1TB In A Cubic Centimeter

rgetty writes "Inforworld posted this article describing the process used by a group of engineers and scientists from Kyoto University and Central Glass (Japan) to pack 1TB of data into a cubic centimeter of glass. Portable data warehousing is not too far off..."

Re:man, this is getting old

[Anonymous Coward]

Holographic storage cubes exist. The problem is that they are slow, extremely slow by electronic memory standards.

A standard doped lithium niobate memory can take anything up to 10 seconds to retrieve an image, although the image retrieval process itself is pretty amazing.

Writing is even slower - if I remember correctly the process is temporaty unless the crystal is baked for several minutes after data is stored.

A basic holographic memory can reconstruct data given a small part of the input - one famous demo had a system reconstruct a picture of a cat, given just part of its tail to work on.

SI no, you won't see holographic memories on sale any time soon, but they do exist, and they do exhibit some very interesting properties.

Re:Myth

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to disappoint you. in Jena, Germany st the place where the first optical grade glass was made, there was then a block of glass setup with a weight on top of it. Nowadays you can see (after you pay an admission of course) the weight half sunken into the block.

Re:But...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think they're aiming this thing at the consumer marketplace just yet. No one really needs a Terabyte of storage space on their home computer, and no one will for years. However, if I install several new games on that "huge" 4 Gig drive I bought 4 years ago, I'm going to run out of space really fast.
The place where this type of storage is really going to come in use in the near future is in scientific projects involving gene sequencing, or modeling of the human brain and human thought. Large companies and governments could really use this kind of storage for the large databases they are keeping, as the continue to try and record everything we do, what we buy and where, etc.

Re:1 TB filesystem

[Anonymous Coward]

You're all missing the original poster's point; we all know that filesystems exist which can handle this much storage, but people cannot handle this much storage using currently-used data organization techniques.

I only have 11GB of stuff on my home system right now, and I've had to make up lots of ad-hoc indexing/search systems for finding it all. I have gotten into the habit of appending additional information about files onto the filename, sort of like file extension suffixes on steroids. The "locate" database is no longer sufficient; I'm better off just keeping "du -a / > /tmp/du-a" updated and using egrep + perl snippits to sort through it. I've been working on an organization tool which will let me browse through my reams and reams of html and usenet articles I've downloaded off the net, so I can catalog them and create an html heirarchy in which they are organized and annotated and searchable.

But this is all ad-hoc, and not everyone is a perl programmer .. MacOS is somewhat ahead of the rest of us, with its standard "Finder" being a reasonably decent filesystem search tool, but even it is woefully insufficient for filesystems larger than 20GB or so. We need something more, something that the average joe can use. What will this "something more" look like? What will scale up to multi-TB filesystems, filled with files with an average size of no more than 50KB? That is the challenge, not simply writing a filesystem that can merely store 1800 exabytes of data.

-- Guges --

Re:Helloooo!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, I've just found this. Although the handle is not round (another theme maybe?), it really works. And indeed, there's a full immersion environment behind it, with a resolution where even looking close, I couldn't find individual pixels! I wonder how they store that much data.

But there a few points which could use improvements. For example, I really miss an undo functionality. Also, they could insert hyperlinks - while it is nice to move to other places in real 3D, sometimes it would really be easier to just klick on a hyperlink and get to another place. Do you have any mail address where I could mail those suggestions?

SCNR ;-)

Re:WORM

[Anonymous Coward]

A WORM memory unit could also be used to store what would effectively be a dictionary for highly compressed data (on a re-writable medium).

Furthermore, content providers could provide bulk content with a licensing control mechanism in the hardware. Buy one movie from a brick and mortar (or wait for shipping), 199 additional movies can be licensed remotely.

Next consider how much of one's hard drive is consumed by write-once content (e.g., icons, standard sound files, etc.).

Imagine a standard collection of open Web content (along the lines of [next] button images, page backgrounds, etc.). This could save a portion of network latency and bandwidth while providing a reasonably rich audiovisual experience.

>a law enforcement dream
Really? Getting a warrant to search one's drive (only because law enforcement loves harrassing innocent people), planting evidence, etc. (Not to mention going around encryption. If one has private (as in personally sensitive not criminal) material, one would be inclined to encrypt it.)
When law enforcement is interested in one's complete collection of comp.os.linux* newsgroup postings, we have a problem.

Femtosecond Lasers

[Anonymous Coward]

The lab I work in uses nanosecond lasers to create BEC's. Down the hall though, is a faculty member who works on femtosecond spectroscopy. As someone guessed, the space required for all the equipment is very large.

It _does_ take up a room, or at least the optical bench does.

But more importantly, in order to generate femotosecond pulses, you need _enormous_ bandwidth (10^15 Hz). These are class 4 lasers that are extremely powerful and also extremely dangerous.

I can't imagine this technology being anything resembling "out of the box" anytime soon --- you'd need an entire support staff just to use it.

Re:I.T. Paranoia just went up a notch

[bluGill]

I doupt that. Even at a TB per cubic centimeter you aren't gonna walk out with all their data. Last month I was helping one company that was creating 3 TB of new data a day. Add up a few months of that, and you byond pocket size. This wasn't even a really big company, I've worked with some that do 20 TBs a day.

I won't even mention NASA and the like that can do a few 100 TB a day. (most of which they don't process). And speculations of what the NSA (echolin, however it is spelled) can get in a day aren't worth it. Though the latter is important to consider.

Re:Alright just a cubic centimeter

[BadlandZ]

Yea, true, the reading equiptment might be big... But, if its just an archive of old data, you can use robotics to swap diffrent 1cm cubes in and out, and archive 100's of them in one unit.

Re:1 TB filesystem

[BadlandZ]

I'm sorry, but you lost me... And I am not a file system expert. So, how do you make a mini-internet system and avoid the directory tree structure?

The internet itself is a directory tree structure, with links working out from the ":" it's server.domain.com:/web/files/ type thing, in theory.

