China Breakthrough Promises Optical Discs That Store Hundreds of Terabytes (theregister.com) 38
Optical discs that can store up to 200 TB of data could be possible with a new technology developed in China. If commercialized, it could revive optical media as an alternative to hard disk or tape for cost-effective long-term storage. The Register: Researchers at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology (USST) and Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (SIOM) say they have demonstrated that optical storage is possible up to the petabit level by using hundreds of layers, while also claiming to have broken the optical diffraction barrier limiting how close together recorded features can be.
In an article published in Nature titled "A 3D nanoscale optical disk memory with petabit capacity," the researchers detail how they developed a novel optical storage medium they call dye-doped photoresist (DDPR) with aggregation-induced emission luminogens (AIE-DDPR). When applied as a recording layer, this is claimed to outperform other optical systems and hard drives in terms of areal density -- the amount of storage per unit of area. To be specific, the researchers claim it to be 125 times that of a multi-layer optical disk based on gold nanorods, and 24 times that of the most advanced hard drives (based on data from 2022). The proposed recording and retrieval processes for this medium calls for two laser beams each. For optical writing, a 515 nm femtosecond Gaussian laser beam and a doughnut-shaped 639 nm continuous wave laser beam are focused on the recording area.
In an article published in Nature titled "A 3D nanoscale optical disk memory with petabit capacity," the researchers detail how they developed a novel optical storage medium they call dye-doped photoresist (DDPR) with aggregation-induced emission luminogens (AIE-DDPR). When applied as a recording layer, this is claimed to outperform other optical systems and hard drives in terms of areal density -- the amount of storage per unit of area. To be specific, the researchers claim it to be 125 times that of a multi-layer optical disk based on gold nanorods, and 24 times that of the most advanced hard drives (based on data from 2022). The proposed recording and retrieval processes for this medium calls for two laser beams each. For optical writing, a 515 nm femtosecond Gaussian laser beam and a doughnut-shaped 639 nm continuous wave laser beam are focused on the recording area.
Enough space for (Score:5, Funny)
One picture of your momma.
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Only with a sufficient compression algorithm (lempel-ziv-get-your-mom-to-sit-on-it)
Long-term (Score:3)
I can believe this data will be able to be stored. What I can not belive, like it happened with CDs and DVDs, that it will be actual long term storage. This extra value will be optimized out of the manufacturing process via price competition. Sure, some lucky guy will be able to boast their survivor bias twenty years later when his anime collection is still going strong, but that will be no help to everyone else who bet theirs on the hype.
Long term storage, as usual, follows the logic of backups. Multiple copies in different places on different media, and regular verification.
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More of my 40 year old floppies are readable than you might imagine. Media death over time is real, but it's spotty.
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I will second that. I had to pull data off 27 30+ year old floppies from work. They had been stored in an unheated/uncooled basement area and all but one worked fine.
Re: Long-term (Score:2)
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We aren't talking about mass-manufactured industrially pressed CDs.
We are talking about optical media that can be written / re-written such as DVD-R and DVD-RW. Those suffer "bit rot" far quicker because they're not a hard plastic that was meant to never change.
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The problem with the consumer-writable media was the use of organics in the substrate, organics which made the media cheap to manufacture but not enduring for the long term.
Inorganic media were developed, particularly for DVD and BD, and tended to be sold under monikers like archive quality . They also cost more and required writing devices capable of using them.
I had started getting into this as a way of archiving that which I've saved locally in case media servers died, but in the end it required a lot
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Unfortunately in order to convince me the technology will need to mature and be in service for long enough to confirm that it's truly a viable, durable solution, and typically by the time that happens we're moving on to whatever the next new hot thing is regardless of how good it is.
You should probably tell that to all the Fortune-500 companies that still buy LTO tapes by the truckload to keep their backups and archives humming along every single day.
Re: Long-term (Score:5, Informative)
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I have a handful of stamped movie DVDs that are now unreadable. It's not just the burned discs that are a lot more fallible.
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M-Disc has a purported lifespan of 1000 years, and a NITS report stated it was an acceptable archival format for 100 years.
The data can be read by most DVD players (all per wiki).
