can also create an OCR system to transfer the data into a computer system but we can do things to make it easier on us and whatever future entity wishes to reliably recover the data. Just making a good choice of fonts so that a "1", "l", and "I" are readily distinguishable.
Again, this is cool stuff, but I crave more.
Re: I have tons of questions on this... (Score:1)
Sounds like you were expecting a competent written article. This is a soup of buzz words.
Re: I have tons of questions on this... (Score:1)
Femto laser writing in 3D has been around for awhile. Apparently for fiber optic cable. It's basically creating 3 different waveguide paths of light within a flexible glass cable.
http://spie.org/newsroom/technical-articles/5979-femtosecond-laser-3d-writing-from-smart-catheters-to-distributed-lab-in-fiber-sensing
And all I want for Xmas is an m-disc burner.
Re:I have tons of questions on this... (Score:4, Interesting)
The stuff about church windows flowing over time is "chinese whispers" about lead organ pipes somehow getting confused with glass, then attempted justification after the fact because glazier put the stronger thick edge at the bottom. You need low end oven temperatures for glass to flow over a timeframe of centuries.
Re: (Score:3)
Had not heard that before (have heard the urban myth times). Thanks for the interesting walk through google, other people who have not come across this before might find this page [unl.edu] to be interesting.
Re: (Score:2)
"hence the fuss about vitirification of nuclear waste"
Some of us are opposed to vitrification because that "waste" is mostly useful material for future reactors.
Re: (Score:2)
If you are impatient the short answer is that most things bombarded with neutrons become low level nuclear waste that is not active enough to ever use for fuel. It still has to be disposed of in some way - not a difficult problem, but just an example that the wave the magic wand idea of reusing everything as fuel is a simple and misleading "lie to children".
If you want to discuss at a m
Re: (Score:2)
Read different tech sites, or just browse the amazon catalogue. Some people are interested in new ideas.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
I will never understand the fascination with tech web sites always reporting on fringe research that probably won't eventuate to anything.
New concepts and technologies are more interesting than products.
Or at least you'd hope so on a technology oriented site - there are plenty of other media options if you just want to know about the latest iShiny.
Re:I have tons of questions on this... (Score:5, Informative)
According to the paper [soton.ac.uk], they wrote three layers deep at a 150nm pitch [soton.ac.uk]. At 3 bits per nanodot, the claimed 360TB could be stored in about one square inch. Compare that to the latest 10TB HDDs, which have an areal density of around 0.14 TB per square inch.
No figures are given for transfer speeds, though they describe 200kHz laser pulses, which would be about 75 kB/second - not so dramatic, but it is after all a lab prototype. There are numerous options for speeding this up in commercial products.
If the intention is to provide data for future civilisations, then presumably some "key" discs would be included, with information at various scales describing the technology, equipment, and encoding needed to read the next deeper scale. The larger scales could be inscribed in common human-readable languages, but any civilisation capable of imaging the deepest nanoscopic scales would have no problem decoding well-described binary formats as well.
Re:I have tons of questions on this... (Score:4, Funny)
I can see it now. An advanced civilization finds the key disks, spends months learning the technology, builds special equipment and tools to decode the disks only to find.... cat videos.
Re: (Score:2)
I can see it now. An advanced civilization finds the key disks, spends months learning the technology, builds special equipment and tools to decode the disks only to find.... cat videos.
I think this scenario is even more likely:
"builds special equipment and tools to decode the disks only to find.... Rick Astley videos."
Re: (Score:2)
Doesn't make any sense.
1) The first paper you linked to was entitled "5D Data Storage by Ultrafast Laser Nanostructuring in Glass" published in 2013 - not the same title as the one referred to by the article: "5D Data Storage by Ultrafast Laser Writing in Glass" due to be published tomorrow (2016).
2) The second paper you linked to mentions a pitch of "up to" 150 nm but was published in 2006.
3) Using the 150 nm pitch figure from the 2006 paper:
25400000 nm per inch / 150 nm pitch = 170000 dots per inch per la
Re: (Score:2)
1) & 2) Yeah, the linked papers were older, but there's (still) no record of the new paper, so I went with what I could find.
3) You're right, my pitch math was way off. But the glass discs shown weren't much more than a square inch, and reportedly could hold "up to" 360TB, so the result is probably still close. There's no reason given to limit the discs to only 3 layers - they could have hundreds, at 5 micron spacing. It's also possible they could be using a tighter dot pitch since 2006.
other 3) I read
Re:I have tons of questions on this... (Score:4, Funny)
The problem is DRM, with many millennia of durability Congress will need to expand the period of protection else the IP holders will suffer.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
'Scientists have developed X' usually implies that this is a one off prototype in a lab somwhere, possibly using hand crafted instruments to operate and certainly not a streamlined manufacturing process.