And the only thing that makes it look diffrent on the surface are links. I can make all the symbolic links I want if I want to group all audio related files in one area.... If for some reason that makes it easier to navigate...

A search engine on a file system, like "locate"?

Re:Myth

[Cid Highwind]

If I remember correctly the molecular structure of glass is a mess, just a bunch of random bonds everywhere. I can't remember what the term for such a substance was.
"amorphous", I think

Re:Interesting, but a bit short of data. . .

[Squeak]

I was working with fs lasers from 1994-8. Back then there were very few available commercially and they cost quite a bit, about $100K with the necessary ancilliary equipment. The research group I was with built a couple ourselves that ran with 80fs and 20fs pulses. (The world record was about 6fs at the time.) The lasers were built on 4'x2' optical tables, but most of this space was only required to provide a large enough external cavity to slow the pulse repetition rate down. The core components within the inner cavity were all mounted on an 18" track. The main problem was stability - the slightest knock would ruin the alignment. The whole system was on top of a 10'x5' stone table to reduce vibration. Putting half a dozen fans, HDDs, CDs, etc near it would have been a disaster.
By the late 90s commercial lasers were lower cost (but still not cheap) and would fit in about 2'x1'. I suspect they are a little cheaper and a little smaller by now, but not greatly so.

Re:"Is that a gun your pocket..

[Squeak]

The last fs laser I used could be optimised to put out an average power of about 100mW with a pulse rate of about 40MHz. A piece of matt black card held in the beam would smoke, and could be a good way of finding the beam at times. (It was infrared.) White card would reflect too much, so stayed cool. You could wave your arm through the beam, but you wouldn't want to stay still.

Now the maths:
The intensity profile over time of each pulse was roughly gaussian with a FWHM time of 80fs. (Full Width Half Maximum is the width of the gaussian at the point it rises/falls through the level half of the maximum. Since gaussians decay towards zero but never quite reach it you cannot measure 'start' and 'stop' times. If you assume a square pulse of the FWHM width the numbers are about 10-20% out, but I cannot remember which way off hand.) This beam could be focused down to a 20um diameter spot (area=3.1E-10 m^2)
100mW / 40MHz = 2.5nJ per pulse
2.5nJ / 80fs = 31kW (+/- 20%) peak pulse power
31kW / 3.1E-10 m^2 = 10^14 W/m^2

100TW per square meter is a huge power density, but these are the kind of levels that non-linear optical physics works at. There were losses through the various components in the system - we were doing experiments which required a fair amount of kit - but we usually ran at 1/3 to 1/2 of this.

The 100mW output femtosecond laser was powered by a 2m long Nd:YAG providing 8W of laser power. (Waving your arm through that beam left holes, but at least laser wounds are self cauterising and, believe me, you only ever do it once.) The power supply for that was almost 1m high, ran off the 3 phase supply and required water cooling. The pump laser required water cooling. Even the fs laser required cooling - I built a tiny water cooled peltier unit which would work perfectly for cooling today's high speed processors.
So, not exactly battery powered and hand held.

Re:Still skeptical

[Omnifarious]

Until they can implement this with a solid-state wave guide and lasers, the tech pretty usless.

Until they can implement this using sheep, cows and bovine flatulence, this tech is pretty useless.

My statement and your statement are of similar importance and relevance. If you had bothered to explain something about why you feel that all of these things are necessary, perhaps your statement would be more relevant than one about cows.

Re:2001 anyone??

[elmegil]

even in the late 1970's (when the movie was written)

Not to be a stickler for facts or anything, but the movie premiered in 1968. I'm thinking it was written before that.

Re:Interesting, but a bit short of data. . .

[elmegil]

But couldn't you just make it so the data store is the portable part? So a given site makes a large investment in the laser emplacement to read one of these, and you put your data in it and take it with you to another such site. This isn't how data warehouses are used today, but I'm sure some enterprising use could be found for this (personal pr0n collections anyone? Heh.)

Re:Still skeptical

[Toddarooski]

I still have a hard time beleiving this will make it into the mainstream market for at least a couple more decades due to some unforseen hurdle.

I think I can see the hurdle....

Clerk: Hi! Welcome to Fry's! Can I help you?
Shopper: Yes, I'd like one of those 8T holographic cubes.
Clerk: Here you are sir. That'll be $300 for the cube... oh, and $18 million for the giant femtosecond laser. You cleared out a room where you can store this?
Shopper: Yeah, I decided we don't really need a kitchen.

I am, of course, exaggerating. You can't really help at Fry's.

Re:smart trolls

[An Ominous Coward]

"New smart trolls"? Trolls have been getting +5 forever.

From New Scientist...

[theyman]

This appeared in New Scientist on the 31st May.
From the article: "Pavel Cheben of the National Research Council in Ottawa and Maria Calvo of Complutense University in Madrid suspended photosensitive chemicals in porous silica glass to form a 1-centimetre cube which can store a hundred times more data than a DVD."
The photo-sensitive chemical is a photo-polymer and the "glass" is used to provide structure.
I don't know how long the data lasts before the liquid nature of glass ditorts it, but... The size mentioned in the NS article is a little different from the /. one: "In tests, the pair have now successfully stored and retrieved data. In theory, they say, a 1-centimetre cube of the material should store 6 million megabits (6 terabits) of data. And because data pages are read all in one go, rather than as a sequential stream of bits, they can be read a hundred times faster than from a DVD."
That certainly makes it look good for most forms of storage, eventually :) Something to watch, anyway...

All well and good...

[Mindwarp]

...but how the heck are we supposed to back it up?

;-)

--

Re:Interesting, but a bit short of data. . .

[leperjuice]

Lobstermagnet [512productions.com]!

Seriously, this would be a boon for NASA. Currently, they're pushing the limits of backup technology [wired.com] and it's expected to get worse.

A "cube library" (as opposed to tape) with a little shuttle to move the cubes around would be a godsend even if the laser to read them costs 300k.

