Chinese scientists promise to bring to life what Japanese developers have been struggling with for decades. The Japanese stopped fighting for optical media after the release of four-layer Blu-ray discs with a capacity of 128 GB. Experimental developments far surpassed this threshold, but they never left the laboratories. Promising Chinese optical disks are also still at the experimental stage, but they have already made an incredible breakthrough at the start.
As reported in a recent article in the journal Nature, the promising Chinese optical disc is the same size as conventional DVD discs in both thickness (which is important!) and diameter. At the same time, it has 100 recording layers on each side. The layers are separated from each other by a transparent layer only 1 micron thick. The 100-layer disc developed by Hitachi, for example, had only 50 layers per side with the recording layers spaced 60 microns apart. One can only marvel at what Chinese scientists were able to achieve.
On one disk, developed by Chinese scientists, you can record 1.6 petabits (200 TB) of information. This is almost an order of magnitude more than what modern hard drives can accommodate. Thus, even a small stack of such disks can contain the information of an entire data center.
Like Hitachi, scientists from Shanghai University of Science and Technology, Peking University, as well as the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics and the Key Laboratory of Photochemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences used a femtosecond laser for recording. However, they had a much more difficult task to ensure that the data was written to a much larger disk space.
The abstract of the Nature paper states, in part: “We have developed an optical recording medium based on a photoresist film doped with an emissive aggregation-inducing dye that can be optically stimulated by femtosecond laser beams. This film has high transparency and uniformity, and the phenomenon of aggregation-induced emission provides a storage mechanism.”
Simply put, thanks to a combination of molecules in a photoresist film that reacts to light, the dye is fixed under the influence of laser pulses. The technology is not yet ready for commercial use and needs to be improved both in terms of increasing write/read speeds and in terms of developing devices for writing and reading. However, Chinese drives have great potential in the field of data archiving: scientists say they can last from 50 to 100 years, and they only consume energy when writing and reading, but not when idle.
Until now, not a single similar project has reached the stage of market products. However, the world needs such high-capacity and cost-effective storage media. Artificial intelligence promises to generate a flow of information that we have not yet encountered, and data center consumption is already taking away a few percent of electricity generation from national power grids. It will become even more difficult to live with this and it is better not to take it to extremes.
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