That's a lot of memory

Optical memory - the dream of high capacity storage developers. Sugar cubes - the dream of coffee drinkers and sweet-tooths everywhere. What do they have in common? Japanese researchers from Kyoto University and Central glass have just developed an

Optical memory - the dream of high capacity storage developers. Sugar cubes - the dream of coffee drinkers and sweet-tooths everywhere. What do they have in common? Japanese researchers from Kyoto University and Central glass have just developed an cube of glass the size of a sugar cube that can store a terabyte (that's 1,000Gb of pr0n, MP3z, or crackz boys and girls) of data.

The process is not, however, a simple one. First you need a layer of glass that's dotted with a 400nanometer speck of the rare earth element Sararium. These need to be spaced about 100 nanometers apart. Then you need to build those layers into a cube - 2,000 layers can be fit into a cubic centimeter of glass. Then you need a femtosecond laser (not a nanosecond or picosecond laser - they crack the glass) that fires for about one 1000-trillionth of a second. You fire this short-lived beam at the dots and they can light up. If you have the right laser, and also alter the number of electrons your working with, then you can access each of the 2,000 layers of memory.

Commercial development is set to begin some time at the end of this year. A year after that we'll no doubt be getting all mixed up and sweetening our coffee with glass and trying to store data on sugar cubes. Stick with floppies - they look like nothing else on earth.
Kyoto University
Central Glass