New Breakthrough in Storage Industry: Cerabyte shows Ceramic coated Glass Storage Technology
Thanks to CTOnews.com netizen OC_Formula for the clue delivery! CTOnews.com, November 25 (Xinhua) German startup Cerabyte recently unveiled a prototype of data storage that uses ceramic-coated glass technology to store up to 100 PB of data on a disk with a few centimeters on the side.
Because glass and ceramics are not afraid of fire, water, radiation, magnetic field and other effects, they can become more reliable and economical alternatives to magnetic tapes, optical discs and hard drives.
In September this year, the company announced the launch of a glass storage system with a ceramic layer, and in a video released recently, the working principle of the system is described in detail.
The video attached to CTOnews.com is as follows, in which you can see how the glass plate is removed from the ink cartridge, placed on the recording and reading surface, and how the recording process occurs.
The recording is carried out twice: the femtosecond laser writes a line of information in one transmission, and in the reverse transmission, a special camera reads the record to verify the record. When reading, the camera works in both directions, making the process twice as fast as recording.
The recorded dataset is stored in a cassette and does not require energy for storage. Records are permanent records and do not require special procedures to maintain data integrity.
The thickness of the ceramic layer on the Cerabyte glass plate is between 50 and 100 atoms. The ceramic is coated on both surfaces of the board. During recording, the laser burns holes in the layer and encodes the data in binary code (with or without holes).
The data recording format is a plain QR code, making the solution compatible with mainstream file systems, operating environments, and applications, but each set of code is so small that normal people cannot see it.
The width of each laser hole in the ceramic is 100 nm. In the future, developers promise to reduce the wavelength to 3nm, but more sophisticated devices such as electron microscopes will be needed to read it.
