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Data Storage

5D Optical Disc Could Store 500TB For Billions of Year (extremetech.com) 133

Researchers from the University of Southampton "have developed a fast and energy-efficient laser-writing method for producing high-density nanostructures in silica glass," reports Optica. "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." ExtremeTech reports: This type of data storage uses three layers of nanoscale dots in a glass disc. The size, orientation, and position (in three dimensions) of the dots gives you the five "dimensions" used to encode data. Researchers say that a 5D disc could remain readable after 13.8 billion years, but it would be surprising if anyone was even around to read them at that point. In the shorter term, 5D optical media could also survive after being heated to 1,000 degrees Celsius.

The technique devised by doctoral researcher Yuhao Lei uses a femtosecond laser with a high repetition rate. The process starts with a seeding pulse that creates a nanovoid, but the fast pulse doesn't need to actually write any data. The repeated weak pulses leverage a phenomenon known as near-field enhancement to sculpt the nanostructures in a more gentle way. The researchers evaluated laser pulses at a variety of power levels, finding a level that sped up writing without damaging the silica glass disc. The study reported a maximum data rate of one million voxels per second, but each bit requires several voxels in 5D optical systems. That works out to a data rate of about 230 kilobytes per second. At that point, it becomes feasible to fill one of the discs, which have an estimated capacity of 500TB. It would take about two months to write this much data, after which it cannot be changed.

This work is still in the early stages, but the team managed to write and retrieve 5GB of text data using a 5D optical medium. All you need to read the stored data is a microscope and polarizer, and it should be readable for eons.
The findings appear in Optica, Optica Publishing Group's journal for high-impact research.
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5D Optical Disc Could Store 500TB For Billions of Year

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  • What will read it? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Monday November 01, 2021 @08:33PM (#61949671) Journal
    We can't even read my old verbatim 8 inch floppy disks anymore.

    Nor the 100 MB Jaz disks

    Nor my 4mm Digital Tape backup

    I still have my 1200 feet 0.5 inch wide 6250 bytes / inch BASF spool with me.

    • DVD, Blu-Ray, and BD-UHD disks have problems with being read if the chemicals from the packaging are allowed to settle on them. Imagine trying to get this kind of precision outside of a lab, with 100 graduate students tuning up the laser optics every few writes?

      • DVD, Blu-Ray, and BD-UHD disks have problems with being read if the chemicals from the packaging are allowed to settle on them. Imagine trying to get this kind of precision outside of a lab, with 100 graduate students tuning up the laser optics every few writes?

        Perhaps billions of years is an optimistic extrapolation based on best case laboratory conditions sprinkled with fairy dust... you don't ever know the depth of the desperation of the authoring party.

        They might possess the angst of a short term crypto trader hedging his bets with tulips.

      • AFAIK, original (non-LTH) BD-R is magneto-optical & should remain readable for at least a century, as long as the disc itself is stored with reasonable care (dry, not exposed to the elements or physical abuse, generally within temperature range for human comfort). The laser melts the plastic, a magnetic field orients particles, the plastic hardens (freezing them in place), and it's good for a century or more.

        NEWER BD-R media (LTH-type) is another matter entirely. It uses organic dyes (like DVD-R). Manuf

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Jaz was not 100MB, that size is for a Zip drive.

    • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Monday November 01, 2021 @08:49PM (#61949719)

      You can buy readers for any of those formats.

      There are also online services that will read your media and email you the contents.

      No non-proprietary standard digital format has ever died. If your media is good, it can be read.

      • by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Monday November 01, 2021 @09:20PM (#61949781) Journal
        OMG! My precious copy of ChiWriter and Digger are still readable? It has my original plots of adaptive refinement of the leading edge of NACA 0012 airfoil ! Someday, I will actually pay for them to be decoded ... Got me an assistantship and admission and an exemption from GRE too!
      • by musicon ( 724240 )

        I have to disagree with you there somewhat -- I have a stack of old 4MM DAT backup tapes that I would like to restore, but I haven't been able to locate anyone in the Dallas / Ft. Worth TX area capable of doing so, and the only online services I've located charge an arm-and-a-leg. I'm literally speaking about being charged $4-5k for 10 tapes.

