Engraved words on the stone.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “爱范儿” (ID: Ifanr), author Liang Menglin, authorized to reprint.
The storage space of smartphones is getting bigger and bigger today, and global data storage will soon show an “insufficient storage” warning.
According to Domo’s report, in 2018, people searched for 3.83 million searches per minute on Google, 4.33 million videos on YouTube, 159,362,760 emails, 473,000 Twitters, and 49,000 photos on Instagram.
In China, more than 45 billion messages are sent on WeChat every day. Domo expects global data per capita to generate 1.7 MB per second by 2020, with a global population of 7.8 billion, resulting in 418 ZB of data per year, requiring approximately 418 billion 1TB hard drives to be installed.
This does not take into account the population growth trend. The United Nations expects the world population to exceed 9.7 billion by 2050. This means that existing data storage systems will not be available until the next century.
i Image from: United Nations
The explosive growth of data is forcing humans to find better data storage technologies. Some people try to store global data with 1 kilogram of DNA. Microsoft has developed a “glass disc” that can be used for thousands of years. However, the most technologically advanced technology companies are still using tape to store data.
Human civilization has been rushing for more than 5,000 years, but the longest lifespan of available storage media is only about 60 years, where is the future of data storage??
In 9102, why are technology companies still using tape to store data?
In many people’s minds, the tape seems to be an antique of the last century. After many 80s and 90s, they still bought tapes to support their idols. Ren Xianqi’s album “Heart is too soft” released in 1996 broke through 10 million.
However, as CDs, MP3s, and smartphones have become popular in the music market, tape has become a memory of a generation, and it is hard to find in life. Tape is not dead, but instead becomes the most competitive storage medium in the era of big data.
Technologies, including Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, are still using tape to back up massive amounts of data. Why not use mechanical hard disk (HDD) and solid state hard disk (SSD) instead, instead use tape to store data?
The most important reason is still cheap. These technology companies have hundreds of millions of users and the amount of data they need to store is huge. Although cloud computing is the future trend, for companies providing Internet services, it is still necessary to store data locally, which will be a significant cost.
Although tapes are read much more slowly than hard drives and semiconductor storage. But the cost is much lower. A 1 TB mobile hard drive costs about $50, and a tape of the same capacity costs just $5.
The 1951 tape was first used for computer (Univac) data storage
And the tape is more durable than the hard disk. Generally, the life of the hard disk is less than 10 years. It is copied to the new hard disk every few years. The copying of massive data is not only time-consuming, but also easy to lose data, and the tape can be Save for decades.
In addition, the tape only needs to be inserted into the slot of the mechanical tape library during use. It does not need to consume electricity and saves a lot of electricity costs. It is known that the global data center’s electricity bill will exceed 10 billion US dollars in 2025.
For many companies, the security of data storage is often important. Because the tape is inaccessible without a driver installed, this offline state isolates hackers and cyber attacks and is not easily lost and tampered with.
In 2011, Google Mailbox Gmail accidentally deleted more than 40,000 accounts because of bugs in an update. Although Google has been using hard drives to store data copies in multiple data centers, some data is still unrecoverable. Fortunately, this data is also backed up to disk, so that all data can be recovered.
Image from: Business Insider
Therefore, in addition to technology companies, many companies and organizations that have high requirements for data security are still using disks to store data. Such as banks, insurance companies, national archives, and research institutions, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
But tape is not a data storage carrier that sacrifices efficiency because of security and cost. The development of tape technology has exceeded the imagination of many people.
In 2014, Sony used the self-developed sputtering thin-layer deposition technology to lay 7.7nm ultra-fine magnetic particles on magnetic tape, achieving high-density magnetic storage with a storage capacity of 185TB.
IBM Capacity 330TB Tape
IBM has a dedicated research team in Zurich, Switzerland to promote tape technology. According to team scientist Mark A. Lantz, IBM solved the problem of storing 201 gigabytes per square inch in 2017, and introduced Sony’s Sputtered thin layer deposition technology increases the capacity of single-cassette tapes to 330 TB.
Editor’s Note: 1 square inch = 0.00064516 square meters
More importantly, tape storage capacity has grown at a rate of 33% per year for many years and there are no signs of slowing down. The Information Storage Industry Association (INSIC) predicts that tape storage density will reach 91 GB per square inch in 2025 and 200 GB per square inch by 2028.
Image from: Quartz
The speed of the magnetic recording density of the hard disk has dropped to 10-15%, because when the storage density of the hard disk reaches a certain limit, it is difficult to maintain the magnetic stability by reducing the magnetic particle size. This is called super smooth. The superparamagnetic limit.
According to IDC, big data on the Internet is growing at a rate of 30%-40% per year. At present, hard disk capacity growth is less than half of the growth rate of big data, and tape may become the last to follow Moore’s Law. An information technology.
Many vendors are trying to break the limits of storage technology, but not so easy
As mentioned above, enterprise-level data storage devices must take into account at least the following factors: cost, security, durability, and storage density. So apart from tape, do we really have no other choice?
