Know All About 5D Optical Data Storage Technology 

The Covid- 19 pandemic has made the world go digital. Most of our work and routine have moved to various virtual platforms. In a way, we are completely dependent on the digital platform for our daily work, so much that we need a social media reminder to recall birthdays and anniversaries. Sad, but true. 

Since our dependency has increased we also need a considerable amount of space to store our work, memories in the form of pictures and videos along with backups. Citing this, we face many space crunch issues and often encounter low storage space in our cell phones or computers, even in the cloud. Data storage should be easy like new battery technology to charge smartphones in 5 minutes. 

But, there is some good news for you. Scientists from the University of Southhampton have had a breakthrough that offers an incredible data storage density and long-term archiving capabilities. 

Want to know more about this technology? 

5D Optical Data Storage Technology 

What is the new Data Storage Technology? 

The new technology is termed 5D Optical Data Storage Technology. It is developed by deploying cutting-edge laser technology along with a little problem-solving. Scientists claim that the 5D data storage technology has the capacity to store 500 terabytes (TB) on a single CD-sized disk. 

The creators also claim that this technology can be used to store data from museums, libraries, and even individual persons. 

How did it begin? 

The inception of this technology can be dated back to 2013. IT was first demonstrated in 2013 when scientists successfully claimed of successfully using the format to record and retrieve about 300 Kb test files. 

How does the 5D Optical Storage Technology work? 

Scientists say that the data stored in this technology is written using a femtosecond laser. It emits short but powerful pulses of light. It then forges tiny structures on the glass that can be measured in nanoscale. They are termed 5D because the structures on the glass contain information on the intensity and polarization of the laser beam that has three spatial dimensions. 

Later in 2015, the team again demonstrated that through this technology they could save digital copies of major documents. This came as a major breakthrough. 

What is the Addition? 

Making advances in this technology, the scientists came up with an up-gradation now. They claimed to be able to write at fast enough speeds using the optical phenomenon. This is called near-field enhancement. It enables scientists to create nanostructures with weak light pulses rather than writing with femtosecond laser directly. This allows data to be written at 100,000 voxels per second which is equal to 230 kb of data, or more than 100 pages of text, as good as a book. 

“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,” says Yuhao Lei from the University of Southampton in the UK. “The highly localized, 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.”

Advantages of using this Technology

• Not vulnerable to high temperatures like a typical hard drive 
• Stores large amount of data for a longer duration 
• Chances of stored data being corrupt are low 
• 100 percent readout accuracy 
• It can also preserve data from someone’s DNA 

Conclusion 

Storing digital data safely is the biggest challenge in the virtual world. Undoubtedly, we have many services that give you cloud space to save your data, but it has its own risks. The 5D Optical Data Storage technique helps you store large amounts of data securely. This can be considered a boon in the digital world. 

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