“the medium is silica crystal, similar to optical cable, it’s highly durable. It’s also capacious: The technology can store up to 360 TB of data on a 5-inch glass platter.”
How hf can you have 5D space within 3D space? This sounds like marketing bullshit.
The 5D Memory Crystal stores data by using tiny voxels – 3D pixels – in fused silica glass, etched by femtosecond laser pulses. These voxels possess “birefringence,” meaning that their light refraction characteristics vary depending upon the polarization and direction of incoming light.
That difference in light orientation and strength can be read in conjunction with the voxel’s location (x, y, z coordinates), allowing data to be encoded in five dimensional space.
Oh, I get it now. It’s a five-dimensional mathematical space which is given by the three physical space dimensions plus the difference in light orientation and the difference the light strength.
5D is the wrong term, the correct term is multiplex.

It is the correct term if you look at it from a Hilbert space point of view. You have 5 probe options (vector 5D) that give you 5 read options (vector 5D).
It’s not strength, but rotation. Shoot a photon at the cube at a certain spot, you get data out of it. Hit the same spot in the cube with light that is polarized perpendicular to the first, and you get different data out of it.
Er… that’s what it sounds like, anyway…
and just like every other storage medium, it will last for eons…and die about .5 femtoseconds before you have a critical need to pull data off.
prints article out
places it on an overflowing, ancient pile of documents of promising, science proved data storage methods that haven’t made it to public use yet
Remember Memristors? They’re commercially available today, at 200 EUR per bit.
wow, sign me up for a couple of dozen terabytes of that!
I also remember people burning pitts on scotch tape, then rolling it up and reading it in 3d :)
Nor ever will
I’m up to 45TB of actual used storage. I just want another tape analog. I want inexpensive, slow, long-term storage I can move off-site easily. This paying double to keep disks around and then moving them in boxes is just bad, and online storage is stupid expensive at those sizes.
Was running on Backblaze for years until they screwed around with my client enough that I can’t backup my NAS reliably. I’m not a company, I’m not going to pay the cost of my disks every year to store the content of my disks.
I’ve been considering for a few years standing up a 2u box in colocation.
It will not.
For real, what am I going to do when the sun swallows the earth in 4 billion years?
You may be entitled to compensation
Any number I could call?
Finally some worthy storage for memes!
Eat your heart out Ea-nāṣir.
Those aliens from the future will be so amazed when they find a disc with 360 TB of cat videos.
You mean various levels of fucked up porn.
Yeah but they aren’t amazed by that, tons of porn in literally every civilization. But cat videos are novel
Open AI just bought out all the glass platter production. Not only will consumers not be able to store their data for 14gy, they won’t have anywhere to set down their drinks either
Sauce? Or sarcasm?
Really?
I been wooshed, sorry v.v
It’s like that these days. It’s hard to tell.
Excellent, I will catalog my journals of my metamorphosis into a giant worm on these.
Giant worm that shits mind enhancing drug, to be more specific
Pondering my backup orb
What if some civilization in the past already had something like this, and there are ‘plates’ or pieces of rock out there (under sand dunes? written in the sides of those vases from ancient Egypt?)
Could they make portable readers that can at least spot old pottery chunks that are probably FULL of videos?
Given that it’s the engine Egyptians, they’ll be cat videos.
LOL I would NOT be surprised !!
See, now this is the tech I would understand pouring billions into. Give every nation on earth a durable copy of the last 100 years of medicine, physics, biology. That’s what a reasonable ruling class ought to do.
At least give them to the nations which aren’t currently trying to ignore and undo the last 100 years of medicine, physics, and biology. (Sorry, United States.)
those are the places that most need it though
Eh, we earned it.
if they were reasonable, they wouldn’t be a ruling “class”
Once you have the tech fully worked out, the budget to make them is going to be cheaper. Easier for all nations to get their own
Oh good it can fit the next Call of Duty game.
But is it safe from the cats? 😼
glass shattering sounds
Is anything, really?
Not even cats are safe from cats.
Oh yeah? Well take a look at these Elder Scrolls over here.
Wait no, not literally! 😵💫 🔥
Skyrim Silica Crystal Edition
I’ve seen this particular revolutionary technology come by about once a year for the past two decades or so, so let’s say I’m not holding my breath and I will toss this one on the large pile of “bullshit tech articles”
Waiting for the consumer reader and writer of those things, call me then
Totally. This is the data equivalent of a “new battery tech will revolutionise your phone” post.
Crystalline / Holographic storage has been hyped since the 80s… still not production ready.
Not the business plan. This will be used as an archiving service for $$$.
Denis Villeneuve nailed it years ago.

Similar concepts have been developed before, Microsoft and Southampton University were working on glass cubes with 3D laser etchings in the centre around 2015-16

(now divorced)
If you squint this is a weird shrine to a fictional marriage between Elvis and Britney Spears
I saw Shakira and that chef on YouTube who makes ornate sculptures out of chocolate and has a weird, fixed PanAm smile the whole time.
Okay yeah, now that you’ve said it I can see that too XD















