Skip to main content

A stamp-sized piece of this nanofilm can store more data than 200 DVDs

Northeast Normal University

Ninety percent of the world’s data has been created in the last two years, with a massive 2.5 quintillion bytes generated every single day. As you might suspect, this causes some challenges when it comes to storage. While one option is to gradually turn every square inch of free land into giant data centers, researchers from China may have come up with a more elegant solution.

In a potential breakthrough, they have developed a new nanofilm — 80 times thinner than a human hair — that is able to store large amounts of data holographically. A single 10-by-10 cm piece of this film could archive more than 1,000 times the amount of data found on a DVD. By our count, that means around 8.5 TB of data. This data can also be retrieved incredibly quickly, at speeds of up to 1GB per second: The equivalent of 20 times the reading speed of modern flash memory.

In the journal Optical Materials Express, the researchers detail the fabrication process of the new film. This involves using a laser to write information onto silver nanoparticles on a titanium dioxide (titania) semiconductor film. This stores the data in the form of 3D holograms, thereby allowing it to be compressed into smaller spaces than regular optical systems.

That’s exciting enough, but what really makes the work promising is the fact that the data is stored in a way that is stable. Previous attempts at creating films for holographic data storage have proven less resilient than alternate storage methods since they can be wiped by exposure to ultraviolet light. That makes them less-than-viable options for long-term information storage. The creators of this new film, however, have shown that it has a high stability even in the presence of such light. This environmental stability means that the device could be used outside — or even conceivably in harsher radiation conditions like outer space.

Going forward, the researchers aim to test their new film by putting it through its paces outdoors. Should all go according to plan, it won’t be too long before this is available on the market. We might be willing to throw down a few bucks on Kickstarter for a piece!

Editors' Recommendations

Luke Dormehl
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
Six-year-old AMD GPU smokes Nvidia’s new GTX 1630 by more than double
MSI's custom GTX 1630 graphics card.

Nvidia quietly released the GTX 1630 on Tuesday, following a reported delay at the end of May. The card, which is around $150 and built on the older Turing architecture, won't be making it into our roundup of the best graphics cards, though. Early reviews show that even the six-year old RX 470 beats the GTX 1630 by as much as 52%.

It's a dire situation for Nvidia's new GPU. Guru3D's review of the Palit GTX 1630 4GB Dual showed that the card sits at the bottom in every benchmark. And that's not just against the latest graphics cards. In Far Cry 6, for example, the GTX 1630 was beaten by Nvidia's GTX 1650 Super by a massive 64% at 1080p. AMD's RX 470, which is twice as old as the GTX 1650 Super, won out by 52%.

Read more
Lenovo’s latest ThinkStation is smaller than an Xbox (and way more powerful)
Lenovo small form factor workstation.

Usually, the faster the PC, the more hot it gets and the bigger it is. But what if you could just have the components worthy of the best desktops in a case that's smaller than an Xbox Series X? That's exactly what Lenovo is doing with its ThinkStation P360 Ultra, which clocks in at just under 4 liters of volume.

That's almost 3 less liters than the Xbox Series X, and much, much smaller than the typical desktop, while also supporting up to a Core i9-12900K and an RTX A5000. With these specs, the P360 Ultra might be the fastest small form factor PC ever launched.

Read more
World’s first 200TB SSD is nearly here, but you can’t use it
An SSD data port.

The era of 200TB solid-state drives (SSD) appears to be on the horizon, with a successor to the world’s largest SSD confirmed to be in development.

Nimbus Data’s 100TB ExaDrive immediately became the biggest SSD in the world when it launched more than two years ago. However, that record will soon belong to its successor, which may even launch sometime in 2022.

Read more