High-speed laser may be solution to our ever-growing data dillema

By Tom Campbell via SWNS

A high-speed laser could pack more than 100,000 movies onto a single CD-sized glass disc, according to new research.

The revolutionary method provides a more energy-efficient way of storing data and is 10,000 times denser than Blu-Ray, say scientists.

Huge amounts of information, around 2.5 quintillion bytes, are produced by people and companies around the world every day.

Storing all this data is becoming increasingly challenging and costly, particularly on the environment as it requires energy.

Now researchers in the UK have come with an energy-efficient solution that stores the information in a piece of glass.

Their new approach can write at speeds of 1,000,000 voxels - three-dimensional pixels, per second, equivalent to 230 kilobytes of data or 100 pages of text.

Study author Yuhao Lei, a doctoral researcher at the University of Southampton, said: “Individuals and organizations are generating ever-larger datasets, creating the desperate need for more efficient forms of data storage with a high capacity, low energy consumption and long lifetime.

“While cloud-based systems are designed more for temporary data, we believe that 5D data storage in glass could be useful for longer-term data storage for national archives, museums, libraries or private organizations.”

Storing information in transparent objects - such as glass - is nothing new, but writing it fast enough and with a high enough density has been a challenge until now.

To overcome that hurdle, the researchers used a special laser with a high repetition rate, known as a femtosecond, to create tiny pits in the glass measuring just 500 by 50 nanometers each.

Creating these nanostructures with a few weak light pulses minimized any thermal damage which has proven problematic for other ‘laser data storage approaches.'

Mr. Lei said: “This new approach improves the data writing speed to a practical level, so we can write tens of gigabytes of data in a reasonable time.

“The highly localized, precision nanostructures enable a higher data capacity because more voxels can be written in a unit volume.

“In addition, using pulsed light reduces the energy needed for writing.”

The new method was used to write five gigabytes of text data onto a silica glass disc, about the same size as a conventional compact disc, with almost 100 percent readout accuracy.

Based on the density available, each disc would be able to hold 500 terabytes of data, equivalent to around 125 million photographs taken with a 12MP camera or 125,00 movies.

With upgrades to the system, this amount of information could be written in about 60 days, the researchers say.

Senior author Professor Peter Kazansky said: “With the current system, we have the ability to preserve terabytes of data, which could be used, for example, to preserve information from a person’s DNA.”

The researchers are now working to increase the writing speed of their process and make the technology usable outside the laboratory.

The findings were published in the journal Optica.