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5D ‘Superman memory’ crystal could lead to unlimited lifetime data storage
- maggit 13y agoI initially interpreted "5D" in the title as five spatial dimensions, which would be incredible, but the reality is entirely credible: > The information encoding is realised in five dimensions: the size and orientation in addition to the three dimensional position of these nanostructures.
- quchen 13y agoI wonder how orientation is just a single degree of freedom though; somehow one of the polarization directions of the light must get lost along the way.
- vlasev 13y agoPerhaps it is because this is a crystal and there is a relationship or redundancy between the different axes of orientation. EDIT: Actually, this [1] paper says in the abstract that they use wavelength, polarization and the three spatial dimensions. So it is wavelength and not direction! [1]http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7245/full/nature08053.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7245/full/nature0...
- rch 13y agoQuasicrystals were the first thing I thought of... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasicrystal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasicrystal
- e3pi 13y ago> Quasicrystals were the first thing I thought of... I searched your link, I did not find quasicrystals suggesting anything related to memory storage. Why quasicrystals?
- rch 13y agoIt's just a conceptual link. Think about the higher dimensional symmetries in quasicrystals and how one might encode information using a mechanism that exploits that property.
- kirualex 13y agoThe NSA is probably looking into it right now...
- swombat 13y agoFor all you know they've built (or something else equally advanced) already. Which would make claims that they're storing everything pretty believable.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- vergiliu 13y ago"[...]At the moment companies have to back up their archives every five to ten years because hard-drive memory has a relatively short lifespan,” says Jingyu. Since when hard drives die after 5-10 years? Are there some new physics laws that I'm not aware of, or what?
- eksith 13y agoI'm guessing this is with MTFB rates given by manufacturers. With continuous use, it's not that uncommon to for hard drives to reach EOL fairly quickly.
- sambeau 13y agoIt's a bit off but in the ballpark: Google's 2007 study found, based on a large field sample of drives, that actual annualized failure rates (AFRs) for individual drives ranged from 1.7% for first year drives to over 8.6% for three-year old drives http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive_failure http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive_failure Memory, of course, has other problems: http://www.ewh.ieee.org/r6/scv/rl/articles/ser-050323-talk-ref.pdf http://www.ewh.ieee.org/r6/scv/rl/articles/ser-050323-talk-r...
- lifeformed 13y agoHaven't you experienced it? My HDDs all wear out eventually... there's only so many times a thing can spin 7200rpm just nanometers off the ground before something gives.
- JonFish85 13y agoThis stuff is really fascinating to me. Will we ever hit a point in data storage where you can fit all the data about a volume in space, into a smaller volume of data storage? I'm sure the Uncertainty Principle plays into it, but theoretically could it be done--store 1 cubic meter's worth of data into a 1 cubic micrometer of storage?
- gardarh 13y agoYou can't really, by definition. By the same logic you should be able to store 1 cubic meter's worth of data storage cube into a 1 cubic micrometer of data storage cube, which in turn could be stored in a smaller cube ad infinitum. Going by the same logic you could store all entropy of the universe in an infinitely small cube which is not possible unless the universe had zero entropy.
- stingraycharles 13y agoBut assuming the universe has an entropy smaller than one, couldn't the data be compressed ?
- venomsnake 13y agoHmm ... go back 13.5 billion years in time and that is exactly what was the universe back than.
- gardarh 13y agoYes, and along the road we have accumulated some entropy. Anyhow, that was a rather crappy answer, the "How much entropy does the "data about a volume in space" have?" answer basically captures it.
- GotAnyMegadeth 13y agoThey will have to change the name before they market it. I can't imagine many people understanding anything with 5D in the name, regardless of what it means.
- wikwocket 13y agoSince when do people have to understand a name for it to take off? Look at the soup of technologies grouped under the label "4G." All consumers know is that 4G sounds better than 3G. I'm sure if the technology is commercialized, someone will come up with a cute nonsensical name for it, but I can absolutely see a subhead somewhere saying "Advanced Five-dimensional storage technology!", just because it sounds cool.
- anigbrowl 13y agoGo tell Canon. The 5d has been one of their most successful cameras for years.
