Researchers Develop New High-Speed Laser Writing Method, Enabling CD-Sized Glass Discs with 500 TB of Storage Capacity

[Tsing]

Image: ORC Southampton



Researchers with the University of Southampton in UK have developed a speedy, energy-efficient laser writing method that brings high-capacity, glass-based optical storage closer to reality. Described as “5D” optical data storage, the potential medium comprises CD-sized glass discs that are more than 10,000 times denser than Blu-ray discs. They can store as much as 500 terabytes of data.



Image: University of Southampton



From Optica, a scientific organization supporting optics research and education:



Although 5D optical data storage in transparent materials has been demonstrated before, writing...

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[LeRoy_Blanchard]

That glass disk in the picture is about the size of a half dollar, not a CD.

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

Been a longtime coming. Our current method essentially started in the 70's, was revolutionized by shifting the laser frequency hence 'blue', and since has mainly been about trying to cram more layers, along with different compression techniques. Now much like the complaints with supersampling in games we're a bit trapped by streaming and it's compression since physical media is once again hitting physical limitations. Something like this could have a huge impact on the return of better encoded discs for 4K and upcoming 8K content.

 

[Brian_B]

That glass disk in the picture is about the size of a half dollar, not a CD.

Neither is the square die they have in the other pic - but they needed something to be able to relate data density to - most people (around here anyway) know how much data a CD or DVD or BR sized disc hold... the small round die they have there holds the Bible (I presume), as some folks that aren't as familiar with a CD or DVD probably know about what the contents of the Bible are -- at least physically in print. But since the Bible is only a bit over 4MB in ASCII, I think the bottom is actually the Bible encoded in the image of Michelangleo's "Creation of Adam" -- just one of those example things they can do with the tech.

I don't know that this will make any impact on consumer devices. Consumer consumption has already shifted away from physical media. It ~could~ be a huge jump, but I don't think people will care to have another device when what they can already stream is already "good enough" for them.

I think it will be great for cold storage - optical media that won't degrade over time has some very clear advantages for archival purposes. But most people don't use a ton of cold data storage. Probably be semi-important for space travel as well, it won't be affected by radiation unlike magnetic media.

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

but I don't think people will care to have another device when what they can already stream is already "good enough" for them.

Sad but true and I do agree with you.

Anyone remember how the benchmark for data on CD's used be when they bragged about putting an encyclopedia on it?

 

[Zarathustra]

I understand this is still in the research stages, and it takes a while for these things to make it mainstream, but I can't help but wonder who this is for.

I'd imagine a technology like this would be great for Enterprise users to manage large scale backups, but I just don't see optical storage making a comeback on the consumer side of things.

 

[Grimlakin]

It would be handy as an archive space for older backups. The problem becomes the technology to consume the media expires.

For instance with LTO tapes, if you have been using LTO backups for a long time you started with like LTO 3 lets say. That's fine and can be read on up to an TLO5 drive, that's all well and good but if you upgrade to say an TLO 7 drive set and don't have the older LTO 5 drives that media is now useless, and unless you want to dig an older storage drive out of the closet to put in your library to read the old tape... You just hope Legal doesn't need them.

 

[Zarathustra]

It would be handy as an archive space for older backups. The problem becomes the technology to consume the media expires.

For instance with LTO tapes, if you have been using LTO backups for a long time you started with like LTO 3 lets say. That's fine and can be read on up to an TLO5 drive, that's all well and good but if you upgrade to say an TLO 7 drive set and don't have the older LTO 5 drives that media is now useless, and unless you want to dig an older storage drive out of the closet to put in your library to read the old tape... You just hope Legal doesn't need them.

That's the problem with most storage media.

I wonder if this technology can be done in a more universal fashion. With a laser beam you have more flexibility than with a magnetic read head.

I'd imagine as generations improve, the required laser would be come finer, and able to use more complex patterns, but reading old encodings ought to still just be a software thing.

 

[Burticus]

It would be handy as an archive space for older backups. The problem becomes the technology to consume the media expires.

For instance with LTO tapes, if you have been using LTO backups for a long time you started with like LTO 3 lets say. That's fine and can be read on up to an TLO5 drive, that's all well and good but if you upgrade to say an TLO 7 drive set and don't have the older LTO 5 drives that media is now useless, and unless you want to dig an older storage drive out of the closet to put in your library to read the old tape... You just hope Legal doesn't need them.

