Nick
In Remembrance
Bye bye Blu-ray? Glass based discs written with femtosecond lasers could blow away current optical media
30956_Superman_Memory_Crystals_FP_Wide.p
Jingyu Zhang, a UK professor at the Univ. of Southampton's Optoelectronics Research Centre, is not satisfied with today's optical media that maxes out at 128 gigabytes (GB) for "BDXL" Blu-Ray multi-layer discs. With the help of collaborators at the Netherland's Eindhoven University of Technology, he's cooking up new "Superman crystal" discs, which could one day hold 360 terabytes (TB) per disc.
Prof. Zhang describes, "We are developing a very stable and safe form of portable memory using glass, which could be highly useful for organisations with big archives. At the moment companies have to back up their archives every five to ten years because hard-drive memory has a relatively short lifespan. Museums who want to preserve information or places like the national archives where they have huge numbers of documents, would really benefit."
Much like the fictional device Superman's scientist birth father Jor-el used to store memories of Kryptonian culture for his son, the new storage media is composed of crystals that can store data for over a million years. The crystal disc can even survive intense temperatures of up to 1000 °C. The data is stored in trillions of tiny fused quartz crystals -- also known as nanostructured glass.
More on this here http://www.dailytech.com/Scientists+Create+360+TB+Superman+Crystal+Discs/article31933.htm
30956_Superman_Memory_Crystals_FP_Wide.p
Jingyu Zhang, a UK professor at the Univ. of Southampton's Optoelectronics Research Centre, is not satisfied with today's optical media that maxes out at 128 gigabytes (GB) for "BDXL" Blu-Ray multi-layer discs. With the help of collaborators at the Netherland's Eindhoven University of Technology, he's cooking up new "Superman crystal" discs, which could one day hold 360 terabytes (TB) per disc.
Prof. Zhang describes, "We are developing a very stable and safe form of portable memory using glass, which could be highly useful for organisations with big archives. At the moment companies have to back up their archives every five to ten years because hard-drive memory has a relatively short lifespan. Museums who want to preserve information or places like the national archives where they have huge numbers of documents, would really benefit."
Much like the fictional device Superman's scientist birth father Jor-el used to store memories of Kryptonian culture for his son, the new storage media is composed of crystals that can store data for over a million years. The crystal disc can even survive intense temperatures of up to 1000 °C. The data is stored in trillions of tiny fused quartz crystals -- also known as nanostructured glass.
More on this here http://www.dailytech.com/Scientists+Create+360+TB+Superman+Crystal+Discs/article31933.htm
