Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

Re:Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for bi... by lvh on Tuesday June 25, 2019 @08:06AM (#20273359)

It’s perfectly reasonable to say you’ve increased dimensionality when you find a new physical property to store things with. If a CHS-addressed HD tomorrow starts using opacity or depth as a way to store 2 bits in each, obviously the dimensionality has increased.

In ML, we regularly accept 100+d data (much higher for imaging applications). Even simple mechanical systems have large state vectors.

I’m a regular critic of university systems but this isn’t the university making stuff up because it sounds impressive.

(Additional evidence: one of the authors is a Microsoft employee, not an academic employed by the University of Southampton.)

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Re:Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for bi... by sshine on Tuesday June 25, 2019 @08:24AM (#20273476)

The criticism that I am also willing to go with is that dimensionality in statistics / linear algebra / machine learning assumes abstract dimensions, where readers of popular science assume physical dimensions.

When the number of dimensions is so close to 3, and the subject of discussion is ways to physically store data, this appears misleading.

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Re:Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for bi... by lvh on Tuesday June 25, 2019 @08:28AM (#20273501)

I agree that’s probably what’s going on, but “the university is making stuff up to look busy” and “no sane engineer would say this” and "clearly they made this up, 13.8Gy is mighty convenient" isn’t exactly a charitable read.

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Re:Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for bi... by cgravill on Tuesday June 25, 2019 @09:56AM (#20274181)

There's a related Microsoft Research project https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-sil...

(I work in the same lab but on different things)

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Re:Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for bi... by matheweis on Wednesday June 26, 2019 @06:19AM (#20283538)

The one recent (late 2018) publication (1) from that lab hints at the current practical state of the technology:

“We have not (yet) built a full storage system and are currently building out (multiple) prototype read and write heads.”

“the prototype decoder achieves an accuracy of 99.47% across ... voxels written at two micron lateral separation, over 10 layers.”

“we anticipate that in a volume equivalent to a DVD-disk we can write about 1 TB. The technology can potentially get to 360 TB”

1. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2018/0...

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