Quartz Long-Term Data Storage

[rhoenix]

So, remember all those scifi series where massive amounts of data is being stored on tiny crystals?

For all our accomplishments as a species, we've never found a storage medium that can last forever. Tapes, CDs, film ... they all fade with time. Even our hard drives, and our digital history, may eventually fade away. But thankfully, researchers at Southampton University are here with a solution: a quartz hard drive that can last 14 billion years and store 360 terabytes.

Given that that's long, long after the sun will have consumed the Earth, it's possible that the tiny optical disk could outlast humanity, so we might as well put the next Golden Record on it. The tiny discs are etched with a nanoscale laser in a microstructure about five microns tall, with each pulse creating a series of three lasers. By reading the polarized light passing through the discs, the massive treasure trove of data can be revealed.

The university is calling it the "Superman memory crystal." The Large Hadron Collider produces about 30 petabytes of data annually, or about 30,000 terabytes or about 83 of the Superman discs. In addition, the Library of Congress estimates that the entire Internet is 74 terabytes (as of 2009, at least.) Each human's genome is 200 GB of information, give or take a few gigabytes, so with 9 billion people on Earth right now, so that's 1.8 trillion gigabytes or 1.8 million petabytes, which translates to 5,000 of these quarter sized discs.

So ... a nice big warehouse full of these disks, buried deep underground with all the thermal protection in the world, could be the ultimate time capsule of humanity, if we get to work with the massive task of storing all of the data into a new Library of Alexandria. Regardless, these definitely have a few billion years worth of advantage over using DNA hard drives.

But, uhh, will we find enough quartz for that?

So, whether we have materials to mass-produce these things is certainly a concern - but having proper long-term memory in this form would have subtle, but profound effects on many aspects of computers, networking, and the Internet.

[rhoenix]

Researchers at the University of Southampton have discovered a way to store data in five dimensions on nanostructure glass that can survive for billions of years.

The scientists from the University's Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) have developed the write and read processes of five dimensional (5D) digital data through femtosecond laser writing, where they use short bursts of high intensity light to encode a quantum bit, (a qubit) through the polarization of a single photon.

The self-assembled nanostructures in the glass (which is fused quartz) change the way light travels through it, modifying polarization of light that can then be read by combination of optical microscope and a polarizer, similar to that found in Polaroid sunglasses.

The researchers call the nanostructured glass "Superman memory crystal," as the glass memory has been compared to the "memory crystals" used in the Superman films.

"The information encoding is realized in five dimensions: the size and orientation in addition to the three dimensional position of these nanostructures," the researchers said in a news release.

The orientation of the photon or dot (horizontal or vertical) determines whether it has a bit value of 1 or 0. The dots appear as visible vortices (voxes) in the glass under a microscope.

The storage method enables up to 360TB of capacity on a disc about one-inch in diameter that can withstand temperatures of up to 1,000 degrees Celsius and has a virtually unlimited lifetime at room temperature (13.8 billion years at 190 Celsius). Data is written to a file comprised of three layers of nano-structured dots separated by five micrometres (a micron is one millionth of a meter). The technology was first demonstrated in 2013 when a 300 kilobit digital copy of a text file was successfully recorded in 5D.

"The laser beam was focused 200 [microns] below the surface of a 2 mm thick fused silica sample, which was mounted onto [an] XYZ linear air-bearing translation stage system [from Aerotech Ltd.]," the researchers stated in a paper.

"As a very stable and safe form of portable memory, the technology could be highly useful for organizations with big archives, such as national archives, museums and libraries, to preserve their information and records," the researchers said.

The technology has already allowed major documents from human history such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Newton's Opticks, the Magna Carta and the Kings James Bible, to be saved as digital copies "that could survive the human race," the researchers said.

A copy of the UDHR encoded to 5D data storage was recently presented to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) by the ORC at the International Year of Light closing ceremony in Mexico in December.

[frigidmagi]

Huh the Popular Mechanics guy needs a new fact checker. There are 7.4 billion people on earth not 9.

Beyond that, this is pretty awesome. Although I am sadden by the thought that is unlikely that I see this become a popular data medium.

[rhoenix]

Huh the Popular Mechanics guy needs a new fact checker. There are 7.4 billion people on earth not 9.

Wow, good catch - I completely missed that.

Beyond that, this is pretty awesome. Although I am sadden by the thought that is unlikely that I see this become a popular data medium.

At this point, it's just a matter of materials science - and once that bridge gets passed, all bets are off.

[LadyTevar]

The nice thing about quartz is it's one of the easier crystals to create in a lab. Just grab some sand off a beach, or find some high-silicon dirt, and you're good to go.