        So while it /may/ be possible, it's not feasible for most people.

        • I just spent 20 seconds typing "4mm DAT" and clicking an eBay link to see dozens of drives for sale starting at around $25.

    • Nor my 4mm Digital Tape backup

      I can read DDS-1 to DAT-160, and write DDS-4 to DAT-160. I don't have a DAT-320 drive, but I could get one if that ever comes up. Bring them on over and I'll copy them onto M-Disc Blu-Ray or whatever. :)

      I stream 'git bundle' straight into my tape device for doing source backups. I also have the usual TAR based backups. I have a script that creates both the TAR and takes a snapshot to Restic so that I have both short-term (remote disk on the "cloud") and long-term local backups.

      The kinds of things I back up

    • My one experience with BASF tape (1/2" 1600 bpi) made me never trust them again. I was a junior research assistant, with a PI who was running out of money. I wanted a copy of the research data, the PI wanted a backup copy off site, and the copyright owner granted me permission to copy (I still have the letter). We had just enough money left to make a full copy. None of the 5 or so tapes were readable.
      • by HiThere ( 15173 )

        Sorry you got a bad batch of tapes...if it wasn't the tape machine write stage. Generally they were decent tapes. (Perhaps they weren't stored in a temperature controlled environment. That did horrible things to tapes.)

        My horror story involves 800 BPI even parity tapes, where a zero couldn't be distinguished from a record gap. Our entire copy of the 1960 Census travel data was unreadable. (Of course that's not literally true. One could read is as variable sized BCD records, and extrapolate record by r

    • You just don't know the right people. Working drives of all those systems still exist
    • by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 ) on Monday November 01, 2021 @10:51PM (#61949915) Homepage

      And even if you did have equipment to read these discs in a billion years, what software would one use to read the file formats? It's getting harder to read old Word and Excel files, WordPerfect is gone, Lotus 1-2-3 and VisiCalc. PDF is fairly stable, but it too keeps getting new features, some of which will eventually be discontinued. Databases come and go, nobody can read dBase or Paradox databases any more.

      That whole billion years thing is nothing more than a gimmick. The only way to prevent loss long-term is the same as with anything constructed by humans: It is necessary to maintain them. Without constant maintenance, things rot, including data.

      • by stfvon007 ( 632997 ) <`moc.oohay' `ta' `700ramgine'> on Monday November 01, 2021 @11:54PM (#61950011) Journal

        Also it would take 69 years to write the entire disk currently at 230kBps. (the 60 days estimate in the article is with hundreds of parallel write operations on the same disk)

      • If there's enough interest in a format, provided it's not encrypted or something like that people will make libraries to read them. I believe LibreOffice already supports a bunch of old formats although those probably were pretty simple and probably easy to reverse engineer.
        Also, we live in the era of virtualization and emulation. You can still run DOS programs (in e.g. DosBOX) if you need to read the data.
        • Your argument is valid on a scale of decades. We live in an "era"...measured in terms of a 1- or 2-digit number of years. Have you ever tried to read a 300-year-old document? Even though it's on paper, using handwriting, such documents are already hard to read. A thousand-year-old document requires extensive schooling to read. A billion years is a very, very long time.

          A billion years ago, multicellular life hadn't yet evolved, let alone humans. In another billion years, what will life even be like? Will the

          • by SirSlud ( 67381 )

            apparently the word "could" is very confusing to people

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        The billion years claim seems like a bit of misdirection. When storing data for realistic timeframes what you want to know is how resistant to things like temperature cycling, extreme temperatures, light, moisture, abrasion and so forth the disc is. Then you want to know how durable the reader is and what the realistic prospects of them being around in say 20 or 50 years will be.

        One thing you can say about archival BluRay, the players can read CDs made 35 years ago and the drives will likely be manufactured

      • For document archiving, PDF/A is used. It's a somewhat feature limited PDF where fonts have to be embedded instead of linked.

        https://www.prepressure.com/pd... [prepressure.com]

        It was created for areas where long term document storage is required by law (law practices, banks, medical records, etc).

