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Data Storage

Scientists Create DVD-Sized Disk Storing 1 Petabit (125,000 Gigabytes) of Data (popsci.com) 113

Posted by EditorDavid from the disk-jockeying dept.
Popular Science points out that for encoding data, "optical disks almost always offer just a single, 2D layer — that reflective, silver underside."

"If you could boost a disk's number of available, encodable layers, however, you could hypothetically gain a massive amount of extra space..." Researchers at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology recently set out to do just that, and published the results earlier this week in the journal, Nature. Using a 54-nanometer laser, the team managed to record a 100 layers of data onto an optical disk, with each tier separated by just 1 micrometer. The final result is an optical disk with a three-dimensional stack of data layers capable of holding a whopping 1 petabit (Pb) of information — that's equivalent to 125,000 gigabytes of data...

As Gizmodo offers for reference, that same petabit of information would require roughly a six-and-a-half foot tall stack of HHD drives — if you tried to encode the same amount of data onto Blu-rays, you'd need around 10,000 blank ones to complete your (extremely inefficient) challenge.

To pull off their accomplishment, engineers needed to create an entirely new material for their optical disk's film... AIE-DDPR film utilizes a combination of specialized, photosensitive molecules capable of absorbing photonic data at a nanoscale level, which is then encoded using a high-tech dual-laser array. Because AIE-DDPR is so incredibly transparent, designers could apply layer-upon-layer to an optical disk without worrying about degrading the overall data. This basically generated a 3D "box" for digitized information, thus exponentially raising the normal-sized disk's capacity.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader hackingbear for sharing the news.
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Scientists Create DVD-Sized Disk Storing 1 Petabit (125,000 Gigabytes) of Data More

Scientists Create DVD-Sized Disk Storing 1 Petabit (125,000 Gigabytes) of Data

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  • Giggidy!

    Come on. Admit it. You were thinking the same thing as me.

    • Come on. Admit it. You were thinking the same thing as me.

      Actually, I was thinking: A petabit? No, I'm just fine with eating animals.

  • is this going to cost for the drive?

    • Don't worry. If it's getting into production it's definitely going to be affordable.

      First gen would be expensive, but it's normal.

      But the music and movie industry will hate it.

      • First gen would be expensive, but it's normal.

        I paid $8500 for my first CD-R writer.

        It was the size of a microwave oven.

        The blank discs were $50 each.

        • I paid $8500 for my first CD-R writer.

          I paid $200 (IIRC) for a Memorex CRW-1622. That was when the technology became affordable to mere mortals who couldn't spend the cost of a decent used car on computer hardware. It's also probably worth mentioning that adjusted for inflation since 1998, that is the equivalent of $381.70 in today's dollars.

          Another fun fact about that Memorex drive is that it was the subject of a class action suit. I never had a problem with mine (other than that the 2x burn speed was painfully slow), and it's actually stil

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ls671 ( 1122017 )

            I paid $8500 for my first CD-R writer.

            I paid $200 (IIRC) for a Memorex CRW-1622. That was when the technology became affordable to mere mortals who couldn't spend the cost of a decent used car on computer hardware. It's also probably worth mentioning that adjusted for inflation since 1998, that is the equivalent of $381.70 in today's dollars.

            Another fun fact about that Memorex drive is that it was the subject of a class action suit. I never had a problem with mine (other than that the 2x burn speed was painfully slow), and it's actually still in my collection of obsolete computer parts.

            Well I paid $600 for my first hard drive (20MB) in ~1982. It's ~$1900 in today's dollars or $95,000 by GB of storage you get for under $50/GB nowadays.

        • Circa 1996 I paid around $1200 for the HP 4020i: Philips drive with some SCSI controller. The SCSI controller lacked parity and would give undetected transfer errors, with bad CD content maybe 1 out of 3 attempts. I worked around that with a file manifest with hash codes that allowed the recording to be verified. This was for a low volume but reliability-critical software distribution. This writer was very useful in the specific situation, but the data integrity trouble was a disappointing surprise.

