The process uses minuscule dots called voxels etched in the molecular structure of pure silica glass that bend light to store information (the light itself changes direction as it passes through one depending on thelight's polarization orientation.) The data can then be wiped and rewritten by re-etching the voxels.
Glass has a lot of advantages over other non-volatile memory. In particular, it can withstand temperatures up to 1800F and, since the etchings are located within the structure of the glass itself, the information lasts quite literally forever with no noticeable data degradation.
As research team member, Martynas Beresna, said:
Other uses include cheaper and more compact medical imaging, precise manipulation of atom-sized objects, and even high-resolution imaging far beyond what we see today.We have developed this memory which means data can be stored on the glass and last forever. It could become a very stable and safe form of portable memory. It could be very useful for organizations with big archives. At the moment companies have to back up their archives every five to ten years because hard-drive memory has a relatively short lifespan.
17 comments:
It sounds like a pretty good idea, but I just have one problem with it. Glass is pretty fragile, and the glass that isn't fragile tends to be big, or thick, or both, so I can't see too many practical mobile applications for it, yet. Or I could just be an idiot.
Mark has a point. Glass is cheap and very practical but I know there are people out there like me who drop their crap all the time.
That is very impressive stuff. Heres to the future.
The Glass should be protected by a container ofcourse, shock resistant ;D
pretty soon, all the data is gonna be stored within us.
i think reilly hit it nail on..its likely the disk would be cased like a 3.5m diskette
This is pretty sweet. No more hard drive failures, etc. As long as you don't shatter it, you're good to go. Getting a bit tired of hard disks to be honest. Mechanical failures are a huge pain. Flash disks are great but they're limited, expensive, and eventually wear out. I welcome this new technology and more stable data storage. Now let's just hope it isn't $1000 per gig when it's released.
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Wow. Keeps getting smaller and smaller.
Technology sure is crazy.
it is amazing the way the tecnology keeps advancing,and the humans go steps back haha..really nice and interesting post =)
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This is cool. May be dating myself a bit, but it's awesome to go from Atari 2600 to seeing stuff like this.
Isn't glass just gonna break really easily. The fact that they can get that much data onto such a small area is brilliant, but I wouldn't trust memory made out of glass.
This is pretty interesting stuff; the future is gonna be awesome :>
damn, the tech world is developing with a crazy speed. In my country ( Vietnam), we rarely know about Blu Ray, in fact I have never seen a BR disc. And this new step of storage technology is just simply crazy.
Wow that's crazy, can't wait for it to find its place in the consumer market :D
crazy stuff o_o
I disagree with Mark: You don't throw around your Harddrives or Magnetic tapes.
I can't wait to use those things for our backups. We've got like bazillions of magnetic tapes and the waste space like shit. You have to store them in a faraday cage just to _not_ break them. And all that shit just to store your backups - not even your actual data.
Having that on glass would be a tremendous improvement
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