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New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray

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Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray

#121

Off topic: if I wanted to digital store files to pass down to my children that might not be access for decades , what's the best medium to store such data? Floppy/ZipDrive/CD-ROM/Blueray/USB-A are either obsolete or are on their way out. What's a future proof storage option? (and if you said Cloud Storage {X} - just look at how many services have folded in just the last few years alone). Secondly, what's the best fil…

Rosetta Project[0] physically etches data into an object for long-term durability. Project used text for human readability as it only requires magnification. One could imagine establishing some OCR/barcode system to enable future re-digitization. Evidently there is now a Nano Rosetta[1] commercial project you can use today to have jewelry printed with your information.

Alternatively, the Arctic Code Vault project[2] evidently used Piql[3] which claims 1000 year durability.

[0] https://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/ [1] https://nanorosetta.com/ [2] https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/ [3] https://www.piql.com/services/long-term-information-storage/

Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray

#122
post #18
post #10

In case anyone is wondering what they mean by "5D": they mean it's a 3D array of marks, each of which has both size and orientation. The 3D array is three 2D layers. According to this definition, a DVD or Blu-Ray disc is "4D" because it can have multiple layers each of which stores 1-dimensional data (pit versus no pit). And a book is at least "7D" because it contains a 3D arrangement of marks, and marks can vary in…

I think Dimension in the data sense of the word, not Dimension in the spatial sense of the word. Multi-dimension data is a thing, and it goes a lot higher than 4, 5, or 7.

Sure, "5D" _could_ make sense. It just happens not to in this case.

They're mixing up two different sorts of dimensionality that it doesn't make any sense to mix up.

1. How many parameters does it take to describe where you're looking for a given piece of information?

This is (kinda) a measure of how many pieces of information there are. Increasing the number of dimensions can mean a very large increase in the amount of data -- imagine going from a 1000x1000 array of things to a 1000x1000x1000 array.

The number of dimensions in this case is "two and a bit", because they're using a small number of 2-dimensional layers.

2. How many parameters does it take to describe what you find when you look at a particular piece of information?

This is (kinda) a measure of how much information there is in each thing. Increasing the number of dimensions here typically means a rather small increase in the amount of data. E.g., the difference between "1D" and "2D" here would, in the simplest case, be a factor of 2.

The number of dimensions in this case is 2, because in each voxel there's a thing parameterized by size and orientation. (I think.)

So, three dimensions of the first kind and two of the second. Add 'em up to get 5D, right?

Wrong. (At least, if your aim is to inform rather than to deceive.)

First problem: these two kinds of dimension do not behave in the same way. Suppose there are N positions along each dimension, and you have A type-1 dimensions and B type-2 dimensions. Then you have N^A places to look for data, and each one stores B log N bits. So adding 1 to A multiplies the amount of data stored by N, typically a very big change; but adding 1 to B multiplies it by (B+1)/B, typically a rather small change.

Second problem: the "baseline" is not zero type-2 dimensions but one. You always have at least one type-2 dimension, or else you aren't actually storing any data. So e.g. if you have a grid of memory cells, that's 2 type-1 dimensions and 1 type-2 dimension. Are we going to call this 3D storage? I really hope not.

Two-and-a-bit-th problem: as mentioned above, their third type-1 dimension is really hardly there: they have three layers. I guess that is a third dimension, kinda, but it's pretty underwhelming.

This is 2-and-a-bit-dimensional storage, with each storage location being able to hold a bit more data because of this size-and-orientation thing. It sounds like it's an impressive technical achievement and might turn out to be a great storage medium. It just isn't in any useful sense five-dimensional.

I said at the start that "5D" could make sense. How? Well, suppose you have a system where you have things arranged in a 3D lattice, and then to query each thing you shine light at it and see what it does. And suppose you're able to make each of your thing store different things for different wavelengths of light, and also different things depending on what angle you shine the light at. In that case, the number of type-1 dimensions might be as large as 6: storage locations are indexed by three spatial dimensions, two dimensions describing the direction of the light beam, and one dimension describing the light wavelength. (If you had a system like this, then I bet that in practice those last three dimensions would all be "small", like the third spatial dimension in this silica-glass storage.)

Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray

#123
post #10

In case anyone is wondering what they mean by "5D": they mean it's a 3D array of marks, each of which has both size and orientation. The 3D array is three 2D layers. According to this definition, a DVD or Blu-Ray disc is "4D" because it can have multiple layers each of which stores 1-dimensional data (pit versus no pit). And a book is at least "7D" because it contains a 3D arrangement of marks, and marks can vary in…

They mentioned 500TB for a single glass disk, isn't that 100,000x more than a 5GB blu-ray, or are they comparing it with the 10-layer blu-rays that never really hit the market? Is this the same UK group that did all the holographic disc research that is basically vaporware in the mass market (I don't want to call their research vaporware, just that it never hit the consumer market)? Edit: Whoops. 4.7 geebees is for a…

They did indeed mention 500TB. That doesn't mean they have actually stored 500TB anywhere, or that they have a system that's currently capable of storing 500TB anywhere, or even that they genuinely have good reason to think that their system can practically be made to store 500TB in something the size of a Blu-Ray disc.

Maybe it can! But so far as I can tell the 10000x figure is much more what they hope might be achievable than what they are in any position to do.

I don't have access to their actual paper. But the reports in the popular press seem to indicate that the individual voxels are on the order of 500x50nm in size, compared with Blu-Ray pits which are about 500x500nm. So that's a density increase of 10x within each layer. Each voxel apparently stores 4 bits, compared with one bit for a Blu-Ray pit, so that's a density increase of 40x.