        • I had a CD-R writer that cost four digits that required an upgrade so it could burn at 2x speed. Well worth it at the time, otherwise, it would be 60+ minutes from initial writing until the CD was finalized. I had to use it on its own SCSI PCI card (2940UW) and use Linux because any interruptions to writing the data stream would make a coaster.

          Now, a decent CD/DVD drive can burn a disk in a few minutes... and have buffer underrun protection. Doesn't matter how crappy the OS is, and it can use a dodgy I/O

    • is this going to cost for the drive?

      Depends. A 54 nm laser diode can be quite pricey - check DigiKey for current prices. You might be able to find a vendor on AliBaba as well.

      (Note to the humor impaired: 54nm is in the X-ray spectrum, narrower than Vacuum UV, and the world's shortest wavelength diode laser tops out at about 270 nm. A 54nm laser is essentially unobtanium outside of a particle accelerator.)

      I couldn't get the paywalled paper and the abstract didn't mention the laser, but I strongly suspect that 54nm is the *size* of the diode, a

      • Re:Check DigiKey for prices (Score:5, Informative)

        by test321 ( 8891681 ) on Sunday February 25, 2024 @06:40PM (#64268048)

        They use two lasers (515, 639 nm) and the material does the magic. From the paywalled paper:

        "The whole process in Fig. 3a starts with the first 515-nm femtosecond writing laser beam triggering the transformation of the polymer from the second to the third state. Subsequently, the doughnut-shaped 639-nm continuous-wave (CW) laser beam induces the triplet–triplet absorption effect, inhibiting polymerization during the writing process and simultaneously deactivating the fluorescence enhancement of the HPS-AIEgens from the second to the third state. This ultimately results in a recorded spot of super-resolution size, which can be read by all-optically differentiating the fluorescence intensities of recorded and unrecorded areas with a high signal-to-noise ratio. [...]
        We conducted further investigations into the effect of the deactivation beam on the writing spot size, as shown in Fig. 4a, and found that the lateral size of the spot decreased as the power of the deactivation beam increased, ultimately reaching a minimum subdiffraction feature size of 54.6 +- 2.2 nm (about lambda/12)."

    • is this going to cost for the drive?

      Better question: How fast? Average read and, more importantly, write rate and time to actually write 1 Petabit to a disc. Also, considering most people don't have a Petabit of data sitting around waiting to archived, it would be better if it can be re-written or, at least, not just write once so data can be added/appended later.

      • I had the same questions about speed, etc.

        As far as rewritability, that would be nice but if the first few gen were reasonably priced write once and had reasonable speed then the write once isn't that big a deal as most people will have tons of space available. Zeroing old data to write new data out isn't that big a deal if a disk costs, say, $100. How long would it take to burn through that many gigs before you needed another fresh disk?

        I wonder how reliable these things are though. If you put 125k gigs

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ls671 ( 1122017 )

          I wonder how reliable these things are though. If you put 125k gigs on a single disk it better be god damned fucking never fail reliable because even if you have good backups, that's going to suck to deal with.

          I guess any sane person would have multiple copies. Hopefully, not all copies would fail.

      • Most people didn't have 700 megs to write to a cd when the recordable format came out 30 years later no one would scoff at the fact I have a 20TB nas just backing up my wife's graphics files for her home biz

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        I think that write once would be fine, as long as they implement multi-session writes.

        OTOH, I have to wonder about durability, error rate, etc.

        So far this is just a lab demo, though, so one can't really extrapolate from this to a commercial product.

      • Another question: How fragile is this media? It sounds like it might be super-sensitive to things and forces that a regular CD/DVD would shrug off.

        On the other hand, some of the data itself might be protected by being layers deep in the material, a scratch or nick might only obscure a few layers.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

        I don't think the engineers will forget to put multi-session writing in the spec from the beginning this time. Hopefully that lesson has been learned.

