Engineers Can Now Fit 500TB On A CD-sized Glass Disc Via 5D Storage

With the help of high-speed lasers, researchers have developed “5D” data storage technology that enables 500 TB of data to be written to a CD-sized glass disc, as reported by Optica society.

Higher writing speeds have been used in this technique that might finally make it feasible for archival and other uses.

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With this 5D technology, each file utilizes 3 layers of nanoscale dots. The dots’ size, orientation, and position in the three dimensions make up the five ‘dimensions’. These dots change the polarization of light traveling through the disc which then passes through a microscope and polarizer.

The slow writing speed of the previous 5D optical storage made the technology impractical. According to reports, the storage medium can tolerate temperatures up to 1,000 degrees C° and remains intact up to 13.8 billion years at room temperature.

In this new technique, the manufacturers wrote 5GB of text data on a silica glass disc which has the same size as a CD with nearly 100 percent readout precision.

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The researchers claim that the disc would be able to preserve 500 terabytes of data with the writing density available from the method.

In almost 60 days one can easily fill a 500TB disc by using parallel writing. Although it seems very slow, it can provide a way to backup reams of valuable data. The research group leader Peter G. Kazansky revealed that the current system can preserve terabytes of data. The storage is enough to preserve as much data as human DNA.

This new technology is expected to do wonders in the future.

Via Engadget