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1TB In A Cubic Centimeter
rgetty writes "Inforworld posted this article describing the process used by a group of engineers and scientists from Kyoto University and Central Glass (Japan) to pack 1TB of data into a cubic centimeter of glass. Portable data warehousing is not too far off..."
The lab I work in uses nanosecond lasers to create BEC's. Down the hall though, is a faculty member who works on femtosecond spectroscopy. As someone guessed, the space required for all the equipment is very large.
It _does_ take up a room, or at least the optical bench does.
But more importantly, in order to generate femotosecond pulses, you need _enormous_ bandwidth (10^15 Hz). These are class 4 lasers that are extremely powerful and also extremely dangerous.
I can't imagine this technology being anything resembling "out of the box" anytime soon --- you'd need an entire support staff just to use it.
I doupt that. Even at a TB per cubic centimeter you aren't gonna walk out with all their data. Last month I was helping one company that was creating 3 TB of new data a day. Add up a few months of that, and you byond pocket size. This wasn't even a really big company, I've worked with some that do 20 TBs a day.
I won't even mention NASA and the like that can do a few 100 TB a day. (most of which they don't process). And speculations of what the NSA (echolin, however it is spelled) can get in a day aren't worth it. Though the latter is important to consider.
Clerk: Hi! Welcome to Fry's! Can I help you?
Shopper: Yes, I'd like one of those 8T holographic cubes.
Clerk: Here you are sir. That'll be $300 for the cube... oh, and $18 million for the giant femtosecond laser. You cleared out a room where you can store this?
Shopper: Yeah, I decided we don't really need a kitchen.
I am, of course, exaggerating. You can't really help at Fry's.
"Do you expect me to talk?" "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!"
...but how the heck are we supposed to back it up?
;-)
--
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
Seriously, this would be a boon for NASA. Currently, they're pushing the limits of backup technology and it's expected to get worse.
A "cube library" (as opposed to tape) with a little shuttle to move the cubes around would be a godsend even if the laser to read them costs 300k.
Picture one of these; the laser might take up most of it, but the savings would be incredible.
-- "I am disrespectful to dirt. Can you not see that I am serious!"
Sure, ten or even five years ago, media size was really important, but as bandwidth increases the information bottleneck is the cost of data storage, and the speed of data transmission.
A terabyte ina sugarcube is terriffic, but not because I'll be able to put a box that can read it on my desktop in 10 years, it's because I'll be able to control a couple hundred gigs on a server somewhere, or even better, everywhere (like OceanStore), because the cost of the hardware is distributed, much like the internet compared to dialup BBSes of the '80s.
One of the supercool things about the net is that I'm using the latest expensive hardware every day when my packets are routed through gigabit routers and fiber-optic backbones. I don't have to pay for it like I did the long-distance copper wire when I called BBSes across the country.
Storage will continue to follow the same trend, where the terabyte and exabyte drive complexes will serve my storage needs, and not some primitive box I plug into my computer and have to upgrade every year or two.
Kevin Fox
--
Kevin Fox
Subject says it all, size is great, but how long does it take to get the femtosecond laser to focus on a different part of the cube to read other data? (not to mention *finding* where this data is stored)
;)
Also, what would the transfer rate be? And how is the data encoded? (CRCs etc. you wouldn't want a speck of dust to prevent you from reading a couple of gigs from the cube...)
I wish there was a more technical article published somewhere (hopefully not in Japanese
-- the cake is a lie
Ok... the house I grew up in is about 110 years old. Some of the windows are the originals. Perhaps some are apt to forget this but, glass is a liquid (albeit an extremely viscous one). Over time, it pours.
Old windows are like that NOT because the glass has "flowed" down over years... but because the methods used to manufacture windows at that time created ones that were thicker on one end, and often slightly rippled. And of course it made more sense for stability to install them with the thicker part downward.
It's all urban legend stuff. So look through the alt.folklore.urban FAQ for details on this.
Besides - there are plenty of people who collect old bottles and the like. My mom does. And there are none of those signs of "flowing" glass, even in some of the REALLY old ones. (As in older than those windows)
I don't believe glass flows at room temperature. At all. And if it does, it's on a much, much longer timescale than what we need to worry about here.
---
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Then, you could fit the entire world's yearly production of information inside a cube that measured...
cube-root(1.5 million) ~= 115 cm
(OK, so how about we create a couple of these every year, and launch them into space, just in case something goes horribly awry with our planet?)
I think its interesting how the avg user will probably not need larger and larger drives anyhow. As the power of your computer increases, and thus the ability to compress/decompress using more and more complex but space-efficient algorithms, so does its ability to 'recreate' on the fly things like music, computer graphics, etc. Remember when everyone said the CD-Rom was the future of gaming because of the size of the medium? For a few years, yes, we had all those 4 CD-Rom pre-rendered movies/scene games, but once the hardware caught up, practically every game now just renders on the fly; consequently, games are way smaller. Anyhow, it is very cool from a datawarehousing standpoint .. things like geographical analysis, centralized data stores (a la library of congress, I guess) will benifit. And the size of the read/write mechanism shouldn't matter as much, although clearly it will have to be reasonable.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Japanese url.
