Scientists from Southampton have developed a new data storage writing method using lasers that can supposedly hold hundreds of terabytes of data on CD-sized glass.

According to a released paper, the new ‘5D’ optical data storage method uses laser technology to write high-density nanostructures into silica glass, causing the disk to become 10,000 more dense than Blu-Ray.

Researchers claimed that not only is the storage system incredibly dense, but can write at 1 million voxels per second, the equivalent of writing more than 230 kB of data, or more than 100 pages of text, per second.

As part of the research, around 5 GB of text data was written onto a disc with an almost 100% readout accuracy. With the writing density available, a disk written in this way could hold up to 500TB of data.

With upgrades to the system that allow parallel writing, the researchers say it should be feasible to write this amount of data in about 60 days.

“With the current system, we have the ability to preserve terabytes of data, which could be used, for example, to preserve information from a person’s DNA,” said Peter Kazansky, leader of the research team.

Findings showed that the silica glass disks could be an effective alternative to cloud storage, and a potentially key option as the world continues to demand vast storage capacity for large amounts of data.

Commenting on the results, doctoral researcher Yuhao Lei said: “Individuals and organisations are generating ever-larger datasets, creating the desperate need for more efficient forms of data storage with a high capacity, low energy consumption and long lifetime.

“While cloud-based systems are designed more for temporary data, we believe that 5D data storage in glass could be useful for longer-term data storage for national archives, museums, libraries or private organisations.”

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Previous attempts by scientists to use optical storage in transparent materials has proven difficult, with researchers struggling to find tech that could be effectively used in the real world.

Lasers have proven to be the key to unlocking this technology, the scientists said, by creating tiny pits inside glass.

“This new approach improves the data writing speed to a practical level, so we can write tens of gigabytes of data in a reasonable time,” Lei added.

“The highly localised, precision nanostructures enable a higher data capacity because more voxels can be written in a unit volume. In addition, using pulsed light reduces the energy needed for writing.”

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