Picture one of these [storagetek.com]; the laser might take up most of it, but the savings would be incredible.

Re:1 TB filesystem

[Nick_Psyko]

BE OS can address 18 Pentabyte files(theoreticaly).

This is of course limited by the current hardware, but a raid array of these, now that would be smart!

Media size isn't the real issue

[KFury]

Sure, ten or even five years ago, media size was really important, but as bandwidth increases the information bottleneck is the cost of data storage, and the speed of data transmission.

A terabyte ina sugarcube is terriffic, but not because I'll be able to put a box that can read it on my desktop in 10 years, it's because I'll be able to control a couple hundred gigs on a server somewhere, or even better, everywhere (like OceanStore [berkeley.edu]), because the cost of the hardware is distributed, much like the internet compared to dialup BBSes of the '80s.

One of the supercool things about the net is that I'm using the latest expensive hardware every day when my packets are routed through gigabit routers and fiber-optic backbones. I don't have to pay for it like I did the long-distance copper wire when I called BBSes across the country.

Storage will continue to follow the same trend, where the terabyte and exabyte drive complexes will serve my storage needs, and not some primitive box I plug into my computer and have to upgrade every year or two.

Kevin Fox
--

Interesting, but a bit short of data. . .

[Salgak1]

Yes, the info store itself is sugar-cube sized.

But how large are the femtosecond lasers, manipulation for the store, sensors to detect the florescence, firmware, etc. ????

My rough guess would be room-sized, at current technology. Give it 10-20 years, and then you'll likely see a unit to fit in a home computing unit (whatever THEY will look like by then.....)

1TB aint what it used to be

[Brooks Davis]

It's all very impressive, but frankly 1TB isn't all that big a deal anymore. I'm currently working on project prototyping a data store for a 5yr satellite mission. It is currently estimated that the system will use 2PB of storage (2000TB). Probably several hundred TB of that will have to be online and the rest nearline. All of it will be remotly accessable.

Access times & transfer rate?

[MarcoAtWork]

Subject says it all, size is great, but how long does it take to get the femtosecond laser to focus on a different part of the cube to read other data? (not to mention *finding* where this data is stored)

Also, what would the transfer rate be? And how is the data encoded? (CRCs etc. you wouldn't want a speck of dust to prevent you from reading a couple of gigs from the cube...)

I wish there was a more technical article published somewhere (hopefully not in Japanese ;)

Re:Time of storage?

[p3d0]

Sorry about the repeat. I think some of us posted within a few minutes of each other.
--

Re:Time of storage?

[p3d0]

Perhaps some are apt to forget this but, glass is a liquid (albeit an extremely viscous one). Over time, it pours.

Someone needs to have another look at the sci.physics FAQ [ucr.edu].
--

Re:WORM

[p3d0]

What retard moderated this article as Offtopic?
--

Myth

[FunOne]

Thats is a myth, glass is a solid.

Glass doesn't 'pour' you see that effect in old windows, etc, because they were badly made.
FunOne

I.T. Paranoia just went up a notch

[1010011010]

"Portable data warehousing is not too far off..."

... imagine the level of paranoia at corporations and government agencies when you can buy little terabyte cubes at CompUSA or Frys or someplace. Slap a firewire interface on that thing, and walk out with a company's / agency's entire data set. Invisibly.

Of course, they'll probably institute body-cavity searches, or have devices mounted at the exits to obliterate little high-capacity storage devices. Or something. Heh. Your daily X-ray...

- - - - -

Re:Time of storage?

[Saige]

Ok... the house I grew up in is about 110 years old. Some of the windows are the originals. Perhaps some are apt to forget this but, glass is a liquid (albeit an extremely viscous one). Over time, it pours.

Old windows are like that NOT because the glass has "flowed" down over years... but because the methods used to manufacture windows at that time created ones that were thicker on one end, and often slightly rippled. And of course it made more sense for stability to install them with the thicker part downward.

It's all urban legend stuff. So look through the alt.folklore.urban FAQ for details on this.

Besides - there are plenty of people who collect old bottles and the like. My mom does. And there are none of those signs of "flowing" glass, even in some of the REALLY old ones. (As in older than those windows)

I don't believe glass flows at room temperature. At all. And if it does, it's on a much, much longer timescale than what we need to worry about here.
---

Re:How to use it

[alexjohns]

OK. You got me. Song files, not MP3's. Audio Files. Music files. Files on a Compact Disc (CD) that are sometimes converted to the MP3 format. My bad. 50 lashes with a wet noodle. I can take it.
--
Alex Johns

How to use it

[alexjohns]

People are wondering how we would possibly use all this space.

MP3's - right now, you're compressing them - it's lossy. With infinite space, you wouldn't compress them - average of 500MB per disk, 1000 disks - half your terabyte is used up right there. (If there aren't 1000 disks you would like to have, your interests aren't broad enough. Expand your mind.)

Movies - What format are you going to show them in? 5 years from now, when you've got your giant HDTV set hanging on the wall and you want your picture to look nice, what format are you going to need your movie in? Certainly not DivX. 2000 X 1600 X 24 bits X 30 frames a second X 7200 seconds = 2TB. Some good mpeg compression will bring that down, but how much? 10x compression will take up only (only!) 200GB. And 2000X1600 probably won't be good enough.

Images are only going to get bigger - the bigger and better the display, the more storage space will be needed.

OS's - Windows for work, games; Linux for real work, games, fun; BeOS for cool things; BSD to check compatibility. They all take up space.

Office Suites aren't going to get any smaller.

Porn - it's not likely that fewer people will start taking off their clothes. :)

Who's got the space today to archive the complete run of Babylon 5 in a viewable resolution, digitally? I know someone who's got them all analogally. 75 tapes or so. That's a nice chunk of storage space.

I'm not breaking any new ground here. Believe me, stuff will expand to fill the available storage space. It always does.
--
Alex Johns

All the world's information would fit inside...

[gojomo]

OK, if you can get 1 terabyte inside a 1-cubic-centimeter volume...