Most places that have mixed media like that have different generations of drives in the tape libraries. I know one we had in our library a couple jobs back had like 95% current gen LTO but also had single drives for other formats (old LTO, SDLC, ibm etc).

500 TB non perishable media would be awesome for backups and cold storage. I wonder if it's read-writeable or just write one (I admit I didn't read the whole article)

But I guess people who have worked in datacenters are weirdos with different perspectives (like me!)

 

[Endgame]

Most places that have mixed media like that have different generations of drives in the tape libraries. I know one we had in our library a couple jobs back had like 95% current gen LTO but also had single drives for other formats (old LTO, SDLC, ibm etc).

500 TB non perishable media would be awesome for backups and cold storage. I wonder if it's read-writeable or just write one (I admit I didn't read the whole article)

But I guess people who have worked in datacenters are weirdos with different perspectives (like me!)

We also had several different drives at my last job - legally required to keep at least 7 years of basically everything, and more of certain things. We did try to be proactive however of migrating the data to newer storage tech, mostly to keep our costs down at iron mountain.

 

[Stoly]

Most places that have mixed media like that have different generations of drives in the tape libraries. I know one we had in our library a couple jobs back had like 95% current gen LTO but also had single drives for other formats (old LTO, SDLC, ibm etc).

500 TB non perishable media would be awesome for backups and cold storage. I wonder if it's read-writeable or just write one (I admit I didn't read the whole article)

But I guess people who have worked in datacenters are weirdos with different perspectives (like me!)

I guess you mean re-writable and it seems its write-once

 

[Zarathustra]

I guess you mean re-writable and it seems its write-once

Yeah, considering it is etching glass, that would make technical sense.

 

[Stoly]

So I read the article and its really confusing. There's no mention of read speeds, and write speeds are not very clear.

It mentions an equivalent of 230kb of data write speed, that's not even CD-ROM 2x write speed. Then it says 10,000 times denser than a BR disc, but later it states that it can cram up to 5GB on a cd size disc; that's nowhere near the density of a singlelayer BR disc.

So where's the high speed and density?

 

[Brian_B]

So I read the article and its really confusing. There's no mention of read speeds, and write speeds are not very clear.

It mentions an equivalent of 230kb of data write speed, that's not even CD-ROM 2x write speed. Then it says 10,000 times denser than a BR disc, but later it states that it can cram up to 5GB on a cd size disc; that's nowhere near the density of a singlelayer BR disc.

So where's the high speed and density?

The article does talk about speed, and I don't think that's the draw here -- more on that below. But the article, and even the title, state that it's 500TB on a CD-sized - not 5GB. 5GB on a CD-sized disc wouldn't be news at all - DVD's can eclipse that already, and Blu-Ray is up to 50GB.

The article states that the initial run they wrote 5GB of data, and it is confusing I admit, but it implies they didn't use the full physical area of the medium they were writing to. It was more proof-of-concept: they wrote 5GB and were able to recover it later on with high accuracy; proving the technology is viable.

As far as speed goes: they do mention that. It would take an estimated 60 days to write a full 500TB to a disc with current methods. Hardly useful really, but then again, I think this type of storage is really aimed at long term, high density cold storage and space applications. There, you write once and it sits there for decades and longer, and you are more worried about degradation of the medium and data than you are the speed at which you can access it.

Now, I could be misinterpreting the 60 days estimate. You could also read that as: "In 60 days we will be able to use parallel methods to write to high scale", not "It will take 60 days to write this amount of data using parallel methods".

This I think is another of those pie-in-the-sky tech demos, like breakthroughs in battery storage or flying cars: we always seem to see a lot of press releases about them, but nothing ever seems to come from them outside of the research space.

 

[Grimlakin]

So I read the article and its really confusing. There's no mention of read speeds, and write speeds are not very clear.

It mentions an equivalent of 230kb of data write speed, that's not even CD-ROM 2x write speed. Then it says 10,000 times denser than a BR disc, but later it states that it can cram up to 5GB on a cd size disc; that's nowhere near the density of a singlelayer BR disc.

So where's the high speed and density?

It is time... FOR SOME MATH!

Here is the paragraph quoted in the article.

