If it is so easy to write to, seems it would be equally easy to erase
this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2025
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Bro has never used a permanent marker
A little bit of rubbing alcohol and it comes right off
Depends on the surface the marker was used on.
"easy if you have a diffraction-limited watt-scale laser" I guess
Intentional deletion is a lot different to entropy-caused bitrot
Open AI just bought out all the glass platter production. Not only will consumers not be able to store their data for 14gy, they won't have anywhere to set down their drinks either
Sauce? Or sarcasm?
Really?
I been wooshed, sorry v.v
It's like that these days. It's hard to tell.
and just like every other storage medium, it will last for eons..and die about .5 femtoseconds before you have a critical need to pull data off.
It will not.
For real, what am I going to do when the sun swallows the earth in 4 billion years?
You may be entitled to compensation
Any number I could call?
prints article out
places it on an overflowing, ancient pile of documents of promising, science proved data storage methods that haven't made it to public use yet
Remember Memristors? They're commercially available today, at 200 EUR per bit.
wow, sign me up for a couple of dozen terabytes of that!
I also remember people burning pitts on scotch tape, then rolling it up and reading it in 3d :)
How hf can you have 5D space within 3D space? This sounds like marketing bullshit.
The 5D Memory Crystal stores data by using tiny voxels – 3D pixels – in fused silica glass, etched by femtosecond laser pulses. These voxels possess "birefringence," meaning that their light refraction characteristics vary depending upon the polarization and direction of incoming light.
That difference in light orientation and strength can be read in conjunction with the voxel's location (x, y, z coordinates), allowing data to be encoded in five dimensional space.
Oh, I get it now. It's a five-dimensional mathematical space which is given by the three physical space dimensions plus the difference in light orientation and the difference the light strength.
5D is the wrong term, the correct term is multiplex.
It is the correct term if you look at it from a Hilbert space point of view. You have 5 probe options (vector 5D) that give you 5 read options (vector 5D).
It's not strength, but rotation. Shoot a photon at the cube at a certain spot, you get data out of it. Hit the same spot in the cube with light that is polarized perpendicular to the first, and you get different data out of it.
Er... that's what it sounds like, anyway...
Finally some worthy storage for memes!
Eat your heart out Ea-nāṣir.
Those aliens from the future will be so amazed when they find a disc with 360 TB of cat videos.
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...but only one million years into it's life span the human race is gone and aliens are unwittingly melting them down for raw material.
1 million years? You mean 200 top!
That's the spirit! 👍
Denis Villeneuve nailed it years ago.
Similar concepts have been developed before, Microsoft and Southampton University were working on glass cubes with 3D laser etchings in the centre around 2015-16
(now divorced)
If you squint this is a weird shrine to a fictional marriage between Elvis and Britney Spears
I saw Shakira and that chef on YouTube who makes ornate sculptures out of chocolate and has a weird, fixed PanAm smile the whole time.
Okay yeah, now that you've said it I can see that too XD
Permanent storage. Like the Wayback massive and internet archive I hope will fully take advantage of these. As well as project Gutenberg. So much else. I've been waiting for something like this for a long time
Oh good it can fit the next Call of Duty game.
All of this is useless because they can't be used to replace an ssd
Idk about "useless". But the way the article doesn't seem to want to mention the read/write speed is definitely indicative of some drawbacks to the medium. They repeatedly stress "cold storage" which could mean its a useful form of long term archive or backup for static data. Plenty of demand for that kind of information, especially in an era when real time overwriting by malicious actors and artificial engines has been fucking with historical data retention.
But its not going to replace your hard drive any time soon.
I'm pretty sure I still hear of people using tapes for extremely long term but not often accessed storage. This sounds, just from the title, like it could be useful for that.
Excellent, I will catalog my journals of my metamorphosis into a giant worm on these.
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Remember that CDs, CDRs, and so on were originally pitched as surviving 100 years. Turns out they last a highly variable amount of time but potentially as little as 2-3 years before they degrade, depending on the construction.
So I'll just say, this is clearly a theoretical value.
Edit: Words.
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Anyone get the IO on this device? Cause I'm guessing its going to be less good than magnetic storage.
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