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Honestly though, if the media has a guarantee life of some higher order single-digit number of years, that might still be good enough if the media is cheap, and has sufficient storage density and sufficient durability to not make it a pain in the ass to handle.
Dealing with optical media is so much better than tape, and tape still rules archival storage. If this is cheap enough, there's no reason you can't run your backup and send the stream to n drives to make multiple copies (which you should probably do
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The problem with that is no one will guarantee the data to be there after n years. And even if they did, that would be of no help to you when the data turns out to be not there anyway because of whatever x reason. What would a guarantee mean here anyway, other than marketing wank?
Cloud is even worse because it will happily accept any mistaken deletions and random corruption you introduce there by the hiccups of your brain and computer, and unless you put in some extra work and money, there will be no older
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The guarantee would mean sales of this product.
Nobody who is serious is buying archival storage that isn't guaranteed to be of archival use for some stated time period. You know a lot of Fortune-500 companies using DVD-RW for production backups? Or do they use far more expensive LTO libraries because the manufacturers of LTO drives and tapes attach lifetime guarantees to the media, the media has sufficient density for their storage needs to complete a backup in less than 24 hours, and the customers unders
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but that's not really what we're talking about, is it?
Honestly I don't know what we are talking about, in the sense that what you told is mostly correct, but completely unrelated to my post.
You start off as if I had argued for the use of optical media as a backup solution, in fact I did the completely opposite. So your jump in to offer tape instead looks, for lack of a better idiom, a bit like fighting a straw man. And your tangent about "expensive" tape is... a bit off. Tape is dirt cheap if you are doing volume that justifies the initial investment. Whether
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Posting as a reply to your comment so you see it, but meant as extension to my other reply.
I have to walk back on my other reply, apologies for the tone. I had already forgotten most of your parent post. I blame... idk really. Myself.
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This.
A lot of my old CDs & DVDs have delaminated. I haven't characterised the type of media (like, are they just my re-writeable ones) but it's worth noting.
Floppies still fine though
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This is pretty much what I recommend to people. For long term archiving, the best thing to do is build or buy a NAS. Something like TrueNAS Scale using ZFS with RAID-Z2 or even RAID-Z3 to ensure bit rot isn't just detected, but actively remedied. Adding scheduled SMART tests and ZFS scrubs to actively check for errors goes without saying. ZFS can also do compression and deduplication, so something like zstd compression would be useful. Deduplication can vary, but requires RAM for its magic, so estimate
Slashdot could de-dupe to save space (Score:5, Informative)
https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
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Dead end (Score:1)
Amazing! (Score:3)
This is unbelievable! Two sets of scientists! Both from the University of Shanghai! Creating petabyte optical discs at exactly the same ti... oh wait.. it's a dupe.
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/02/25/2026232/scientists-create-dvd-sized-disk-storing-1-petabit-125000-gigabytes-of-data [slashdot.org]
I mean, to be fair to the mods, it must be hard to read the thousands of submissions that are actually accepted each day and then remember the general gist of them.
rly big, maybe rly slo (Score:2)
If Chinese $10 terabyte SSDs are any indication (Score:5, Funny)
They are probably just relabeling DVD-RWs and shipping them with modified drivers that do s/GB/TB/g. Chinese watt, Chinese lumen, ... I'm amazed they get the number of items right.
Write speeds (Score:3, Insightful)
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Part of the speed limitation when dealing with spinning media is the rate at which bits pass under the read/write device. There's a limit to how fast you can spin a disk before it comes apart.
Increasing the density of bits by a given factor should also increase the read/write speed by a similar factor, so going from 20GB/disk to 200TB/disk could be up to 10,000x faster, depending on where other bottlenecks are (like multi-layer media where only one layer can read/write at a time).
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We should steal it (Score:3)
We should steal it.
Slashdot Breakthrough will prevent dupes (Score:2)
https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
Slashdot breakthrough will help prevent dupes (only in the lab)
Do the slashdot editors get paid anything? (Score:2)
They don't seem to do anything so, this would be an ideal job to get paid for not doing. The question is, if these guys are being paid, who hired them? And why?
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Honestly at this point it's a mystery. How many editors are ther
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Are they still slow though? (Score:2)
Old optical discs and drives are so slow though. :(