
5D ‘Superman memory’ crystal could lead to unlimited lifetime data storage - swombat
http://www.southampton.ac.uk/mediacentre/news/2013/jul/13_131.shtml?1
======
nkoren
Really 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.

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cs702
If 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_Stora...](http://www.orc.soton.ac.uk/fileadmin/downloads/5D_Data_Storage_by_Ultrafast_Laser_Nanostructuring_in_Glass.pdf)

~~~
quchen
Keep 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
TI 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?

~~~
jotux
Not just in MSP430s, Ramtron (now part of cypress) sells standalone serial and
parallel FRAM up to a few megabits:
[http://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Cypress-
Semiconductor/FM...](http://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Cypress-
Semiconductor/FM25H20-DG/?qs=sGAEpiMZZMtsPi73Z94q0OKOSVYv1Kg2qQzzB6Xnrgk%3d)

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TerraHertz
Finally.

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
I'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
>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.

all the engineering calculations for a car you can make yourself starting from
the first principles, like

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot_cycle](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot_cycle)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_dynamics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_dynamics)

etc...

It would be very interesting if you can come up for 200mpg goal with better
shape or lighter design or better in some other way than that

[http://green.autoblog.com/2013/04/01/vw-hints-hyper-
efficien...](http://green.autoblog.com/2013/04/01/vw-hints-hyper-
efficient-260-mpg-xl1-could-come-to-us/)

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maggit
I 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
I 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
Perhaps 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/nature0...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7245/full/nature08053.html)

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fireismyflag
Unlimited lifetime data storage is how I though of my 1GB HDD in 1996

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akavel
Some 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.

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JonFish85
This 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
You 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.

~~~
venomsnake
Hmm ... go back 13.5 billion years in time and that is exactly what was the
universe back than.

~~~
eksith
Tinsy nitpick. The universe technically didn't exist back then (at least not
in the form of spacetime), I believe. Existence itself was confined to a
singularity which then expanded with _tar -xzf singularity.tar.gz_

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DanBC
This 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-
storag...](http://gizmodo.com/5466793/inphase-closes-holographic-storage-
wasnt-that-exciting-after-all))

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ChuckMcM
This 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.

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jotm
Funny 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
With a background in chemistry, it seems inevitable, not stupid.

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GotAnyMegadeth
They 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
Since 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.

------
wikwocket
Excellent! Seeing as how Superman released in 1978, I expect scientists to
have figured out the Arc Reactor and Repulsor technology sometime in late
2048.

------
Coincoin
Why 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?

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jl6
Really, 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.

------
vergiliu
"[...]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?

~~~
sambeau
It'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-r...](http://www.ewh.ieee.org/r6/scv/rl/articles/ser-050323-talk-
ref.pdf)

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tocomment
Along 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
It'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_...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/2007/05/shaping_the_future.html)

~~~
tocomment
Interesting read, thanks. I wonder why he suggests two atoms per bit? Seems
wasteful?

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abrichr
There 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".

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egypturnash
I 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.

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danpalmer
Nice 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
Glad 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.

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heroic
How 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
Not very awesome because you lose the ability to restrict access.

The internet makes that unnecessary.

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codemonkeymike
Data always expands to fit a technology

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chrisweekly
So it really will all be over when the fat lady sings, huh. ;)

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sixdimensional
"Three dimensions should be enough for anybody" :)

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milhous
Amazing. Isolinear Chips from Star Trek!

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kirualex
The NSA is probably looking into it right now...

~~~
swombat
For all you know they've built (or something else equally advanced) already.
Which would make claims that they're storing _everything_ pretty believable.

