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Nanostructured Glass Could Provide Highly Durable, Deeply Dense Data Storage (phys.org)

Posted by timothy on from the pictures-of-saints-too dept.

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.

6 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. Oh UTF8, where art thou? by Chmarr · · Score: 5, Funny

    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

    1. Re:Oh UTF8, where art thou? by Chmarr · · Score: 4, Funny

      > Unicode is a virus

      Yes. It is. But it is a virus with several cat faces in it (and possibly one cat feces in it) so all is forgiven!

  2. Let me guess... by GrpA · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?
  3. Re:I have tons of questions on this... by Teun · · Score: 3, Funny

    Given a sufficiently developed culture they will have technology to read this data.

    The problem is DRM, with many millennia of durability Congress will need to expand the period of protection else the IP holders will suffer.

    --
    "The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
  4. Re:I have tons of questions on this... by wings · · Score: 3, Funny

    I can see it now. An advanced civilization finds the key disks, spends months learning the technology, builds special equipment and tools to decode the disks only to find.... cat videos.

  5. Re:"a new era of eternal data archiving" by Somebody+Is+Using+My · · Score: 3, Funny

    USB floppy drives can be had.

    Well, USB 3.5" floppy disk drives can be had. I've /never/ found a 5.25" or 8" floppy drive with a USB interface. And - believe it or not - some people still use those.

    (not me though; I saw the way the wind was blowing and wisely converted everything to Zip disks :-)