So if they're claiming 10000x, I think most of that increase has to be from having many many layers. They'd need 250 layers. So far they have done 3. It seems to me that the technical challenges in increasing the number of layers so greatly without reducing the density of voxels might be very great, because to read or write a voxel you need to point a laser at it, and as the number of layers increases they start getting in one another's way.

Maybe they already have some ingenious solution to that problem -- again, I don't have access to their actual article. But I tend to think that if they'd solved that problem then (1) they would be making sure that the articles in the popular press tell the world of that achievement and (2) they would have demonstrated it with more than 3 layers.

[EDITED to add:] Oh, wait, at least one of their publications is available to read: https://www.osapublishing.org/optica/fulltext.cfm?uri=optica... This one talks about "50 layers", though I'm not 100% sure whether they mean 50 full two-dimensional layers stacked on top of one another (their diagrams seem to suggest not), and says that with the parameters they used the amount they could fit on one disc would be ... 1.64TB. That's a ~30x increase over a dual-layer Blu-ray disc. Not to be sneezed at, for sure, but it's a lot less than 10000x.

That paper is entitled "High speed ultrafast laser anisotropic nanostructuring by energy deposition control via near-field enhancement". It seems there's another one called "5D optical data storage with 100% readout accuracy in silica glass". Same authors, approximately same publication date, so it seems a bit unlikely that one of them is claiming 300x denser data storage than the other, but who knows?

Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray

#124
post #25

The other day I was talking with a friend about the high cost and perceived fragility of tape drives for long term personal archival while bemoaning the loss of higher density optical storage technology. It's not easy to backup or shuffle around terabytes of personal video, audio and pictures. Hard drives aren't exactly the right media for safe deposit boxes. In the 90's I had an Iomega Ditto 250MB drive that held 12…

I have been talking and asking about this for years. And was told about Archival Disc [1] on HN. 500GB per disc right now, and only came out in 2019. 1TB per disc in the future but I suspect not in the next two years. I wish they have a more consumer, or prosumer friendly version though. The current drive goes for about $9K [2] There are Archival BluRay disc that offer 50 + year storage, but they are only in ~50GB pe…

They remind me of m-discs, which seems to be cheaper as well. How is data stored on those Archival Discs?

Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray

#125
post #7

The other day I was talking with a friend about the high cost and perceived fragility of tape drives for long term personal archival while bemoaning the loss of higher density optical storage technology. It's not easy to backup or shuffle around terabytes of personal video, audio and pictures. Hard drives aren't exactly the right media for safe deposit boxes. In the 90's I had an Iomega Ditto 250MB drive that held 12…

Some have theorized that this is what's behind Amazon Glacier, and that they want to keep it to themselves: https://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bd... I also crave for such cheap storage, perfect for archival/backups, especially when combined with modern snapshotting. HVDs never really materialized, despite being promising, and actually on the market at some point, IIRC: https://en.wikipedia.org/…

Is the suspect for Glacier proven?

Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tape drive backwards compatibility is an issue for sure but optical drives have had decent backwards compatibility so far. DVD drives can read CD's. BR drives can read CD, DVD and BR. I think backwards compatibility is more feasible for optical as the larger pits on older media can still be read by narrower wavelengths. They'll just look like giant craters flashing by instead of nice neat pits.

AFAIK I believe that they actually do use different lasers for different disc types, but the cost to put two or three laser diodes in one drive is basically nil these days. The big problem with optical storage is the same that tape struggles with - it's primary market shrank. This was a bit of a self-inflicted wound. CDs and DVDs were basically ubiquitous, drives came down in price dramatically, and the storage densi…

I believe streaming killed optical disc for video even if there are no format war. It's just convenient and quality is fine for most people.

Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no lack of DVD drives, they are widely available on Amazon, BestBuy, eBay.

They're also pretty cheap ($15-30), powered fully over USB—no extra power cable like in the old days—and they're tiny.

Note that for restore purpose, generally slim drives aren't good to read not good quality discs. Better to buy 5-inch bay sized drives.

Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray

#128
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seek times always matter even if they're not the top priority. And especially if we're talking about a storage medium that takes in a whopping 500 TB.

The GP is talking about something interactive like a web app, where a seek time likely would matter. This isn’t intended to be used as such.

Imagine you need to seek 490TB to restore 10TB.

Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray

#129
post #117
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some guys I know propose a storage on 35mm-film solution that looks pretty foolproof for a couple of centuries at least. https://digifilm-corp.com/preserve-your-works-for-eternity To read back the data, you need something to digitize the film (a flatbed scanner would work, I've tried, or probably even a smartphone with a a DIY magnifier), then something to decode the data (the necessary source code is provided in cle…

I'm having trouble finding the data density. How many lbs of film/GB?

It's not very dense at the moment, around 600KB per frame IIRC, with lots of redundancy and while staying really easy to read even with DIY hardware. They think they should be able to cram about 2MB per frame without compromising durability and without any compression (but lots of in-picture redundancy).

That should give about 200 GB per roll of film (the large ones).

Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray

#130
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That much music (even at lossless compression that’s a lifetime of nonstop music) is completely impractical to navigate using a common stereo UI

Assuming you're referring to the parent comment's 100GB drive (or even the 256 GB one) that's really not true. A quick `du -sh` tells me I have right at 100 GB of FLAC music, and I've easily listened to every single track. There are, in fact, only 3770 tracks. At an average of 4.5 minutes a song (guessing), that's only around 11.8 days of music. About 8 hours a day of music for a month! Or to calculate it another way…

To be fair, the parent said "impractical to navigate using a common stereo UI" which doesn't have much to do with the capaciousness of a library, more about how easy it is to browse/search/find/choose what you want.

Some stereos have pretty small, monochrome displays. For example this seems to get mentioned a lot in the UK, partly because they are advertised through mainstream channels at older listeners: https://www.brennan.co.uk/

Dunno if you call them "common".

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