  • Lab accomplishments mean absolutely nothing if they can't be followed up by mass affordable manufacturing.

  • Dumb units are dumb (Score:5, Informative)

    by Burdell ( 228580 ) on Sunday February 25, 2024 @06:00PM (#64267946)

    Nobody talks about storage in terms of bits, it's always bytes. And there's a more applicable unit than 125,000 gigabytes, it's called 125 terabytes. And you can readily buy consumer 22TB hard drives today, so 125TB would require a stack of hard drives 6 inches tall, not 6 feet tall.

    And oh yeah, multi-layer optical recording has been around for a long time, and multi-layer mastered discs even longer (the very first sentence of the summary is also dumb).

    Being able to make a disc that can store 1.25TB on a single layer (I'm assuming all the layers are the same density) is a nice feat in itself, and 100 layers is interesting too. But a dumb article is just irritating. Maybe they could have told us how many Olympic-sized swimming pools full of punchcards this was equal to?

    • Re:Dumb units are dumb (Score:5, Funny)

      by iAmWaySmarterThanYou ( 10095012 ) on Sunday February 25, 2024 @06:17PM (#64267998)

      Libraries of Congress. Please use the Standard Units, sir.

    • You can buy a 61.44 TB QLC SSD from Solidigm [solidigm.com].

      It comes in the EL.1 form factor, which is 1.8 cm thick and you'd need two of them, so a stack 3.6 cm high.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Entrope ( 68843 )

      I was curious about the physical size of bits on this thing. Wikipedia says a standard CD has a program area of 86.05 cm^2. 10 terabits per layer means they achieve an areal density of just about 0.75 Tb/in^2 -- compared with ~1.3 Tb/in^2 for current commercial high-density hard drives. So the most impressive aspect seems to be the layering, which probably makes it much more complicated to read and write at high speeds.

    • Nobody talks about storage in terms of bits

      In research, they use capacity in bits and density in Gbit/sq in. You can see the Extended Table 1 from the paper (in free access) https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com] and Wikipedia for reference on the units See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      It's also pretty silly in that it's a fine recording medium, but a lousy distribution medium.

      One needs to remember that the only reason we can "only" store 33GB a layer is because that's the limit of our physical manufacturing process - we physically take a metal die and press it into a disc of polycarbonate plastic, and that's how we mass-manufacture physical storage discs used for movies, games, etc. In well under a minute we can press a complete disc (the actual pressing part takes seconds)

      Storing data m

      • This. I'd be very happy if Blu-Ray could add more layers to BDXL, perhaps even use MO technology so that magnetic domains can be melted and frozen in place, if that would give better aerial density than pits.

        It may not be easily stamped for mass production, but on the other hand, this would be great for backups. If a Blu-Ray variant could hold storage in the terabytes, it would work wonders for backups. All one needs to do is find the disk autochangers from the 90s that held 400+ CDs, use that for a tape

      • They make commercial scale SD card duplicators. There's several in the range of 100-200 SD cards at once in a $15-20k machine. Not as cheap as pressing optical media, but still in the bulk manufacture realm.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I'm more interested in durability. 1.25TB is half an LTO6 tape, but may be interesting if it is extremely durable.

      The current best discs are BluRay with metal non-organic layers. They are sold as M-DISC and other brands. Only time will really tell, but they are supposed to be more stable than organic dye based discs. Max you can put on one is theoretically 125GB, but I've only ever seen 100GB ones for sale.

      That's stupid gigabytes, not real power of two ones.

  • Finally something big enough to hold all my...baby pictures. In case of emergency.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Calydor ( 739835 )

      Yes, FBI. This post right here.

      • O-O Not what I was thinking!

