Is This Piece Of Glass The Future Of Data Storage?

We used to store files on floppy discs, then on compact discs, then on USB sticks, but none of those last a lifetime. In my family, we're constantly copying family images from one computer to the next, from one external hard drive to a newer one, while also storing them on three different cloud services of companies that might no longer exist by the time we have grandchildren. But here comes Microsoft. Their research team just announced they've managed to read and write data in glass where it could last for more than 10,000 years. That's long enough for archaeologists to write PhD thesis about your bathroom selfies. How big is this news really? And what other data storage upgrades are coming to consumer electronics? Let's have a look. The new Microsoft paper is about what they call project silica. The idea is to store data in glass. They don't do this by etching the surface, but instead they write with a laser inside the bulk of the glass in all three dimensions. They do this by using the laser to subtly change the atomic configuration so that either the refractive index of the glass is somewhat different or that the propagation of light depends on the polarization which is called by refringence. To read the information, they just illuminate the glass with LED light in the visible range and scan it with a microscope. They identify particular positions by focusing the light in different layers from multiple different directions. This gives them a full 3D reconstruction of the data. The major reason they are working on this is that this medium is particularly durable. But of course, we also want to know the other numbers. The potential data density of this storage medium would be going by volume a factor two to four or so higher than typical hard drives. For the writing speed, they report about 4 megabytes per second. That's like a factor 50 or so slower than a state-of-the-art drive. So if you want to back up your photos, that's a good opportunity to reread war in peace. Then again, this was a lab demo, not finished technology. It seems realistic to me that this could be improved. They don't say how fast the readout works, but it's clear that when it comes to durable storage, this is pretty good. It's much more practical than DNA storage, which we talked about a few months ago. That said, this is not a product that'll hit the consumer market anytime soon. This is because the writing and reading mechanism is rather complicated and at least for the time being requires specialized and rather expensive equipment. More likely, it'll become available as a cloud service for archiving purposes. But there are other developments in data storage which are about to hit the consumer market. Today's hard drives use a tiny electromagnet to flip the magnetization of a tiny region on the disc. If you want to store more data in the same volume, you must make those regions smaller. But smaller regions are more susceptible to random thermal noise. So they're more likely to accidentally flip, which brings in errors. To avoid this, you'd have to use a material that's less susceptible to noise. But that means that the magnetization is harder to flip. You need a stronger current for the tiny electromagnet to ride, which creates more heat, which creates its own noise. That's quite a conundrum. A clever idea to avoid the problem is by using a material whose magnetization is hard to flip, but then temporarily briefly heat the place you want to write on with a tiny laser, which makes it easier to flip the magnetization. That way, one can pack data more densely onto the disc. It's called heat assisted magnetic recording. The first types of these hard drives come from the company Seagate, and they began selling a few months ago. Western Digital is working on a similar product. And another development that's coming up is MR RAM, the magnetic resistive random access memory that stores information in electron spins. The random access memory is the working memory of your devices. This data is currently lost when you power down. For M RAM, this isn't the case. It can hold the data even when you switch off power. Better still, it's much faster. The current standard memory has access times typically in the range of 50 or so nanconds. With M RAMs, you can do it in the range of a few nanoconds. What this means is that it's likely that in the coming years, data storage will continue to get smaller. Phones will continue to become faster and we'll waste our time much more efficiently. It'll be great. So, don't forget to subscribe. Do you know the joke about the two guys running from a bear? Do you really think we're out on the bear? says one of them and the other one says I don't have to outrun the bear. I just have to outrun you. That's how I think about internet safety. I

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