"The researchers used their new method to write 5 gigabytes of text data onto a silica glass disc about the size of a conventional compact disc with nearly 100% readout accuracy. Each voxel contained four bits of information, and every two voxels corresponded to a text character. With the writing density available from the method, the disc would be able to hold 500 terabytes of data. With upgrades to the system that allow parallel writing, the researchers say it should be feasible to write this amount of data in about 60 days."

so it's 500TB to a disk a far shout better than what 40gb on a blue ray?

Ok moving on... they say they can write 500 terabytes in 60 days.... now jumping to excel...

500 Terabytes in 60 days,
8.333 terabytes in a day.
347.222 Gigabytes in an hour
7.78 gigabytes a minute.
96.4 megabytes an second.

Really not that unreasonable if I can download a game at 112MB a second.

So you can basically saturate a 1 gigabit network connection. Not bad but not great.

 

[Brian_B]

It is time... FOR SOME MATH!

Here is the paragraph quoted in the article.

"The researchers used their new method to write 5 gigabytes of text data onto a silica glass disc about the size of a conventional compact disc with nearly 100% readout accuracy. Each voxel contained four bits of information, and every two voxels corresponded to a text character. With the writing density available from the method, the disc would be able to hold 500 terabytes of data. With upgrades to the system that allow parallel writing, the researchers say it should be feasible to write this amount of data in about 60 days."

so it's 500TB to a disk a far shout better than what 40gb on a blue ray?

Ok moving on... they say they can write 500 terabytes in 60 days.... now jumping to excel...

500 Terabytes in 60 days,
8.333 terabytes in a day.
347.222 Gigabytes in an hour
7.78 gigabytes a minute.
96.4 megabytes an second.

Really not that unreasonable if I can download a game at 112MB a second.

So you can basically saturate a 1 gigabit network connection. Not bad but not great.

I think you have bits and bytes mixed there, or maybe I do as it always gets me - as well as x10 vs ^2 when jumping tiers.

But regardless that does put it into some perspective, thanks.

 

[Grimlakin]

I think you have bits and bytes mixed there, or maybe I do as it always gets me - as well as x10 vs ^2 when jumping tiers.

But regardless that does put it into some perspective, thanks.

This has to do with the early 2000 IEEE change to Megabytes.

Now a Byte is 1 a Kilobyte is 1000, a megabyte is 1000000, a gigabyte is 1000000000, and so on...

if they meant to use the 1024 standard (whatever it is called I can't remember) the abbreviation is Mib. For megabit.

IF these numbers were all Mib based, then basically divide what I have written by 8 and it sucks a lot more.

 

[Brian_B]

This has to do with the early 2000 IEEE change to Megabytes.

Now a Byte is 1 a Kilobyte is 1000, a megabyte is 1000000, a gigabyte is 1000000000, and so on...

if they meant to use the 1024 standard (whatever it is called I can't remember) the abbreviation is Mib. For megabit.

IF these numbers were all Mib based, then basically divide what I have written by 8 and it sucks a lot more.

Yeah but, like, your ISP speeds are usually in bits per second, almost never bytes per second.

 

[Zarathustra]

It is time... FOR SOME MATH!

Here is the paragraph quoted in the article.

"The researchers used their new method to write 5 gigabytes of text data onto a silica glass disc about the size of a conventional compact disc with nearly 100% readout accuracy. Each voxel contained four bits of information, and every two voxels corresponded to a text character. With the writing density available from the method, the disc would be able to hold 500 terabytes of data. With upgrades to the system that allow parallel writing, the researchers say it should be feasible to write this amount of data in about 60 days."

so it's 500TB to a disk a far shout better than what 40gb on a blue ray?

Ok moving on... they say they can write 500 terabytes in 60 days.... now jumping to excel...

500 Terabytes in 60 days,
8.333 terabytes in a day.
347.222 Gigabytes in an hour
7.78 gigabytes a minute.
96.4 megabytes an second.

Really not that unreasonable if I can download a game at 112MB a second.

So you can basically saturate a 1 gigabit network connection. Not bad but not great.

I could see the likes of Backblaze shifting to using these if they aren't too unaffordable.

Use hard drives only as a write cache, and then dump cold data to these in the background.

 

[Grimlakin]

I could see the likes of Backblaze shifting to using these if they aren't too unaffordable.

Use hard drives only as a write cache, and then dump cold data to these in the background.

Yea the real issue is if they are actually re writeable or not.