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ls671 ( 1122017 )

          I think his point is that you should have been thinking this way because the FBI will anyway. Naked baby pictures were really common back in the days. My parents had several of me as a baby. Nowadays, any such picture would be automatically flagged so just be careful.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Calydor ( 739835 )

            Pictures of a toddler splashing around in a bathtub were so incredibly common; I think all parents had a whole photo album of such pictures simply because it was cute and showed the kid having the time of their life.

            Now, though ... oh boy. You'd probably get arrested just for taking your kid's clothes off so they can have a bath in the first place.

            • You're probably OK, just don't run against Joe Biden with an "R" after your name.

            • Re:Finally (Score:4, Informative)

              by TractorBarry ( 788340 ) on Monday February 26, 2024 @07:10AM (#64268918) Homepage

              Shows how sick the American mindset is. My family's half Swedish and no-one bats an eyelid at nudity. I think every member of the family has appeared nude in photos at all sorts of ages. I've got pictures of me as a baby sitting naked on a setee next to my dad's Playboy magazine, sitting on a tractor with no pants on, in the bath with my mum etc. etc. I was just one of those kids who liked to go sky clad :)

              Us Europeans have the totally amazing ability to seperate the act of being nude with the act of having sex. Mainly because we don't live in a totally repressed culture like the US where the mere sight of a ladies "babies bar" will cause a societal meltdown.

              It's almost like there's a conspiracy to make you all so repressed you can use the merest hint of getting sex to sell more product :)~

  • Something seems off (Score:5, Informative)

    by WhatAreYouDoingHere ( 2458602 ) on Sunday February 25, 2024 @06:03PM (#64267954)

    125,000 gigabytes of data...

    As Gizmodo offers for reference, that same petabit of information would require roughly a six-and-a-half foot tall stack of HHD drives — if you tried to encode the same amount of data onto Blu-rays, you'd need around 10,000 blank ones to complete your (extremely inefficient) challenge.

    125,000 GB = 125 TB, right? A standard single-layer Blu-ray is 25 GB, thus 5,000 (not around 10,000) of those discs would equal 125 TB. And HDD (I assume they didn't actually mean HHD, what is that?) of 20TB can easily be found, so, 6 of those drives would = 120 TB, a comparable amount; or, say 7 of them if you want to make sure to equal/exceed the 125 TB. 7 hard drives is a "six-and-a-half foot tall stack"? Just how are they stacking those?

  • Quotes that didn't age well (Score:3)

    by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Sunday February 25, 2024 @06:05PM (#64267958) Homepage Journal

    Johnny Mnemonic: I can carry nearly eighty gigs of data in my head.

      K.I.T.T. : I am a Knight Industries 2000 with a 1000 megabits of memory and a one nanosecond access time.

    • 80 gigs of secret spy v spy data is actually a lot. I assume he's not carrying a copy of the latest call of duty.

      Important data doesn't have to be big.

      1000 megabits otoh... I got nothing... maybe his algorithms and cpu were so far future he didn't need to remember much, just regenerate it on the fly :-)

      • Perhaps those are 1000 million quantum bits (qubits)? And perhaps is just the memory used in KITT's main quantum processing cores, not actual medium or long-term storage?

        https://www.technologyreview.c... [technologyreview.com]
        "Late last year [2022], IBM took the record for the largest quantum computing system with a processor that contained 433 quantum bits, or qubits, the fundamental building blocks of quantum information processing. Now, the company has set its sights on a much bigger target: a 100,000-qubit machine that it aim

      • Have you seen the size of CoD games recently?

        And what makes you think he is not carrying the source code/texture/3d models of the next unreleased CoD? ;)

        • Tbh no I haven't. I was never a fps fan :-)

          More into 4x, turn based strategy and dungeon crawls but I did have a blast with mech warrior 5 which is basically a robot fps.

          • Tbh no I haven't. I was never a fps fan :-)

            More into 4x, turn based strategy and dungeon crawls but I did have a blast with mech warrior 5 which is basically a robot fps.

            Damn it, you sound like me!!!

            Although I did play the original Doom, Quake, etc years ago.

