Researchers Have Figured Out How to Squeeze 500TB on a DVD-Sized Disc

By switching from crimson lasers to blue lasers with a finer beam, the storage capability of DVDs went from 4.7GB to 25GB to permit Blu-ray discs to carry motion pictures encoded in HD resolutions and past. Last week, researchers from the University of Southampton within the UK revealed the next big breakthrough in disc storage capacities, probably permitting them to hold up to 500TB.

When it involves long-time period storage of digital information that don’t must be readily accessed, gigantic arduous drives aren’t truly the most well-liked resolution. It’s so much cheaper to depend on a medium that’s been round for the reason that ‘70s: magnetic tape. A 12TB tape cartridge will set you back about $100, with the tradeoff being it takes a little longer to load files, and a basic tape cartridge reader runs around $6,000. What if the capacities of tape cartridges could be brought to discs that cost considerably less? At the moment you can get a blank Blu-ray disc for about a buck.

Since 2012, the researchers at the University of Southampton have been working with femtosecond lasers to increase the density of optical storage media. The laser produces powerful but very short pulses of light that etch data into the 3D structure of glass on a nanoscale level. The first breakthrough showing the technique could work managed to squeeze 40MB of data into a square inch of space, but in 2015 the researchers revealed they had pushed the technology to store 360TB of data onto a tiny glass disc that was incredibly stable and resilient—to the point of surviving 13.8 billion years at temperatures of up to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. The only issue was that the data writing technique was very slow, to the point of being impractical for legitimate data storage needs.

That brings us to 2021, with a new breakthrough that researchers are calling 5D data storage because of the multiple layers that make up the etched glass structures. In a recently paper published in the Optical Journal, the researchers detail how instead of using the femtosecond laser to write directly onto glass, the light it produced was used to create an “optical phenomenon known as near-field enhancement” that allows data to be written using weaker light pulses. So not only is less power needed to write and store data, but it can also be done at a faster speed: around 230KB of data every second. That’s nothe place close to the pace of flash reminiscence and different storage options, however knowledge saved this manner could be secure for so long as humanity wanted it to be.

Using their improved methods, the researchers had been capable of retailer 5GB of textual content knowledge on a silica glass disc that’s roughly the identical dimension as a DVD, with 100% accuracy when it got here to retrieving that knowledge afterwards. At the densities used, the glass disc might probably maintain as much as 500TB of knowledge, with some excessive endurance required, as writing that a lot knowledge would take near 60 days. As a consequence, 5D knowledge isn’t fairly prepared for primetime simply but, nevertheless it has already demonstrated some thrilling potential, and has advanced and improved in lower than a decade to nearly being a sensible resolution. Billions of years from now, our descendants might nonetheless have the ability to recognize the fantastic memes that floated across the web in 2021.