Nano-Structured Glass — a future of data storage
Long Term Storage with Glass
“The 5D optical storage medium works by using an extremely fast and precise femtosecond laser to create tiny pits within the fused silica glass containing self-assembled nanostructures (nanogratings).
Quartz silica glass is the same material used to make spacecraft windows and is extremely durable in space. Data written into nanogratings in quartz has a projected lifetime of 14B years.”
~Arch Mission Foundation Blog
Small Size but Large Storage
“Scientists at the University of Southampton have developed a 5D glass disc that can store 360 Terabytes of data for billions of years. The discs are made out of nanostructured glass, and the data is stored and retrieved using femtosecond laser writing. These discs can store data for up to 13.8 billion years, that’s over twice the estimated age of the Earth, and about equal to the estimated age of our universe.”
~ All About Circuits Blog
Conclusion
As new methods of storage like this continue to emerge, new methods of querying and data management platform architecture will emerge as well. the possibility to store such massive amount of data in a small space could greatly reduce the cost of big data storage systems which might drive newer management systems like data lakes and lakehouses to become go to architectures on the cloud, or even drive more usage to hybrid cloud storage if companies can manage massive storage in small amounts of space rather then pay another company to manage it for them.
