According to the latest report, researchers at the University of Southampton in the UK have developed a new optical storage technology. The use of laser-etched glass discs can make the storage density comparable to Blu-ray discs increased by more than 10,000 times.
This technology can be realized on a CD-sized disc, and a single disc can store 500TB of data. There are 5 dimensions in laser writing data, including two optical dimensions and 3 spatial dimensions. This 5D writing method can greatly improve the efficiency of data storage compared to the simple two-dimensional method of the previous optical disc.
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Researchers pointed out that the amount of data generated by organizations such as individuals and enterprises is increasing, and there is an urgent need for high-capacity, low-cost, and long-life efficient storage. At present, the widely used cloud data center is mainly designed for thermal data, and this 5D storage glass disc is more suitable for archives, museums, libraries, or other types of long-term data storage.
Moreover, the data recording method developed by the University of Southampton has a writing speed of approximately 230KB per second. The researchers added that the technology can be applied not only to glass but also to other transparent materials, as well as to 3D integrated optics and microfluidics.
Although similar technologies have already been developed before, the facts have proved that it is very challenging to achieve fast enough writing speeds and high enough storage densities.
In order to overcome this challenge, the researchers used a stable femtosecond laser light source to etch thin nanoscale pits, each with a size of 500×50nm. When the energy of the laser etching is not directly, but by means of a technique called ” near-field enhancement ” of optical phenomena. A single laser pulse can produce a blast-like effect, forming nanostructures.
The official said that this new method can increase the data writing speed to a practical level, so it can write tens of terabytes of data in a reasonable time. In the actual measurement, the researchers used this method to write 5GB of text data, and the reading accuracy was close to 100%. In addition, this technology allows parallel writing, so 500TB can be written in approximately 60 days.
At present, the British research team is working hard to increase the writing speed and is committed to making it usable outside the laboratory. In addition, in order to respond to actual storage needs, methods for reading data at high speeds are also being developed