...and according to this UC-Berkeley study [berkeley.edu], the world produces about 1.5 billion gigabytes (1.5 million terabytes) of information each year...

Then, you could fit the entire world's yearly production of information inside a cube that measured...

cube-root(1.5 million) ~= 115 cm

..per side. That is, not as long in any dimension as most slashdot readers are tall, and only 1.5 cubic meters in total volume.

(OK, so how about we create a couple of these every year, and launch them into space, just in case something goes horribly awry with our planet?)

Re:Myth

[ErikZ]

Ok, if you can can make a mace out of it and hit someone over the head with it, it's solid enough for me.

Re:But...

[spinkham]

4 Gigs is HUGE! ;-)
~10 years ago, 100 meg hard drives were large by PC standards.
Who in the world could fill a 4 GIGA-BYTE drive?
Only research scientists, large servers, etc..
Now it's pretty small. Expect similar comments about terabyte drives soon... Programmers can get much sloppier, and there's always more places to put high bandwith multimedia....

640K ought to be enough for anyone... ;-)

Attention Slashdot Readers

[mwalker]

Yes, this post is offtopic.
And no, no user is going to moderate me offtopic.

This is because approximately 3 days ago, someone at Slashdot turned off moderation. This is probably obvious to those who pay close attention to the moderation system, but I hoped to bring this issue before a larger audience. The facts so far are:

There are far, far less moderations going on. The ones that are being applied are mainly negative. This leads any reasonable person to believe that the Slashdot editors are moderating the stories by hand (this post, for instance, will probably be buried in short order).

I am posting this message for two reasons:
1) I believe that we, the readers of Slashdot, deserve some sort of explanation, no matter how cryptic, of what is going on.
2) I would like to promote feedback from other readers.

How you can help:
This post will probably be either erased or marked -1 rather quickly. Please copy it and repost it as necessary.

- a dedicated /. reader since 1999,
-mwalker.

Re:Yet Another Announcement...

[SirSlud]

Not all the technological advancements that affect you have to sit on your desktop. If this helps reduce the cost for data storage providers and data-centric service providers (like mp3.com), then potentially we may see the trend for such companies now being forced into the reality of charging reversed; ie, where advertising could end up covering most of the costs again. So you may never be able to buy this at FutureShop, but if slashdot can buy it from Vendor XYZ, at a cost less than however many platter-based disks it would take to match storage requirements, they could show less banners. And you'd probably be happy. =) And yes, its probably years off, but that doesn't neccessarily negate my point.

Just a thought :)

Re:Yet Another Announcement...

[SirSlud]

oh my, well, whether its slashdot, or xyz.com, it doesn't change the substance of my point

What about Moore

[SirSlud]

I think its interesting how the avg user will probably not need larger and larger drives anyhow. As the power of your computer increases, and thus the ability to compress/decompress using more and more complex but space-efficient algorithms, so does its ability to 'recreate' on the fly things like music, computer graphics, etc. Remember when everyone said the CD-Rom was the future of gaming because of the size of the medium? For a few years, yes, we had all those 4 CD-Rom pre-rendered movies/scene games, but once the hardware caught up, practically every game now just renders on the fly; consequently, games are way smaller. Anyhow, it is very cool from a datawarehousing standpoint .. things like geographical analysis, centralized data stores (a la library of congress, I guess) will benifit. And the size of the read/write mechanism shouldn't matter as much, although clearly it will have to be reasonable.

Write Only Drive

[Ronin Developer]

This is nothing. As an EE student, I developed a Write Only drive for the Macintosh 128 in 1985 that could store over 1TB of data. Problem is, I could never figure out how to get the data back out....

Seriously, this is pretty cool stuff. Are we on the way to "isolinear chips" of Star Trek fame?

RD

Re:Attention Slashdot Readers

[Apotsy]

Yeah, I'd like to know if that's the case, too.

Re:Attention Slashdot Readers

[Apotsy]

Uh, did my responding to the previous post have anything to do with me getting bitchslapped?

Re:Attention Slashdot Readers

[Apotsy]

Or maybe it's because I modded up a post (not here, in another thread) that said something negative about michael. He doesn't seem to take criticism very well...

Re:From New Scientist...

[treat]

I don't know how long the data lasts before the liquid nature of glass ditorts it,

Most other media melts at a much lower temperature than glass, so I'm sure it's not a real big issue.

Re:From New Scientist...

[treat]

Glass is liquid at room temperature - it's just a very, very thick liquid. Take a look at a decades-old house some time - the window glass, if it's original, will be measurably thicker at the bottom than at the top.

While glass may not be a crystalline solid, and therefore can be considered a liquid depending on your definition of the term, it certainly does not flow at room temperature. Old windows are uneven and modern windows are flat because glass making techniques have improved. The thicker side is at the bottom because it was purposely put that way. Why would the thicker side be put on the top?

Re:Myth

[cheese_wallet]

that malleable point is called plasticity. Lots of materials have a large plasticity region. As for glass not having a crystalline structure--I've usually seen that defined as an "amorphous solid".

There are a lot of different materials out there that are amorphous and solid. A lot of rocks (volcanic, limestone, etc...) are amorphous, but I don't think anyone would debate their solidity.

Re:Myth

[cheese_wallet]

yes, that is right. Or more specifically glass, at room temp, is an "amorphous solid". Like volcanic rock, or limestone.

Re:WORM

[arban]

"Special care would need to be taken to insure deleted files can be burned out, otherwise this is a law enforcement dream"

... or it would be the nightmare for the admins trying to declassify a former top-secret computer.

Thou, I suppose you could just point a flame thrower at the server.

Still skeptical

[LinuxWhore]

I dunno. I've been hearing about the holographic storage medium mentioned in the article for the past 2 decades and hey never seemed to get past the major hurdle of actually reading the data off without destroying it. I realize that they are having greater success with this, but I still have a hard time beleiving this will make it into the mainstream market for at least a couple more decades due to some unforseen hurdle.

