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.

Comments

Oh UTF8, where art thou?

[Chmarr]

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

Re:Oh UTF8, where art thou?

[Chmarr]

> 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!

"a new era of eternal data archiving"

[Nutria]

As long as our descendants have the high technology to read it!!!

Re: "a new era of eternal data archiving"

[qbast]

Dig site 12, artifact 2372: perfectly preserved glass discs. Assumed to be religious artifacts, associated with worship of the sun.

Re: "a new era of eternal data archiving"

[hackertourist]

You underestimate archaeologists.

Hang on, there seems to be something embedded in the glass. Let's point a microscope at it.

The Long Now foundation has found a nice solution to this. Put some writing around the edge of the glass disc. Make the initial few words large enough to be readable without magnification, and then make the text progressively smaller to encourage people to grab a magnifier.

Re:"a new era of eternal data archiving"

[Somebody Is Using My]

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 :-)

Re: Scratches

[saloomy]

Glass is hundreds of times more scratch resistant than the extremely delicate magnetic media they install in hard drives (ok it really isn't, but the sensitivity is just as crazy because of the nano-meter tolerances required). Of course, this technology could be used in a protective case, like a hard drive, especially if the density/aging rates are as stated.

I have tons of questions on this...

[blindseer]

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.

Re:I have tons of questions on this...

[dbIII]

Glass is very stable over centuries so long as you don't get it wet. Water attacks it very slowly but will eventually leach it away - hence the fuss about vitirification of nuclear waste and some proposed storage sites being too wet.
The stuff about church windows flowing over time is "chinese whispers" about lead organ pipes somehow getting confused with glass, then attempted justification after the fact because glazier put the stronger thick edge at the bottom. You need low end oven temperatures for glass to flow over a timeframe of centuries.

Re:I have tons of questions on this...

[Namarrgon]

According to the paper, they wrote three layers deep at a 150nm pitch. At 3 bits per nanodot, the claimed 360TB could be stored in about one square inch. Compare that to the latest 10TB HDDs, which have an areal density of around 0.14 TB per square inch.

No figures are given for transfer speeds, though they describe 200kHz laser pulses, which would be about 75 kB/second - not so dramatic, but it is after all a lab prototype. There are numerous options for speeding this up in commercial products.

If the intention is to provide data for future civilisations, then presumably some "key" discs would be included, with information at various scales describing the technology, equipment, and encoding needed to read the next deeper scale. The larger scales could be inscribed in common human-readable languages, but any civilisation capable of imaging the deepest nanoscopic scales would have no problem decoding well-described binary formats as well.

Re:I have tons of questions on this...

[Teun]

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.

Re:I have tons of questions on this...

[wings]

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.

Let me guess...

[GrpA]

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 )

Re:Is that write-once? Or rewritable?

[Namarrgon]

Archiving suggests write-only, but this paper shows that the technology can be used for rewritable storage as well.