Interesting -- they mention that the areas hit by the laser emit 680nm light, and are 400nm in diameter, and are separated by 100nm in all directions...
They also mention that this is about 2500 times as much data in one square centimeter, and that they extracted different data from different layers of the cube by varying the type of doping material, thereby varying the frequency of emitted light from each layer...
By the way, why does the lameness filter prevent me from posting the url link in japanese with unicode? That's pretty lame...
Holographic storage has been around a long time, and mentioned on /. quite often. However, the substrate life is terrible, and the precision of the lasers involed in writing and reading would be prohibitively expensive to mass produce.
The difference between this and that, is that they store information by writing it onto the same spot from different angles. This is volumetric storage - it's a 3 dimensional grid of points.
Any spoon would be too big.
XFS on my beloved SGI at home does
Max Filesystem size: 18 million TB
Max File size: 9 million TB
That's according to their spec sheet, I could only dream I had 18 exabytes, course then I might need something bigger than an Indigo II, to get good use out of it.
...isn't this what a lot of people complain about with regards to Microsoft: software bloat was made possible by ungodly amounts of hard drive space (or alternately, very inexpensive drives)?
So while I think it's fantastic that these advances are being made, is it really that big of a deal?
Just think... if there was no such thing as MP3s, would your hard drive be bursting at the seams? This is just an example, but there are many things that many people can download now with their broadband connections to quickly fill their (even 75 GB!) drives... porn movies, DiVX, MP3s, you name it.
Now, I'm not really against larger hard drives, but there has to be a tradeoff somewhere. DiVX (and the like) are great, but now with this new technology (hopefully) we'll be able to carry around a credit card or small box with all of our DVDs. I don't really want more space, I want better quality stuff to be stored on that space... I'd rather have DVD quality than DiVX. But if I can get 1 TB in a cubic centimeter, I want something a hell of a lot better than DVD (at least for videos).
Let's just hope the transfer rates will be up to par when this tech finally hits the consumer markets.
In "Babylon 5", I'd always assumed the "data crystals" everyone plugs into their computers used holographic memory as mentioned in the last paragraph of this article. JMS probably had that in mind, too, but it's interesting to read this and find that laser-read data crystals might not be two centuries away after all.
C'Mon people! The most interesting bit...
Using a femtosecond laser, broadband communication technology that enables transmission of terabits of data per second is possible, he said, talking of another project he is working on.
Oh dear! I think I just got sexually aroused by a technical article. =(
Pinky: "What are we going to do tomorrow night Brain?"
Pinky: "What are we going to do tomorrow night Brain?"
Brain: "I would tell you Pinky but this 120 char limi
XFS on my beloved SGI at home does
Max Filesystem size: 18 million TB
Max File size: 9 million TB
BeOS's BFS, also a 64-bit filesystem, handles 18,000,000 TB hard drives and similarly huge file sizes (aka 18,000 petabytes).
"And like that
The artical dosn't spacifically say this, but it appears to be WORM.
Perhaps, someone will write a filesystem that assumes a huge amount of space, but that can only be written to once. Changes to files would be handled with diffs and versioning.
Special care would need to be taken to insure deleted files can be burned out, otherwise this is a law enforcement dream.
Keep in mind that they don't mention the size of the equipment needed to interface with this tiny chunk of glass. While it probably doesn't take up a room or anything, it would also need to bee minimized for any actual space savings.
.. that losing your marbles could become a verys serious affair...
.. if only.
How would you design a filesystem for a storage device with 1 TB or more? It seems to me that the directory tree concept would become unwieldy, too much stuff would get lost.
Above 1 TB, with multiple processes interacting on the data, it would seem to me that the storage device would start to look like a mini-Internet. Perhaps the "domains" and "search engines" concept could be used. Or is there a better way to design such a filesystem from the ground up?
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The article referenced in this post is a bit short on information, but readers can get a more detailed view of the story from this article.
The technique involved is refered to as resonant hole burning. Rufus Cone and his optical group at MSU have been working on many applications of this technique for years, including optical storage and stabilization of diode lasers (how's 20Hz linewidth for stabilization of a diode laser?) highly accurate clocks, metrology and so forth. Cone has a link to a nice power-point presentaion on his web page.
Cone and his group have been using crystalline materials, while this Japanese group is using glass. The advantage of glass is that the storage medium can be tailored to a specific shape. This abstract, published by the Active Glass Project, indicates other interesting research, including the up-conversion of photons using glass.