Re:Time of storage?

[TheCarp]

Yup your right.

I guess not everything that my high school physics teacher said can be assumed true. I will have to correct him the next time I see him (course, I havn't seen him in years but... I expect I will again).

Not the first time I found out one of them was wrong. My Chem teacher once said that the drug "acid" was actually an acid (someone in class asked)... he was wrong too.

In any case...this is the 10th reply telling me that....doesn't anyone read replies before replying to posts?

(oh well, I don't always either)

-Steve

Time of storage?

[TheCarp]

Ok... the house I grew up in is about 110 years old. Some of the windows are the originals. Perhaps some are apt to forget this but, glass is a liquid (albeit an extremely viscous one). Over time, it pours.

So... if tiny dots are being made in a cube of glass, how long will it be before the glass is distorted enough that they cannot be read?

Sure, it takes half a century or more for glass to pour enough that you can see ripples in a window, but these are TINY dots, litterally "spaced 100 nanometers apart"! thats a hell of alot closer together than you can see - its going to distort enough to make them unreadable much sooner than when the human eye will be able to see the distortion.

This is worrysome mostly due to the size. If your storing 8 TB or more of data, then you are probably going to want that data to be around for a while. If the lifespan of the media is too short, what good is it?

This is great research sure. Perhaps it will lead to real useful data storage that can be used to store massive amounts of information. However, I do somehow doubt that glass is the way to go.

Then again... get 3 or 4 of them, ans setup a raid 5 array across them, that could work. (course, I would supose that would be a RAED array ;))

-Steve

Re:Time of storage?

[TheCarp]

Ahhh thanks for the info.

Very interesting. I will have to mention this to my old physics teacher the next time I see him (I should pay the old school a visit sometime, been years since I graduated).

Hmm I wonder if he has an email address.

-Steve

Re:Time of storage? Not to worry.

[TheCarp]

Ahhh funny.

You are the 10th person to reply (real this time, the post before was the 9th and I accidently called him the 10th).

Actually, I have never heard of anything other than "typical glass" being refered to as glass. I have never seen quartz refered to as a glass.

I have heard of "bullet proof glass" (which is a plastic, usually (always?) lexan) but thats it.

Also... ALL of the other 9 replies were correcting me... glass doesn't flow, its a solid. I havew seen the light, I believe them now.

Really...noone reads replies before posting a reply themselves do they?

-Steve

"Is that a gun your pocket..

[_Mustang]

or are you just glad to see me?" could gain new meaning. The article identifies that they require use of a laser.
And it's identified as: A femtosecond laser is a laser that irradiates for an extremely short period of time -- one-1,000-trillionth of a second.
This suggests that if they could figure out how to get the femstosecond laser firepower into a device the size of the typical hand-help laser pointer then we'd have ultimate unlimited storage. But the question I'd like to know is how much energy is expended by a single pulse and what does it equate to that is already in general use. It would be amazing if a set of rechargeable 9v batteries did the trick, but I suspect this would be more along the lines of the requirements for industrial laser cutters which I believe use 600w transformers.. Can anyone with real experience in the field comment on these things?

Or, alternatively ...

[avoisin]

We could also launch all the useless information (and people?) on the internet into space, and keep the important stuff here.

Don't anybody move!

[[e-mail]]

"Hey, whaddya doin' down there on the carpet? Didja lose a contact lens?"
"No, the data warehouse. DON'T WALK OV--"
[crunch]
"Oops"
--

Re:All well and good...

[malfunct]

Well today the fastest and arguably safest way to back up a large hard drive is on to another large hard drive so I'd say just grab another data cube and transfer the data.

Though with 1tb of data I think we need to go for incremental backups, the transfer time on 1tb can't be good.

Re:All the world's information would fit inside...

[AMuse]

The problem, of course, with launching all that into space is that it's probably mostly porn, and whoever found it would spend more time drooling over the nude pics of Natalie Portman on Slashdot than re-engineering us.

Yet Another Announcement...

[c.r.o.c.o]

about the great new data storage technologies to come in the future... The 140Gb cdrom, the 90-something solid state memory hdd, now this...

While in the meantime I don't see anything more than the announcements. And everybody is still using the same hdds, 700Mb cdroms and DVDs.

I'll believe these new technoligies when I'll be able to buy them in FutureShop (Canadian computer stores chain).

Re:WORM

[AnarchoFreak_00]

Or put it in you'r coffee and drink it.

2001 anyone??

[SpanishInquisition]

Remember, HAL's main data storage was essentially a bunch of glass rectangles, scary isn't it?
--

Re:Interesting, but a bit short of data. . .

[Lozzer]

Sounds like it would just be pushing their problem over the horizon - they need more processing power so they can figure out what is worth keeping

Japanese article...

[torokun]

Here's a link to an article in asahi:

Japanese url. [asahi.com]

Interesting -- they mention that the areas hit by the laser emit 680nm light, and are 400nm in diameter, and are separated by 100nm in all directions...

They also mention that this is about 2500 times as much data in one square centimeter, and that they extracted different data from different layers of the cube by varying the type of doping material, thereby varying the frequency of emitted light from each layer...

By the way, why does the lameness filter prevent me from posting the url link in japanese with unicode? That's pretty lame...

Re:Alright just a cubic centimeter

[Keighvin]

Holographic storage has been around a long time, and mentioned on /. quite often. However, the substrate life is terrible, and the precision of the lasers involed in writing and reading would be prohibitively expensive to mass produce.

The difference between this and that, is that they store information by writing it onto the same spot from different angles. This is volumetric storage - it's a 3 dimensional grid of points.

Meeemreeeeeeeeeees, light the corners of my ...