        • Great! And PDF/A has been a standard for...15 years now! Just 999,999,985 years of changing whims and changing life to go. Let's see how that standard holds up.

    • Nor the 100 MB Jaz disks

      Jaz were either 1 gig or 2 (can't remember). Zip drives were 100MB

    • I restored some 4mm tapes last year from the mid to late 1990s. All the data was intact. Every single bit. Those were DDS-1, DDS-2 anf DDS-4. Booting OS/2 on bare metal to run Bakupwiz and GTAK on a recent machine was harder. The LSI/Symbios Ultra160 SCSI card BIOS did not like the Intel Z170 chipset. Worked fine on an AMD 990FX board, though. I bought an Adaptec Ultra320 for the next time I want to touch those tapes. Might be another decade.

      OTOH, my 3.5 floppies from the same time period almost all have s

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        I've been looking at options for recovering floppy disks that are damaged like that. There are floppy disk readers that just use a brute force method, re-read the sector over and over and use statistical analysis and checksums to try to recover as much of the data as possible. I want to go a step further though.

        Rather than relying on the drive to decode the data, I want to use an oscilloscope to capture the raw flux readings from the drive head. From there software could do automatic threshold setting and t

      • Do those tapes use any kind of error correction mechanisms? I they don't I'm very impressed they've managed to keep the data intact for that long
        • by madbrain ( 11432 )

          Yes, DDS tapes all have error correction at the hardware level. There is also optional DDS-DC data compression.

      • 8" floppies have the fewest bits per unit of area. 5.25" floppies are second. 3.5" are a distant third. They tend to have improved oxides but still suffer from this. It's likely you can read your old Apple floppies, and maybe even 720k 3.5", but 1.44MB 3.5" can be tricky. And the nonstandard more dense formats on DD 3.5s are also difficult, like Amiga 880kB.

    • From TFA: you can read it with a microscope. So even if the original hardware design is lost, the data can be recovered with basic industrial tools.

    • Simple. The first GB or so of the disk will contain instructions for making a reader.
    • The disk contain just bits. If you didn't transfer them to another format (CD, HD) you're simply a fool.

      I transferred the data from my old floppy disks (1.44MB) long ago to CD and now HD or SSD.
  • by Ostracus ( 1354233 ) on Monday November 01, 2021 @08:39PM (#61949695) Journal

    13.8 Billion years at 500TB is about right to store a personality for a long time.

    • 13.8 Billion years at 500TB is about right to store a personality for a long time.

      The Human Connectome Project [wikipedia.org] estimates that the contents of a human brain is about 800 GB. So 500 TB can store about 600 "personalities".

      • by HiThere ( 15173 )

        You're ignoring that a lot of the data is identical from person to person. All that stuff about maintaining homeostatis in temperature can be stored as one copy shared by just about everybody. (The same for how to regulate the heart beat rate, etc.)
        OTOH, I'm not really sure how trustworthy their estimate is. I don't have a better one, but...well, there's a lot of purely mechanical stuff in each brain, that's pretty much the same between brains. But it's also true that synapses may be more complex than t

      • That is for one cubic centimeter of brain. Not the whole brain.
        And: that is only the topology of the brain as in amount of cells and synaptic connections. Not the stored information.

        • The connections are the information if I am not mistaken plus state. The state would be the synapse firing and potentially for how long. The state seems miniscule in relation to the former but I am not a neuroscientist.

          I think this raises an interesting question, how much information can you can from the network of connections if you don't have the state. Could you jump start a stateless mapping of neural connections in any way or is the evolution of those connections rather meaningless with the state infor

          • few mistakes... meh.

            *can you obtain

            *without state

          • by Whibla ( 210729 )

            Could you jump start a stateless mapping of neural connections in any way or is the evolution of those connections rather meaningless with the state information which was part of their development.

            Has there ever been a case of a coma patient waking up and remembering their past?

            (Yes, I am aware it's not quite the same, but it (minimally conscious) is very very close.)

            Oh, and I believe the answer is "yes", though I can't be arsed to google it...