- TerraHertz 13y agoFinally. Though I too suspect the NSA must be using some form of dense, long-lifetime data-in-solid storage technology that we haven't been told of. I can believe them storing 'all comms' in real time using hard disks, but I find it hard to believe they'd be anticipating refreshing the entire archive onto new media every 10 years of so. Which they'd have to do with hard disks or DVD equivalents. And I flatly refuse to believe they'd be prepared to just let it go. There was an announcement back in 1999 from Keele University in UK, of having succeeded with using NMR to store and retrieve data in solids. The lead researcher was Prof. Ted Williams, who led development of the nuclear magnetic resonance scanner. Then suddenly... nothing more was heard of that. There's just something about this idea that sounds extremely likely. That not only is the NSA spying on everyone, but also maybe keeping to themselves a revolutionary storage technology that would change everything. So far I haven't heard anything at all about _how_ the NSA is storing all that data, have you? We should be building eternal, public archives of all the cultural and scientific knowledge of humankind. Instead we're building vast secret archives of everyone's tweets, lunch appointments and credit card transactions.
- swamp40 13y agoI'm just not buying that. It's well known that several hundred patents a year get swept up under a "secrecy order" and disappear. But most of these are from a) defense contractors working on military systems and b) nuclear research. Occasionally (maybe 20 per year), an inventor unaffiliated with the government will attempt to get a patent, and have it get swept up under a secrecy order. But a new type of data storage? I would surely think the government would let this get developed and refined in the private arena. Cutting edge development is a sinkhole for massive amounts of money. Just think how many hard drives a billion dollars could buy? I don't think it makes sense economically, when there is a commonly available alternative. What worries me more is the possibility that the oil industry has spies with control over this "secrecy order". The fabled "200 mile per gallon carburetor" type stuff. It is quite easy for me to believe that a trillion dollar industry would attempt to protect itself by any means possible.
- VladRussian2 13y ago
- akavel 13y agoSome other works resulting from their research announced on http://www.femtoprint.eu/ http://www.femtoprint.eu/ also sound quite interesting, e.g. "a first transparent actuator fabricated using the femtoprint process", sized in millimeters.
- DanBC 13y agoThis is really exciting. I hope it does come to market. There's a need for stable, huge, slow, storage which isn't really covered by drives at the moment. A company called InPhase has had various forms of holographic storage "ready any time now!" for years. They eventually released a product. It's specialist, and expensive. That company eventually folded. (I remember when they were using concept art using a credit-card sized thing for media. That was ten years ago, and 1 TB was exciting.) (http://gizmodo.com/5466793/inphase-closes-holographic-storage-wasnt-that-exciting-after-all http://gizmodo.com/5466793/inphase-closes-holographic-storag...)
- fireismyflag 13y agoUnlimited lifetime data storage is how I though of my 1GB HDD in 1996
- cs702 13y agoIf commercially viable, this looks very disruptive to me: if everyone can get virtually unlimited, ultra-fast, lasts-a-million-years local storage in all their Internet-connected devices, the planet's online needs would change significantly in unpredictable ways. For example, third-party cloud-storage providers would face intense price pressure as more customers find it cheaper to store data locally and pay for more bandwidth. -- PS. Does anyone here have sufficient knowledge of or experience with Photonics and nanostructured glass to comment on the near-term feasibility and commercial viability of this technology? Here's the paper: http://www.orc.soton.ac.uk/fileadmin/downloads/5D_Data_Storage_by_Ultrafast_Laser_Nanostructuring_in_Glass.pdf http://www.orc.soton.ac.uk/fileadmin/downloads/5D_Data_Stora...
- quchen 13y agoKeep in mind that a positive research result is not necessarily anywhere close to any of usability, commercial viability, or even possibility outside the lab. Nuclear fusion is a prominent example of this, and I'm still waiting for MRAM, which has been "around the corner" for quite some time now. Until memory glass may be available, who knows what else is.
- swamp40 13y agoI'm STILL waiting on flexible LCD's. 5000 trade show demos, press releases and tech articles - and you STILL can't buy one to put in your product.
- swamp40 13y agoTI just released an FRAM memory (instead of FLASH) version of the MSP430. It has several features which make it better suited to ultra-low power operation. I know FRAM was popular 10 years or so ago, but never really made it big. I'd always assumed someone had a patent locked up that made other companies avoid it. Maybe that's changed recently?