[John Jorsett]

Lapsing into reminiscence mode, I recall during my first exposure to the internet in the early '70s there was a project called the Terabyte Memory. It was going to be this huge (!) datastore tied to the net so that everyone who needed it could have someplace to keep large amounts of data (for a fee, of course). As I remember, it was going to be a warehouse-sized building with a whole bunch of mag tapes (the only affordable choice, since washing-machine-sized disk drives holding just a few tens of megabytes cost thousands of dollars in those days). The 'highspeed' links of the internet ran running at 50 kbps. If you ever catch a techie saying how great the old days were, you'll know they've definitely gone senile.

Re:1 TB filesystem

[InsaneGeek]

XFS on my beloved SGI at home does

Max Filesystem size: 18 million TB
Max File size: 9 million TB

That's according to their spec sheet, I could only dream I had 18 exabytes, course then I might need something bigger than an Indigo II, to get good use out of it.

Great...

[Elias Israel]

Another cool-sounding technology that will be commercially available approximately the time the sun goes nova.

Doesn't anyone make products anymore, or is it all just press releases?

But...

[doorbot.com]

...isn't this what a lot of people complain about with regards to Microsoft: software bloat was made possible by ungodly amounts of hard drive space (or alternately, very inexpensive drives)?

So while I think it's fantastic that these advances are being made, is it really that big of a deal?

Just think... if there was no such thing as MP3s, would your hard drive be bursting at the seams? This is just an example, but there are many things that many people can download now with their broadband connections to quickly fill their (even 75 GB!) drives... porn movies, DiVX, MP3s, you name it.

Now, I'm not really against larger hard drives, but there has to be a tradeoff somewhere. DiVX (and the like) are great, but now with this new technology (hopefully) we'll be able to carry around a credit card or small box with all of our DVDs. I don't really want more space, I want better quality stuff to be stored on that space... I'd rather have DVD quality than DiVX. But if I can get 1 TB in a cubic centimeter, I want something a hell of a lot better than DVD (at least for videos).

Let's just hope the transfer rates will be up to par when this tech finally hits the consumer markets.

hey...

[jchristopher]

Is that 1000 gigs in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

"Data Crystals"

[mblase]

In "Babylon 5", I'd always assumed the "data crystals" everyone plugs into their computers used holographic memory as mentioned in the last paragraph of this article. JMS probably had that in mind, too, but it's interesting to read this and find that laser-read data crystals might not be two centuries away after all.

Glass as a storage medium

[psiontist]

Could give a whole new meaning to the concept of windows technology. And what do you clean them with? Windex?

Re:2001 anyone??

[pcidevel]

C'mon SI, you know that's because they couldn't use reel to reel tapes as a futuristic storage medium. Do you think the creators of the Superman movie were also visionaries?

I'm fairly certain that you could call Auther C. Clarke a visionary and get away with it. I've read many papers written by him about his series of books (ranging from 2001-3001) and he always tries to accurately portray the future. Holographic storage medium is not a new idea, even in the late 1970's (when the movie was written) the idea of optically storing large amounts of data was probably already discussed in theory. Mr. Clarke loves to read papers discussing some distant theory of technology and then write about them in his book. Read 3001 for some really fine examples of this.

Of course, one could also take the opinion that Sci-Fi pushes the future, i.e. these guys saw 2001 and decided to make it a reality.

Helloooo!!

[Placido]

C'Mon people! The most interesting bit...

Using a femtosecond laser, broadband communication technology that enables transmission of terabits of data per second is possible, he said, talking of another project he is working on.

Oh dear! I think I just got sexually aroused by a technical article. =(


Pinky: "What are we going to do tomorrow night Brain?"

Re:All the world's information would fit inside...

[tswinzig]

Then, you could fit the entire world's yearly production of information inside a cube that measured...

cube-root(1.5 million) ~= 115 cm

..per side. That is, not as long in any dimension as most slashdot readers are tall, and only 1.5 cubic meters in total volume.

(OK, so how about we create a couple of these every year, and launch them into space, just in case something goes horribly awry with our planet?)

But before we shoot them out into space, we just HAVE to paint them black!

Even BeOS has TB support

[tswinzig]

XFS on my beloved SGI at home does

Max Filesystem size: 18 million TB
Max File size: 9 million TB

BeOS's BFS, also a 64-bit filesystem, handles 18,000,000 TB hard drives and similarly huge file sizes (aka 18,000 petabytes).

Re:Time of storage? Not to worry.

[ackthpt]

Glass is a general term, meant for the ignorant masses, to connect with something clear and crystaline (although typical glass is actually an amorphous solid, which flows.) Glass can also refer to Quartz and other clear, crystaline solids which do not flow. Some higher quality camera lenses are made with quartz to cause less defraction and be more stable in temperature ranges.

--

Pandora's Box

[ackthpt]

It would have been nice it you'd expanded on this 'Pandora's Box' idea. The original 'box' was a chest, which Pandora was forbbiden to look into, alas, she couldn't resist the temptation and released all the maladies to the world by opening the box.

The same may be true of such a tiny medium for a large amount of data. Assume it contained all the personal information on people in New York City. At such a compact size it could pass security and change hands nearly undetected. Detection mechanisms would certainly put each of us under a finer scope when passing customs, thus erroding further the right to privacy.

That such a tiny medium with such a wealth of information may pass so easily, it could be very useful to a resourceful terrorist, or simply criminal nuisance (which is what, IMHO, most 'terrorists' are.)

Imagine, too, the further challenge this presents to the RIAA and MPAA, and moreover, the media companies. Duplication wasn't a problem until there was an inexpensive portable medium. Store the entire run of M*A*S*H on one of these and, provided duplication is inexpensive (eventually it probably will be) and everyone could have it, cheap. (Which is why the RIAA and MPAA fight so vigoursly any new technology.)

Don't get me wrong. Producers and performers should be encouraged to create new content, lest they sit on their butts and collect royalties for the rest of their lives, but distribution of content which contributes zero to the original producers and performers can be bad as well. Failing to recover the original investment or money or building a career, people will have less incentive to create the works we enjoy.