That makes it hard to compare on many of those specifications with fully developed industrial products. Data density may be the only spec that they can truthfully give an accurate number for at this time.
Of course if you'd ask the right people you will get some great sounding numbers for all of your question
Re: (Score:2)
HWÃT: WE GAR-DENA IN GEARDAGUM theodcyninga thrym gefrunon. Hu tha æthelingas ellen fremedon ! Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena threatum monegum mægþum meodosetla ofteah, egsode eorl, sythan ærest wearth feasceaft funden. He thæs frofre gebad, weox under wolcnum, weorthmyndum þah, oth thæt him æghwylc thara ymbsittendra ofer hron
Re: (Score:2)
For what definitions of "basic equipment"?
FTFA,
Well, I've got a microscope that can do the polarisation work. But not to 5 microns resolution. That's a ca
Let me guess... (Score:5, Funny)
Are all these "Glass Discs" shaped like human skulls?
The Mayans might have some copyright issues with that ( Mayan copyright lifetime = Author death + 2 Mayan Apocalypses )
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Handy, given the web is 99% stupid. (Score:3)
Simple Light-Based I/O system (Score:1)
If I had a single bit of storage for each article (Score:2)
,....
Seriously, at least 2 to 5 a year since I got on the internet back in 1997?
Always a fun read, never come to fruition.
I remember reading about 100GB optical drives in 1999.
https://www.pctechguide.com/removable-storage/florescent-disc-technology [pctechguide.com]
Nothing ever comes to fruition
Re: (Score:2)
Isn't BDXL good to 100GB per disc?
Now you can say you finally got your 100GB optical discs.
I'd almost wager that the "maximum capacity" of what was talked about in 1999 is largely where BD discs are at today, only they didn't call them Blu-Ray in 1999 and in 2016 100 GB capacity is on the large side of marginally useful.
It's like USB flash drives. The 4 GB size is really only useful for writing CD ISOs for booting CD-less computers. The 8 GB size is really only useful for DVD ISOs. 32 GB and below are pr
Re: (Score:2)
Don't know about you but anything bigger than 2GB is pretty useless. All I use a USB flash drive for is as the boot device for a Linux server that is doing software RAID. Simplifies disk replacement enormously. I guess you might find use for something bigger in a vSphere server or similar, though most servers come with SD card slots (redundant as well) these days.
For everything else there is a network, and even for install and rescue purposes the network is better than a USB drive. I guess somewhere once yo
Re: (Score:2)
I think anything over 4 GB is largely wasted in a ESXi environment, although when I have used them as boot devices I've gone with 8GB models as a kind of future proof as I have bad memories of old ESX default installs using partitions too small to accept upgrades.
There may also be some value to underprovisioning the hardware -- if ESXi only uses the first 4 GB, the thumb drive hardware wear leveling will likely give it a longer lifespan by giving it an actual 8 GB to work against, although writes are so inf
Re: (Score:1)
Q:When is news not news? (Score:2)
Just plain cool (Score:3)
I'm sorry, but this is just plain cool. We can now record every single bit of information that the human race has produced, and know that it will last for another 13.8 billion years. Think of it! All of our fairy tails, such as The Brothers Grim, Mother Goose, the bible, the quran, intelligent design, chemtrails, the illuminati, you name it...
Odin.
Zeus.
Quetzalcoatl.
Moroni.
Billions of years from now some truly intelligent species will discover our eternal library and laugh their alien asses off!
Re: (Score:2)
More "magic" storage that will never materialize (Score:2)
That pattern is well-established by now. If they have a drive and media that are actually available, I may take an interest, but not before.
But technology moves on (Score:2)
And soon, these glass disks will be like 8 inch floppies that nobody can find a drive to read. So much for your 13.8 billion year lifetime.
Holographic memory has been vapourware since 2001 (Score:2)
Forgive me if I do not hold my breath on this kind of thing. It's been a pipe dream of research up to this point with many many cases of companies claiming to bring it out real soon now.
Looks like articles on the topic appear
Room temp off by about an order of magnitude (Score:2)
19 degrees C is about room temperature, not 190.
The summary faithfully describes the article content, however... so it's not a submitter error. I'm curious though... was the error caused by computer (such as an OCR error), or by a human (eg: typo)?
So.... (Score:2)
We can write data to these tiny glass disks and read it back again.
Using equipment the size of a house. Slowly.
The acid test will be fitting all that gubbins into a 5.25" single height case (or something smaller) and getting read/seek rates high enough to be useful.
But what about the porn? (Score:1)
Very poor turnout from you lot. Why has nobody mentioned the amazing porn storage you could have with this media?
(Purely for reasons of whoever (or whatever) billions of years from now, is going to be interested in what what we looked like, we should provide a record for them. No other reason of course...)
Re: (Score:2)
Heat them to 1400 degrees C with a good blowtorch, that'll destroy the nanostructures in no time.