            • My issue with most fps is the lack of sense of surroundings I get. For example, I get shot, ok that happens, but from what direction? No fucking clue. Unless the attacking is in your front 90 degrees so you see them fire at you they could be anywhere. Maybe that's realistic? I don't know, I've never been shot but I think in a real world situation I'd hear the gun shot, feel the hit in a body part, etc.

              Looking at the world through a 90 degree port is just awkward. I feel very separate from my in game a

  • Meh (Score:3)

    by war4peace ( 1628283 ) on Sunday February 25, 2024 @06:31PM (#64268026)

    I've heard that before...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

  • I'm more interested in other features (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Sunday February 25, 2024 @06:46PM (#64268054)

    Give me durability, give me indexing.

    I'm pretty sure if you gave me a 10 petabytes of storage I could have nice high-def video of my entire life from birth to death. Collecting that video and audio, periodically dumping the data from a portable device, compressing all the raw video to H.265, and then writing it to long term storage is probably a bigger issue at this point than actual storage capacity.

    Well before that point you've reached needing to properly index it so you can find what you want when you want it.

    At some point AFTER that, you start worrying about how stable that storage media happens to be. Luckily, we now have the tech to write to quartz, which should last as long as the planet, though the density is low enough you'd need almost 2 million DVD-sized quartz discs to record your life. It's early days though, I would expect that to come down a lot.

    • Why would indexing be an issue for the storage medium? What else, you're going to ask it to cook dinner for you?

      • Indexing grows in faster than the amount of data stored. A simple flat file index does fine when you have a few thousand things you're happy to organize in a tree and classify into a handful of categories, but when you're talking petabytes of data suddenly what would have previously returned a few dozen results now return millions or billions.

        You need a full relational database that is very thoughtfully designed or you'll never find what you're looking for unless you already recall it well enough you don't

        • You'd need an AI working continuously in the background, scanning and classifying and tagging all the moments, events, interactions, etc. Let it do all the boring work work of classifying and sorting all that data while you just go about your day.

          You'd pretty much have to access all this life-stream info through the AI; it would be the only practical way to locate what you wanted in a literal lifetime of data.

          You'd ask it some vague question about "that time I went to Mondo-Pizza and saw Bill and Nancy ther

        • You misunderstand my question. Why does and index need to be part of the design of the medium. It is something at a higher level, much like TCP/IP doesn't define the electrical characteristics of the Ethernet PHY, indexing has nothing to do with the development of a storage medium. At its lowest level maybe a file system, but it can sit higher than that too.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      You might be surprised. High definition video eats up storage space really fast. For 4k, if you want mastering quality, it's 200Mb/sec, or 1.5GB/minute.

  • But is it suitable for long term archival storage? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by upuv ( 1201447 ) on Sunday February 25, 2024 @07:17PM (#64268078) Journal

    Great achievement.

    Here's the but.

    Is the new format suitable for long term data storage? In excess of 50 years?

    I think physical media only future is the long term storage of data. So capacity and longevity are both factors.

    This is an honest question.

    • Unless they significantly improve the materials, sorry, no, I don't think so. At least as long as we are talking about user-writable media.

      The data density aspect is a double-edged sword and the relative Achilles heel of it all.
      Speaking strictly from experience, in about 10 years (on the average), CDR discs I wrote started exhibiting data errors. It doesn't take many bits to make a file unreadable or a zip file corrupted. DVDRs have been slightly better but the problems are relatively bigger when they appea

      • I do wonder why that happens so fast for some people.

        All of my 20-25 year old CD-R's have zero or few C2 errors, same with the DVD-R's with few POE. Excluding any with physical damage obviously.

        I've had one unknown CD-R bronze, but thats it, even then there were no read errors but this was before I was scanning discs so I cant say what error correction the drive was having to do.