--

Re:What about Moore

[ackthpt]

I think its interesting how the avg user will probably not need larger and larger drives anyhow

Let's examine this, shall we? In my 20+ years working from Hobby to Personal computers these are some observations:

1980 16K was a lot of RAM

2001 64M is the minimum for newer versions of Windows

1980 Few graphics, mostly stored in ROM or derived from ROM code. Applications and games were very small.

2001 Download Netscape and the install is 30M, graphics, sound files, libraries, etc.

1980 Sound was produced by algorithms, some not bad, but hardly music.

2001 Sound is stored in a variety of sampled-compressed formats, rarely derived anymore.

1980 the average user could answer specific questions, and likely write in Basic or Assembler Language

2001 the average user has no clue what device controller they have, let alone program. There's no standard language distributed with Windows.

The average user is looking to use their computer as some enhancement to their life: email/chat, entertainment/games, research/web-surfing, news/finance, etc. They really are an average user, where once the only people with computers were geeks or bleeding edge businessmen trying write inventory programs or balance books in VisiCalc.

Memory capacity, goes up as Average users care more about content than how it's derived. The cache on my laptop ecclipses the entire drive on my old computer, why? Because in the normal day-to-day activity I download hundreds of images, html docs, active server pages, perl scripts, etc. I save a few videos (like Duality) and think nothing of it, because space is nearly infinite. Well, it is for the crummy resolution and sampling rates we're fixated with for the time being, how about 5 years from now? I expect to save and HDTV with THX movie on a disk, along with dozens of others. My 6 Gig. drive won't cut it, maybe a 300Gig drive, but heck, the higher the quality and the more of it, the more capacity we'll need. And like most users, I'm pretty bad at keeping my drive clean of old stuff. So it just piles up and I'll need more space.

Whether or not Gates said 640K ought to be enough, it is a laughable thought, only because our demands of information/communication devices have grown, and not for the geeked out people who live a cool hack, but for average users, which buy PC's by the millions, to do everyday things with.

--

WORM

[HaeMaker]

The artical dosn't spacifically say this, but it appears to be WORM.

Perhaps, someone will write a filesystem that assumes a huge amount of space, but that can only be written to once. Changes to files would be handled with diffs and versioning.

Special care would need to be taken to insure deleted files can be burned out, otherwise this is a law enforcement dream.

Re:What about Moore

[Courageous]

1970's: 1MB = $1 MILLION
2001: 1MB = $.50

A 2-million-to-one decrease.

Goodness gracious.

Walking on Glass

[OblongPlatypus]

Walking on Glass is a novel by Iain Banks (who also authors SF novels under the "pseudonym" Iain M. Banks), in which the flowing of glass is described. As a way of implying that a castle is impossibly old, the author lets one of the main characters find a row of window frames with the glass "spilled out", covering the floor. Now, knowing how complex Banks' novels always are, I won't even speculate on what he knew about the lack of scientific proof for this (nonexistant?) phenomenon. Probably he didn't care. But personally, I see no reason not to believe that glass can flow, but I'd imagine timeframes of tens or hundreds of thousands of years would be necessary to see any effect at all. Someone should build a big glass wall, invent time travel, and find out for us :)

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some thoughts from someone who knows

[hyrdra]

First, I can answer some questions regarding this technology. I, myself, am involved in the study of memory methods in ultra-short intermediates in photochromes, which also offer great promse to cheaply store TBs of information. We have been able to store over 500 GBytes in an area around the size of 20 mm^2, and also read it out as fast as we can switch to the pages using an AO modulator.

First, access times. For the samarium method, the access times are in femtoseconds (theoritical). However, this is limited by the steering or positioning device, which can be mechnical, such as a galvanometer, or it can be an array of VCSELs (if femtosecond VCSELs exist, that is), which offer access times as fast as they can be switched and run at the speed of the underlying circuit, and act just like transistors in terms of their function.

As far as a file system is concerned, these memories are arranged naturally in a page format, and this is quite superior to current linear methods. To get to a location anywhere in the memory, you specify the page an the xy position where the data begins.

The reason why this method can store so much data is because 1) they are storing bits as 400 and 100 nm dots, and 2) they are storing it in a volume. As I understand it, the luminous 'dots' are not diffraction limited because they are not coherent and do not interfere with each other. CDs are limited naturally by diffraction because they use very coherent light, in an active approach to read data (e.g. light -> disc). This is because coherent light is the only light which can be collimated to the
However, unlike the view of the article, I am not optimistic of immediate commerical applications. If you read it you will note this method requires the use of a femptosecond light source. Femptosecond lasers are only very recent inventions, from the 1980s, and are also very bulky. Most consist of exotic Ti:Sapphire rods along with sophisticated Optical Parrmeteric Ossicilation and amplification, which all is very expensive and can easily fill an 8'x10' table. Some newer techniques use Nd:YUV04 with a crystal Q-Switch of KTP* or LBO, but these are still slighly bulky although they can fit in a box (still very expensive).

There are no diodes which can generate pulses at this frequency, and the only possible cantidates are organic LEDs which do generate at several hundred picseconds; if these are suitable I do not know. Diodes will probably not reach these speeds for quite some time, and as long as synethic sapphire and other crystals remain expensive (==low yield), this might be a cantidate for heavy industrial use (NASA is a good idea, as someone mentioned), but as far as that sugar cube dream, probably not.

There are also technical considerations, like readout. I would be very interested in how they plan to focus and read 100 nm size dots. There is no CCD or Si sensor with that kind of resolution. How do they position accurate to +/-
These is yet another subset of storage technology which will not make it out of the lab due to the need for certain intristic (yet overlooked) fundamentals. Holographic technology was also limited similarly, both by position and medium (although in recent years very good medium with BER of less than 10-^17 have been found), there still remains the need for very high resolution sensors and positioning devices. Until then, commerical applications won't be practical.

Re:Helloooo!!

[Dancin_Santa]

See that big rectangular thing with the small round handle-like thing on the side embedded in the wall? Go turn the round thing and either push or pull. You will discover another world just beyond the wall. It's called reality! And there are real, honest to goodness females out there. They don't just exist in Everquest!

