Laser writing in glass for dense, fast and efficient archival data storage
- James Allison ,
- Patrick Anderson ,
- Erika Aranas ,
- Youssef Assaf ,
- Richard Black ,
- Marco Caballero ,
- Burcu Canakci ,
- John Antony Chattaway ,
- Andromachi Chatzieleftheriou ,
- James Clegg ,
- Daniel Cletheroe ,
- Bridgette Cooper ,
- Tim Deegan ,
- Austin Donnelly ,
- Rokas Drevinskas ,
- Zhonghe Feng ,
- Christos Gkantsidis ,
- Ariel Gomez Diaz ,
- Istvan Haller ,
- Freddie Hong ,
- Teodora Ilieva ,
- Russell Joyce ,
- Valentin Kapitany ,
- Mint Kunkel ,
- David Lara ,
- Takashi Lawson ,
- Sergey Legtchenko ,
- Fanglin Liu ,
- Xiaoqi Liu ,
- Bruno Magalhaes ,
- Sebastian Nowozin ,
- Hiske Overweg ,
- Antony Rowstron ,
- Masaaki Sakakura ,
- Nina Schreiner ,
- Adam Smith ,
- Oliver Snowdon ,
- Ioan Stefanovici ,
- David Sweeney ,
- Govert Verkes ,
- Phil Wainman ,
- Charles Whittaker ,
- Pablo Wilke Berenguer ,
- Hugh Williams ,
- Thomas Winkler ,
- Stefan Winzeck
Nature |
Long-term preservation of digital information is vital for safeguarding the knowledge of humanity for future generations. Existing archival storage solutions, such as magnetic tapes and hard disk drives, suffer from limited media lifespans that render them unsuitable for long-term data retention. Optical storage approaches, particularly laser writing in robust media such as glass, have emerged as promising alternatives with the potential for increased longevity. Previous work has predominantly optimized individual aspects such as data density but has not demonstrated an end-to-end system, including writing, storing and retrieving information. Here we report an optical archival storage technology based on femtosecond laser direct writing in glass that addresses the practical demands of archival storage, which we call Silica. We achieve a data density of 1.59 Gbit mm−3 in 301 layers for a capacity of 4.8 TB in a 120 mm square, 2 mm thick piece of glass. The demonstrated write regimes enable a write throughput of 25.6 Mbit s−1 per beam, limited by the laser repetition rate, with an energy efficiency of 10.1 nJ per bit. Moreover, we extend the storage ability to borosilicate glass, offering a lower-cost medium and reduced writing and reading complexity. Accelerated ageing tests on written voxels in borosilicate suggest data lifetimes exceeding 10,000 years.