        I have noticed an uptick in PI8 errors on DVD+R DL media at the very edge where the layer transition is, which is not unexpected a

      • I have perfectly readable CD's written 25 years ago (OK, I last checked if they are readable a year ago). And some of them used to be heavyly used - they have plenty of scratches.

        I have also some with their reflective layer pealing off. And among those ones which are also still readable. But I've always invested in quality disks, and I store them in cases.

        In my experience optical storage is much more reliable than magnetic storage. When I was student I usualy wrote my homework multiple times in mult

  • thus exponentially raising the normal-sized disk's capacity

    Sorry, this would be "linearly raising".

  • Si they can control 100 layers of densely packed bit flips. Would this lab technology also derive a path for true 3D display where voxels would be controlled into a 3-dimensional space in a solid medium with lasers?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hawk ( 1151 )

      that *would* be almost full circle--the first instant replays were done on Monday Night Football, using an IBM hard drive, rigged to record analog instead of digital.

      hawk

  • You could archive every movie you've ever owned in a single disk, but breathe on it too heavily and the micro abrasions will wipe out the Godfather trilogy, and every Adam Sandler animated movie worth watching. Or, to put it another way, just the Godfather trilogy.

  • Doesn't that only apply to CDs? DVD and Blu-ray are both multi layer...
  • why the fucking stupid measuring numbers. surely in todays age 1 petabit is better referred to as 125 terabytes rather than in gigabytes. which also gives a much better reference to modern hard drives whose capacity is predominately measured in terabytes now. So equivalent to about 4 of the highest capacity spinning rust drives

  • Petabytes are all well and good, but what I need to know is how many "Libraries of Congress" is that?

  • My sex life is non-existent and my "cultured video collection" is larger than is healthy. This is just going to destroy what's left.

    • My sex life is non-existent and my "cultured video collection" is larger than is healthy. This is just going to destroy what's left.

      Frig, I said that out aloud... well there goes the illusion of being the one tech guy who got lucky.

  • Make it smaller, like 3.5 inch big, get it on a plastic protector cover to protect it from scratches and allow some fancy paper prints to be applied to it.
    I'm pretty sure someone probably invented a whole inserting/ejecting mechanism that could do very well for this fancy new format.

    • > We don't need THAT much storage

      It's not for "us".

      Nobody needs storage these days. We are expected to rent cloud space.

  • You can get a terabyte on a thumbdrive, so WHAT is the point?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MrBrklyn ( 4775 )

      nevermind. I thought that a 40meg hard drive would be all that I would ever need as well. We seem to fill up as much space as we can acquire.

    • > You can get a terabyte on a thumbdrive, so WHAT is the point?

      This is removable media, the thumbdrive is a storage device. The media in a thumbdrive is not removable.

      Besides, it's not for the consumer market. The thumbdirve has no market either as I know so many people who think they are not even made anymore!

  • ... 1 petabit, 125000 gigabytes is roughly 125 terrabytes and that's about 4x 32 terrayte hdd's that would fit my 4 bay NAS.

    Nice to be able to backup my NAS to one optical disc tho ....

  • Write (Score:3)

    by ThurstonMoore ( 605470 ) on Monday February 26, 2024 @08:44AM (#64269000)

    How long will it take to write that much data to one of these disks?

  • This is good news. Quite an upgrade from the wax-cylinder sized petabit device.

  • The biggest issue I've had with drives the last few years is that it can take DAYS to copy a fraction of a drive's worth of data to another drive. I'd like to see faster throughputs more than greater capacity at this point. A petabit sized CD isn't too useful if it takes hours to read/write much.

    A DVDr or Blu-Ray disk 1generally takes ~1 minute to write 1GB. So a disk holds 125,000GB of data, will it take 125,000 seconds to fill which is about a day and a half. Maybe they will be able to eventually write to

  • Now I can actually back up my 64Tb storage array. Speed ? Still ? 2 weeks per backup ? Release date would be nice.
  • People measure stuff in Petabytes, not petabits. Also don't start with the pibibytes and pibibits nonsense!

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