Dancin Santa

Re:1 TB filesystem

[Dancin_Santa]

You could probably just rely on WindowsXP to handle the storage for you. These files will go to "My Pictures", these to "My Music", these to "My Documents", these to "My Applications", and these to "My Secret Stash of Porn - Password Protected".

How long I've waited for that last one!

Dancin Santa

Re:WORM

[Dancin_Santa]

At 1cm^3, you could probably just put it in a bag and wipe the disk clean with a hammer. Then scatter the remnants across the highway during the high-speed pursuit.

Dancin Santa

Re:All well and good...

[Dancin_Santa]

It shouldn't be that heavy, being 1cm^2. You could probably just nudge it a little.

Dancin Santa

1TB in a cubic centimeter

[LVWolfman]

Like others have said, in itself, this isn't anything new. Back in the late 1980's, I read a story in (I think) Scientific American about a government funded Martin Marietta lab that was doing research into using lasers to detect trace elements at the molecular level. A by-product of this research was the ability to polarize a molecule. Suddenly the head geek had a brainstorm that perhaps this could be used for data storage. He turned the whole thing over to MM (anything developed using government funds is considered public domain). MM then developed it into a WORM technology. I don't remember the original specs, but they did say that using multiple frequency lasers (to vary the depth and get 3D storage) they could get 1TB per cubic centimeter. They envisioned this as being used for high capacity data storage where you didn't want the data changed. Monitoring data from nuclear power plants was one example given. MM said they had no desire to develope the technology further and opened it to licensing. The article ended saying that six companies had already signed NDAs. Then about 3-4 years later, another company announced a product called the "Rat Pack 50". A WORM system that used 1" squares (about the size of a Trisket cracker) that held 1 GB of data. The reader/writer was a changer that held 50 wafers. The unit was to cost in the neighborhood of about $5,000 if I remember right. I even saw a picture of it (or at least the prototype.) From the description of the Rat Pack, I think the company had licensed MM's technology. However, as far as I know, the Rat Pack never saw the light of day. The more cynical of us figured that someone shut it down as it'd have blown the hard drive and fledgling CD-Burner markets out of the water. After all, the really expensive SCSI hard drives had just reached 1GB! So while this article is interesting, it just more people finding another way to do something that's already been done. The glimmer of light is that with enough folks and companies working on it, perhaps someday this will actually make it into the consumer market.

This means...

[gus goose]

.. that losing your marbles could become a verys serious affair...

Re:WORM

[vidarh]

There are several log structured filesystems that does this already. Some are very efficient for current data. And the cool part is that "rollback" to any point in time can be done by just ignoring data written after that point in time when reading from the filesystem. Deletion, however, is as you write very important to make possible.

Dispell of myth

[Nickoty]

glass is a liquid (albeit an extremely viscous one). Over time, it pours

No, it doesn't.

Re:Alright just a cubic centimeter

[infinite9]

they don't mention the size of the equipment

I saw a similar technology about five years ago. They were calling it holographic memory. The thingy that stored the data was about the size of a sugar cube. The hardware was about the size of a VCR.

Paranoia

[KingAzzy]

Geeeeeeeeeze the paranoia and conspiracy theories just ABOUND these days.

Oh no! It's new! It's evil! It must be feared! The world might end! EEEEEEEEEEEEEK!!!

I can send instructions on how to manufacture nerve gas and detailed orders on how to kill the entire population of New York in a 2k file.

I can store credit card numbers of the entire population of the United States in a 8 gigabyte file. Compress it down and burn it to a DVD and send it out fed-ex.. or just put it on a website.

Calm down, take your lithium, and please people PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD enough with the conspiracy theories!!!!!!

1 TB filesystem

[s20451]

How would you design a filesystem for a storage device with 1 TB or more? It seems to me that the directory tree concept would become unwieldy, too much stuff would get lost.

Above 1 TB, with multiple processes interacting on the data, it would seem to me that the storage device would start to look like a mini-Internet. Perhaps the "domains" and "search engines" concept could be used. Or is there a better way to design such a filesystem from the ground up?

Much Needed

[glenebob]

I want to dump my PC. I want to plug a keyboard and mouse, and some sort of real display device (maybe one of those nifty retinal scanning thingies :-) into my palm-sized pocket main frame and get to work. I want to do it at the beach. I want to do it next to a small alpine lake. I want to do it on a plane, I want to do it on a train. I want to do it in the dark, I want to do it in the park... Sam I am...

I want my Win2K box in one pocket, and my Linux server in the other, with a wireless network. I'll even wear lead undies if I have to.

Anyhow, two main things stand in my way. One thing is power. The other is huge hard drives with &^*$$%^ moving parts and the rediculous cost and small capacity of current memory technology.

Hurry up with the solid state, fast, tiny storage please!! I'm begging here :-) I'm a programmer and it's sunny outside. I'm stuck in this little room with the blinds shut!!!
*sigh*
--
Damn it Jim, that's my sphincter, not a jelly donut!!!

The data cube.

[Heaviside]

The article referenced in this post is a bit short on information, but readers can get a more detailed view of the story from this article. [spie.org]

The technique involved is refered to as resonant hole burning. Rufus Cone [montana.edu] and his optical group at MSU have been working on many applications of this technique for years, including optical storage and stabilization of diode lasers (how's 20Hz linewidth for stabilization of a diode laser?) highly accurate clocks, metrology and so forth. Cone has a link to a nice power-point presentaion on his web page.

Cone and his group have been using crystalline materials, while this Japanese group is using glass. The advantage of glass is that the storage medium can be tailored to a specific shape. This abstract [jst.go.jp], published by the Active Glass Project, indicates other interesting research, including the up-conversion of photons using glass.

Maybe...

[cybeara]

Actually, the "whole supercooled liquid or not" question re: glass remains a bit open still. One reasonable discussion [ucr.edu] of it reaches the conclusion that there is no clear answer.