This small disc looks like any other piece of engraved glass, but it's actually storing 360 TB of five dimensional data.
A team at the University of Southampton first developed the technology in 2013, and have now stored a number of historical documents -- including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Magna Carta and the Bible -- as digital copies, perhaps forever.
'5D data' is data stored, as the name suggests, on five dimensions -- height, width and depth, and two other dimensions produced by the nanostructuring of the glass. Data is recorded on the material with a femtosecond laser, which emits incredibly short optical pulses -- in this example, 280 femtoseconds or 280 quadrillionths of a second.
The glass is so strong, according to the researchers, it "could out-survive the human race". They estimate it can survive temperatures of up to 1,000 degrees celsius and have a "virtually unlimited lifetime" at room temperature which, according to researchers, will "open a new era of eternal data archiving". Asteroid impacts not withstanding.
The glass discs could be used by large organisations seeking to archive data, or museums and libraries. "It is thrilling to think that we have created the technology to preserve documents and information and store it in space for future generations," said Peter Kazansky, who worked on the project. "This technology can secure the last evidence of our civilisation; all we've learned will not be forgotten."
The future of data storage
In 2014, researchers from the University of Michigan created a "liquid hard drive", which allowed a terabyte of data to be stored per tablespoon.
By suspending nanoparticles in liquid, more data is able to be stored than in conventional computer bits, which are coded in binary. Carolyn Phillips, who worked on the project, described the liquid as "like a Rubik's Cube", as clusters of nanoparticles shift and reconfigure to symbolise different storage states. The clusters can have up to 8 million unique configurations.
Hitachi also announced a similar etched glass data storage solution back in 2012. With similar technology to the University of Southampton glass discs, Hitachi proposed etching data onto small pieces of quartz. The process, which was also based on femtosecond lasers, had the end goal of "longevity", and does not seek to tackle the problem of managing large amounts of data. Like Southampton's discs, the quartz is also pretty hardy and can withstand water and magnetic forces.
Clumsy people beware, though -- both the discs and the quartz can break if dropped.
All humanity has to do now is work out how to build and power a machine to read this unbreakable data, which is as durable as the data itself.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
