5D - Massive leap in digital storage technology (1 Viewer)

[RMajidi]

[Not sure which forum this topic rightly belongs under - perhaps it doesn't belong at HTF at all yet. I'm initially placing it under Blu-ray / UHD and moderators can move it to another forum, or ditch it altogether as appropriate]

A new technology called 5D has been developed by scientists at Southampton University in the UK. Product has now been developed so it's well past whitepaper research theory.

5D involves digital storage into small glass discs. Enormous storage in fact - 360 terrabytes per disc - i.e. 360,000+ GB per disc... over 3000 times the capacity of a UHD Blu-ray disc.

The new product is mooted to have a multi-billion year lifespan at room temperature and stability up to 1000 degrees C; although how they test to support these claims is unclear as I haven't read the technical whitepapers.

This news excites me purely as a massive leap in technological advancement of digital storage and I'm eager to share it with my I.T. students next week. Dreaming of its potential application to home theatre has me drooling even more, though it'll be some time yet before we see any inroads in that direction. I can imagine that this might initially have greater impact in the archival and preservation of audio-visual content, before its application ever reaches the home user.

Another point of possible relevance to film buffs is that the developers of 5D are referring to the discs as "Superman Memory Crystal" - recalling the tiny glass discs that stored planet Krypton's vast historical repository that accompanied baby Superman in his spacecraft to Earth.

The article linked below provides more details and a brief clip of the disc-writing process, but with no details yet of the reader equipment used to retrieve the stored data.


http://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2016/02/5d-data-storage-update.page

 

[Everett S.]

Wow, this sounds great! I wonder if they got the idea from the Superman film?

 

[Brian Kidd]

It's certainly interesting, but I doubt it will have any practical consumer application. Consumers are moving away from permanent physical storage with each passing day. As for being a basis for archival preservation of data, I think it's a remarkable step forward. The drawback is that, although the discs could potentially last "forever," the equipment needed to retrieve the data certainly will not.

 

[RMajidi]

Wow, this sounds great! I wonder if they got the idea from the Superman film?

...As for being a basis for archival preservation of data, I think it's a remarkable step forward. The drawback is that, although the discs could potentially last "forever," the equipment needed to retrieve the data certainly will not.

It doesn't need any data retrieval equipment. You simply hurl the tiny glass data repository into the heart of some snowy wasteland and watch it create its own ice study palace.

 

[Worth]

I think UHD will be the last physical home video format we'll see, though I suspect DVD will still outlast everything else.

 

[Brian Kidd]

To be honest, with the push by the studios for streaming copies during the past couple of years, I am surprised that UHD discs exist. I felt sure that Blu-ray would be the end of the line for physical media. It remains to be seen whether or not UHD even makes much of a splash. I doubt most consumers even know it exists. We could have another D-VHS on our hands. Time will tell.

 

[Rick Thompson]

The only problem I can see with that type of storage media is making sure the equipment to read it exists that far out in time. Even in the past 50 years, you're talking the extinction or near-extinction of 1" reel tape, LPs (though they've had a mini-renaissance), 45s, 1/4" reel tape, 8-track tape, 7" floppy disks, 5-1/4" floppies, 3-1/2" floppies, 8mm movies, beta video, VHS video, S-VHS video. We're told that CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray will soon bite the dust. That doesn't mention some of the more exotic variants of the above, such as audio tapes recorded at 15/16 ips, or LPs at 16-1/3 rpm.

So, will the equipment be around to read, say, an NTSC format glass disk in 100,000 years? Or even a disk at all?