            • The answer is yes but I think while brain dead refers to a lack of higher function, it's probably more comparable to think of restarting someone's heart, such as CPR. In brain death, the basic functions of a body persist such as the heart pumping. With someone who is completely dead and reviced, they are more comparable but anatomically some part of the state may persist which leads to the question what minimal part of the state is needed for consciousness and in turn could lead to treatments for the coma p

    • I patented and copyrighted my genome so that they can't use it for any purposes

    • No, it's not. Your brain is not a computer. It is a dynamic organ and the experience of sentience can't be captured in a static image like that. The transhuman Singularity is just the Rapture for nerds.
  • by NFN_NLN ( 633283 ) on Monday November 01, 2021 @08:50PM (#61949727)

    Billions of years from now, future humanoids will be able to watch all 10 seasons of "Friends" in 4K remastered digital form with 5.1 surround sound.

  • It is now time to put a library of human knowledge and history on the Moon, and perhaps on Mars too. Perhaps in a monolith, as in 2001 A Space Odyssey.
    • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Perhaps in a monolith, as in 2001 A Space Odyssey.

      Real aliens use microservices now. Get with the "in" greys.

  • by jddj ( 1085169 ) on Monday November 01, 2021 @09:05PM (#61949749) Journal

    Corrupt sector lost the "s" from "Years" in the headline...

  • This backup copy won't be right up to the minute, but nobody will be able to encrypt the data and make it useless to you.

    While write speed is slow, TFS doesn't tell us about read speed. If reasonable this is great for archival storage of unchanging files: historic books, art, music, and of course pron. Send a disk on the next Voyager for the enjoyment of extraterrestrials.

    • Send a disk on the next Voyager for the enjoyment of extraterrestrials.

      I wish people would stop suggesting doing this. If the aliens that find it are friendly, awesome. If not, we've just fucked ourselves. Devoid of any information, that would appear to be a 50/50 risk. You gonna play Russian Roulette with 3 rounds loaded?

  • https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Data_crystal

  • When the media moves, it has many things that can affect it, like scratches, incorrect sync, etc.

    Science Fiction has had "data crystals" as part of the fictional cultures for a long time. We have the tech to do such things as fixed media read by a moving laser. A fixed media can be accessed more precisely.

    • Why does it have to be a spinning disk?

      It doesn't, and in fact the prototype isn't. It's a square of glass, and it isn't spun while written or read. Instead it shuffles along on an electronically controlled stage, which takes care of moving it in tiny increments under the aiming point of the laser.

      We have the tech to do such things as fixed media read by a moving laser. A fixed media can be accessed more precisely.

      We do, and in fact they did as part of their testing in order to achieve the published write speed. They used a 4 setting acousto-optic deflector in the beam path to write to four different "columns" per row while moving the stage underneath the las

  • Researchers say that a 5D disc could remain readable after 13.8 billion years, but it would be surprising if anyone was even around to read them at that point. In the shorter term, 5D optical media could also survive after being heated to 1,000 degrees Celsius.

    Get back to me when they can survive The Sun's red giant phase in 5.4 billion years ... :-)

    • Get back to me when they can survive The Sun's red giant phase in 5.4 billion years ... :-)

      Right, because we don't have the technology to move them out of the Sun's reach right now, let alone a few billion years from now.

      • According to predictions from 1960, we should have colonies on Mars by now.

        Trust me, we'll still not have left this planet 5 billion years from now. We'll probably be far too busy bickering in VR over the shape of the earth.

        • Ha! We'll be lucky if we make it another five centuries as a species. We're too busy trying to destroy ourselves.

  • It sounds almost antediluvian in this age of "just store it on the cloud, and let someone else deal with it", but it would be nice to have some optical drives with at least 1-3TB of capacity, a reasonable writing rate, and perhaps the ability to use a jukebox, similar to the early 2000 autochangers that could hold 400+ CDs. As of now, there are no real archival grade formats (SSD and HDD are storage, but not archival grade), other than LTO tape... and LTO tape drives are not cheap... $5800 for an external

    • by Alcari ( 1017246 )
      LTO tapes may last a pretty long time, but if you want anything to have a good chance (>99%) of working in 50 years, you're going to have to be realy really careful with your tape. Throwing it in the back of the closet won't cut it.
    • LTO drives are only expensive because they are made in small numbers. People then don't bother with proper backup because tape is expensive, so the volume of drives sold remains low, so the price remains high and the vicious circle continues. You can just use a VM to get a virtual tape library into Amazon Glacier which probably works out cheaper and is handily off site. For the volumes I need at work it is cheaper to have our own library.

