Ever worry about long term storage of your valuable data but worry that tapes will rot, disks crash, flash die and optical media be cannibalized by the ink printed on them? How about a process which should hold 360TB of data for 13.8 billion years at 190C and far longer at room temperatures? Researchers in the UK have come up with a rather impressive technique for storing data for the long haul using lasers and optical media. They are writing to fuzed quartz glass with femtosecond pulses of light to create three layers of voxels or an optical vortex if you prefer, which are created by the polarization of a vortex by firing that laser through nano-gratings. Check out more at The Register.
"Boffins in the UK’s Southampton University have devised a five-dimensional storage scheme using glass, femtolasers and a lifespan of billions of years, so they say."
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Well, f**k. Should’ve
Well, f**k. Should’ve patented it back in the 2008 when I had a dream about THIS EXACT SAME WAY OF DOING IT. Though I must admit that quartz crystal in that dream of mine was quite bigger (basically just a huge quartz crystal formation, that looked like something you might see in BSSM’s Crystal Tokyo, or similar). Oh well…not like I can do anything about this now (unless someone develops a time machine, that is), since I didn’t really document any of the stuff I’ve seen in that dream of mine, it’s basically only in my memories right now. But the way is EXACTLY the same (using light waves to shoot inside and through the quartz crystal with the phentom particles).
Superman’s parents did it
Superman’s parents did it first.
Those memory crystals were
Those memory crystals were different (more like optics, rather than raw data storage, due to them producing holograms and etc) and they stored way more data than just the “measly” 360TB. Also – Vox 114.
Babylon 5s data crystals or
Babylon 5s data crystals or Cardassian Optolytic Data Rods store wayyyy more information. 😉
Seriously tho, it’s good to see that there is progress with using solid piece of quartz to store large amount of data. There is still long way to go and perhaps others crystalline material will do even better.
Of course storing data is one thing, making this process common and affordable is entirely different.
Yes, but HOW MANY
Yes, but HOW MANY GIGAQUADS??!?
That there is a shed load of
That there is a shed load of Kitty Videos, and Gradma’s going to be fillen that crystal up ’till she’s pushen up daisies, and her grandkids when they’s Grannies gunna still have room fer more Kitties doing Kitty stuff, even at 4 or 8 K! I bet that they more than double en double the data able to be stored before them grandkids is toothless fer tha final time! So the SUN will go red giant before that many years en that there data goes bad, so they is goin to have to use Pluto fer to warehouse them data crystals!