- dragontamer 13y agoMRAM and FRAM are commercially available solutions, but the status quo of the computer industry is to build SSDs out of much much slower (but far more dense) Flash RAM.
- nkoren 13y agoReally intriguing. My father was in the data storage industry (magnetic tape), so I've always watched innovations in this sector with great interest. Nine times out of ten, the storage-density breakthroughs you read about end up being commercially meaningless because they aren't thermally or chemically stable. Doesn't matter how many TB/cm^2 you're writing, if the material degrades after a couple of weeks or months. This announcement is dramatically different, which strikes me as really interesting. Manufacturability is the other obstacle which data storage inventions traditionally founder upon, on the road to commercialisation. I don't have a sense of whether or not that'll be an issue here. If it isn't a problem... then yes, this could be a genuine game-changer.
- wikwocket 13y agoExcellent! Seeing as how Superman released in 1978, I expect scientists to have figured out the Arc Reactor and Repulsor technology sometime in late 2048.
- heroic 13y agoHow awesome would it be if this was then used by NSA to provide agents with backups of all snooped data, available in their pockets, in a piece of glass!
- dm2 13y agoNot very awesome because you lose the ability to restrict access. The internet makes that unnecessary.
- chrisweekly 13y agoSo it really will all be over when the fat lady sings, huh. ;)
- tocomment 13y agoAlong a simliar vein I've heard it proposed you could store information in a diamond using different isotopes of carbon as binary 1 and 0's. That would last a tremendously long time and I believe have a huge storage capacity.
- pronoiac 13y agoIt's called "memory diamond." I'm aware of it thanks to Charlie Stross[1], who credits the idea to Eric Drexler. [1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/05/shaping_the_future.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/05/shaping_...
- tocomment 13y agoInteresting read, thanks. I wonder why he suggests two atoms per bit? Seems wasteful?
- sixdimensional 13y ago"Three dimensions should be enough for anybody" :)
- egypturnash 13y agoI can't quite tell from any of the articles about this if it's write-once-read-many or read-write. Given that it's about "fused quartz" I am suspecting write-once.
- jotm 13y agoFunny how they use crystals in many movies for data storage and I always found it a bit stupid... But in reality, it looks like they're the future of storage - I remember they experimented with writing data using lasers to cubes about a decade ago...
- samatman 13y agoWith a background in chemistry, it seems inevitable, not stupid.
- codemonkeymike 13y agoData always expands to fit a technology
- milhous 13y agoAmazing. Isolinear Chips from Star Trek!
- ChuckMcM 13y agoThis is a fascinating result. The equipment needed to reproduce is a bit extreme (femptosecond multi-watt lasers are not 'garden variety' by any means) and one wonders if the 'read' set-up could be made cost effectively than the 'write' set-up. I would hope that Google would invest in a system to copy all of the books they've scanned into such crystals. That said, I could imagine offering something like a web 'snapshot' (think Internet Archive meets the DVD-R :-) which one might subscribe to. That would be pretty cool.
- jl6 13y agoReally, how can they get away with the word "unlimited" in the title there? The limit is mentioned in the first paragraph: 360TB/disc (whatever a disc is... though I assume it is something which does not exist in unlimited quantities). Still, nice work! Data storage capacity is a great metric of our digital quality of life.
- Coincoin 13y agoWhy does this same magic crystal storage article keep poping up every 5 years? They always claim they could be very close to commercialisation and that it could change the world forever. Yet 25 years later, I fail to see any progress. EDIT: I don't pretend I can understand the technical details, does anyone know if this is actually anything different from that old holographic stuff?
- danpalmer 13y agoNice to see Southampton in the news. This is part of the department I study Computer Science in, and it's this research focus that drew me to Southampton. Awesome place.
- xmr 13y agoGlad to see it's still going well - it had a great atmosphere a decade ago when I was there. So much goes on there that isn't widely reported.
- abrichr 13y agoThere seems to be a lot of misunderstanding of the title. "Unlimited lifetime storage" means storage whose lifetime is unlimited. As it says in the article, the actual data capacity is "360 TB/disc".