Slashdot Mirror
Nanostructured Glass Could Provide Highly Durable, Deeply Dense Data Storage (phys.org)
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.
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
This sounds like the CD's big brother.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
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.
If the latter... wow.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
As long as our descendants have the high technology to read it!!!
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
new interferometry based memory storage / retrieval.
been possible for along time but they hid the technology from mind kind.
obamasweapon.com
this is all excellent news, but 'a new era of eternal data archiving' !
anyone for a sign of human hubris.
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.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
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 )
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
190 is indeed their projected room temperature (F), because they've skipped ahead a few years and factored in the release of methane from decomposition of clathrates in permafrost and continental shelves.
Because of all that methane, the AGW is proceeding at 30-100 times the rate calculated by IPCC which was based on CO2 alone.
Good forward planning! :-)
We have a lot of Deeply Dense Data that needs Storage.
Archiving suggests write-only, but this paper shows that the technology can be used for rewritable storage as well.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
The best way to compliment this system is with a means of retrieving the data and presenting it using only sunlight. If you could design a system that store light and use it to project a screen and keyboard to access the data, they entire thing can be set in a stone monument.
How much is that in cat images??
,....
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
Nothing ever comes to fruition
Thought not.
Anybody care to explain?
Who cares? With that density, you just use a logging filesystem. Only incremental changes - very handy for rollback as well.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
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 pretty much throwaway sizes in general and I don't even buy anything anymore that's not 128GB USB3.
When you take a class or go to conference or have a vendor give away USB drives and they give away like 2 GB USB2 drives it's like an insult. Sometimes I just take them apart and leave them behind in pieces.
Archiving suggests write-only, but this paper shows that the technology can be used for rewritable storage as well.
I hope it's not write-only - I'd like to be able to read it. Write-once would be acceptable for archiving.
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 you need to do an install from a USB drive or DVD to get your install server going, but once you have then why go back to fiddling with drives...
A:When it's 2 1/2 years old.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
"Archiving suggests write-only"
Remember Iomega? That company released a number of write-only formats, but for some reason none of them caught on.
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 infrequent with ESXi USB flash boot media that it's not something I really worry about. Reliability wise they have been great where I've used them, with zero failures over about 10 combined operational years over several hosts.
The redundant SD card systems are better, but typically I've only employed USB boot media for them where it's been the only alternative, like the client project where the SAN vendor couldn't make FC boot from SAN work and it was the only useful
I don't use them much for data storage, although there are some circumstances where they are useful, like laptops with non-upgradable internal storage where I need offline access to multiple gigabytes of data.
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!
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.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
Have gnu, will travel.
Er, how long does it take to do a DoD 3x overwrite, in case I ever need to get rid of these (or "only" parts of them)? How long to full-glass encrypt them? Current drive wipes go into days and maybe even week(s) now. It needs pre-encryping communication channels and/or a flash-overwrite (not remotely triggerable...) or we'll see lots of smashing happening (all of which beg that archive question).
Before we make nanomolecules ubiquitous, can we please make sure they aren't poison?
We already know that the sharp edges of nanomolecule films tear the hell out of cell walls; we have no idea how (or if!) these things get metabolized.
We polluted the hell out of ourselves through ignorance with organometallics; please please please let's not do that again with nanomolecules...
Yours,
Advanced Degrees in Biology and Biochemistry
no, I don't think he does
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4AEBiyn8Rs
I have heard about holographic memory being the next big thing in storage since the 90's. In 2001 there were companies "demonstrating" prototypes they said would be on the mass market soon that never materialized. It is great that they continue to work on the problems.
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 appeared here many times:
http://news.slashdot.org/story/00/02/07/160201/better-holographic-data-storage
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/00/06/26/228244/how-holographic-storage-works
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/04/02/16/1919223/ntt-develops-stamp-size-1gb-hologram-memory
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/05/04/19/0611252/inphase-announces-300gb-holographic-discs
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/05/13/1647212/new-device-could-greatly-improve-speech-and-image-recognition
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)?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
> Moroni.
Some part of me keeps thinking it went down like this:
Joseph Smith: "I'm going to start the Moron religion and say that it came to me from an angel named Moron and stock up on wives."
Anon: "You don't think anyone would ever believe something that dumb, do you?"
Joseph Smith: "Fine, I'll start the Mormon religion and say Moroni gave it to me."
Anon: "Much better. They'll never even notice."
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...)
Nothing to see here. Move along.
"Archiving suggests write-only"
Remember Iomega? That company released a number of write-only formats, but for some reason none of them caught on.
That was because those formats were mostly "read-never."
Yeah, that was the joke, genius.
I stopped reading after the second word; monospace fonts are less apt for information transmitting than handwriting.