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Today, when it comes to storing data, hard drives and flash storage are the preferred media, reason being that they are far more reliable when compared with the likes of CDs, DVDs and floppy disks.
However, as per a report by ExtremeTech, Washington engineers have now developed a novel 5D optical storage that possesses a data density 10,000 times that of a Blu-ray disc.
Whereas the concept of 5D optical storage isn’t new, however its application in the real world was halted by the fact that the process of writing data which happens on glass planets has been incredibly slow.
However, with the development of new application, the University of Southampton has managed to boost the write speed considerably, without impacting the reliability of the data.
To the uninitiated, this kind of data storage makes use of three layers of nanoscale dots in a glass disc. The size, orientation and position in the three dimensions of the dots offer you the five dimensions that are used to encode data.
As per researchers, a 5D disc could be readable even after 13.8 billion years and it would also be capable of being heated to 1,000 degrees celsius.
The newer technique developed by doctoral researcher Yuhao Lei makes use of a femtosecond laser that has a high repetition rate. The process begins with a seeding pulse that creates a nanovoid. The false pulse doesn’t actually write any data. Consecutive weak pulses make use of a phenomenon dubbed near-field enhancement to sculpt the nanostructures gently.
Researchers observed laser pulses at a variety of power levels, in order to find one that enhanced writing speed without damaging the silica in the glass and the sweet spot was at around one million voxels per second. However, each bit of data requires several voxels in a 5D optical system, which translates the transfer rate to 230 kilobytes per second. Which means filling a 500TB 5D optical disc would take a good two months at this rate and once written, the data stays there, with no option to edit or alter what’s on it.
The development of 5D optical storage is still in its infancy stage, however, the team has managed to write and retrieve 5GB of text data using this medium. The data can be read using a microscope and a polarizer. Even though the storage medium isn't as advanced to store complex file types, it’s surely a step in the right direction.
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