      • Used LTO drives are dirt cheap. I paid $40 for an LTO4 drive and another $20 for the fiber channel card and cable. Got a deal on some new tapes for $10 each. Oh and $25 for a new cleaning cartridge. Not bad for 800gb uncompressed per tape.

    • M-DISC's manufacturer claims that it is good for 1000 years, which is pretty decent for most uses, and it reads in a standard DVD drive, which seems to be a pretty stable technology. It isn't as large as your hopes, but it is a technology that might advance over time.

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

  • Researchers say that a 5D disc could remain readable after 13.8 billion years,

    In that same vein, I have a pile of dead 2,3 and 4 year old LED light bulbs with 20+ year guarantees. I'm guessing the LEDs still work and the supporting components croaked. So maybe your 5D nanoscale dots survive billions of years, but the disc substrate has the lifespan of a fruitfly.

    • by Alcari ( 1017246 )
      13.8 billion years*

      Similarly to having your LEDs last 20 years*. The asterisk stands for "under optimal conditions". For the lamp that means a perfect LED driver costing 10 times as much as the bulb, and cooling fins three times bigger than the housing. What it means for "5D disks" is anyone's guess.
    • Heat has a lot to do with the lifespan of cheap electronics. At the computer museum we regularly use DEC disk packs from the 1970s. Core memory based machines still run just fine.

  • My car from now on has 7 wheels. 2 are used for acceleration, 4 for breaking and one in the trunk. Wonders of math and physics.
  • by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2021 @12:57AM (#61950081)

    That works out to a data rate of about 230 kilobytes per second. At that point, it becomes feasible to fill one of the discs, which have an estimated capacity of 500TB. It would take about two months to write this much data, after which it cannot be changed.

    500 terabytes / 230 kilobytes
    = (500 * 1000^4 bytes) / (230 * 1024 bytes/s)
    = 2.12296196 x 10^9 seconds
    = 68.9 years

  • My cryogenically preserved future self can have access to all my porn!

  • each bit requires several voxels in 5D optical systems

    Which made me wonder why they'd use an encoding that's less efficient than 1=voxel present, 0=voxel absent. But from the study itself:

    the information was encoded into two retardance levels and eight azimuths of slow axis, implying 4 bits of information per voxel

    • At a guess, perhaps this simplifies targeting. Imagine 1/0 packed just tightly enough to be unreadable. Now move each pair closer together. You can now easily distinguish pairs. If you can also identify 4 unique states per pair you've pushed the boundary.
  • I know the old "if I had a dollar for" line but like I love storage, I read about it and have done since I was an early teen.

    I'm in my 40s now.

    This particular style tech and announcement, is a dime a dozen, every 2 to 5 years the 3D storage one comes up "size of a sugar cube!!" for example.

    Nope.

    Just nope. Until I can buy it (and it's revision 4, for a start) it's non existent.

    • Agreed. It's been a long time since we've had one of these stories between the cold fusion breakthroughs. Been hearing tales about this optical storage since the 1990s.

  • I haven't seen a way over hyped, never-gonna-happen optical storage solution for ages. It's like old times...

  • Wow, overoptimistic much?

      I would be happy with a disc that could hold together for my lifetime and maybe +200 or so years.

      After I die, none of the shit that goes on planet Earth would matter to me anyway.

  • It's barely even 3D, with only three layers of these "dots" on a flat disc. Storing more than one bit of information per dot by altering their size and orientation doesn't mean there are more "dimensions" to it - it's like a paper printout using alphanumeric characters vs. one that's just 1's and 0's. It provides higher density of data, which is a good thing but doesn't require the hyperbolic language.

  • Superman memory crystals are coming!

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