It can only be said that tape is one of the most cost-effective big data storage media at this stage, but many manufacturers have been researching new storage technologies. For example, the heat-assisted magnetic recording technology (HAMR) and microwave-assisted magnetic recording technology (MAMR) developed by hard disk manufacturers Seagate and Western Digital are expected to make the hard disk break the superparamagnetic limit.
Image from: Fstoppers
These two technologies reduce the coercivity of the medium by laser and microwave, respectively, and ensure sufficient stability in ultra-high-density data storage. But both technologies are not fully mature and require more time to be fully commercialized..
Another optical storage technology that may be overlooked like a tape is that CDs and DVDs are all types of optical storage media. However, in the past, CDs were prone to aging, and due to diffraction limitations (which can be regarded as superparamagnetic limits in optical discs), storage density was also very limited.
Image courtesy of Taskar Baban Sadik
But Blu-ray Disc has changed all of this. According to Hu Bing, deputy general manager of Marketing Center of Hualu Optical Storage Research Institute, Blu-ray Disc also has the characteristics of reliability, stability and long service life. The service life can reach about 50 years. Blu-ray Disc has a capacity of 500 GB and is expected to break through terabytes in the future.
Image from: ssdfans
At the same time, Blu-ray storage requires less ambient temperature, such as temperature, and does not require an air conditioning cooling system, which greatly reduces the cost. Facebook’s data center uses Blu-ray storage, which saves more than half the cost of hard drives and reduces power consumption by more than 80%.
Microsoft’s recently exposed Project Silica project is also based on optical storage technology, which uses a femtosecond laser technology (a laser that emits in pulses, often used for myopia correction surgery) to form a nanoscale grating layer structure on a piece of glass. And produces different depths and angles of deformation, a bit like burning a disc, but the density is higher and more complex, a 2 mm thick glass can contain more than 100 data layers.
Microsoft is currently with Warner Bros.The company cooperated and successfully stored the 1978 Superman film master in a piece of 75 x 75 x 2mm glass, and machined the data in the glass in a non-sequential manner, but the reading speed remains to be read. Upgrade.
Unlike CDs, Project Silica’s data is stored inside the glass rather than on the surface, so the data is not lost due to glass wear. The researchers placed the “glass disc” in an oven at 500 °C, heated in a microwave oven, brewed in waste water, and even wiped with a wire, the data was still read smoothly.
Although this technology is still in its infancy, the deputy director of the laboratory at the Microsoft Research Institute in the United Kingdom said that the “glass disc” can last for thousands of years. In addition, glass does not require temperature and humidity, which can significantly reduce the cost of data storage.
In fact, “Glass Disc” is not the first of Microsoft’s. As early as 2016, the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom successfully used similar technology to encode data into glass, which can withstand high temperatures of 1000 °C, claiming that its life expectancy is near infinity at room temperature. Even at 190 °C, it can be used for 1.38 billion years, and the history of the earth is only about 4.6 billion years.
It is worth mentioning that Microsoft’s Project Silica project was developed in collaboration with the University of Southampton. This glass disc is also known as a 5-dimensional disc, consisting of three-dimensional nanostructures, plus overall size and orientation. . The same size of glass disc storage capacity is 3000 times that of Blu-ray disc.
If successful, it might be like NananResearchers at the University of Cape Town have created a new era of permanent data storage.
The best data storage carrier, maybe our own
A bolder idea in the field of data storage is biomass hard drives, which store information in DNA.
How does DNA store data? In fact, the principle is not complicated. All computer data is stored and operated with binary numbers consisting of 0 and 1. The DNA storage technology uses four bases instead of 0 and 1 to convert digital signals into chemical signals.
In 2017, Harvard Medical School used the CRISPR DNA editing technology to record a horse racing image into the genome of E. coli and read it with an accuracy of over 90%.
In the past two years, there have been a lot of startups exploring DNA storage technology. Some time ago, the startup company Catalog announced that all texts of 16GB of English Wikipedia were stored in a DNA molecule through a very large DNA writer. Upon completion, the data can be written at speeds up to 4 MB/s.
The inside is the DNA of 16G Wikipedia
Another biotech company called Twist Bioscience is currently one of the world’s largest suppliers of synthetic genes. According to its founder Emily Leproust, the DNA in one capsule of the company can store data equivalent to the entire Facebook data center.
At present, Twist Bioscience has launched a DNA storage service to its customers, but the price is very impressive. The price of storing 12 MB of data is as high as $100,000, but Emily Leproust says the price will drop to 10 cents in the future.
2016Harvard University published a research report on DNA storage technology in Nature Journal, which pointed out that DNA storage density is far higher than any other storage medium. After conversion, 1kg of DNA can store data generated globally for one year.
But DNA storage is far from ideal data storage technology. Except for the high cost, the data stored in DNA can only be read by sequencing, and the reading and writing speed is very slow. It has been calculated that it would take 4 billion years to store the 16 ZB data generated globally in 2017 into DNA.
At the beginning of this year, Microsoft realized the first automatic DNA information storage, which made DNA storage technology a step further from the laboratory to commercialization, but only coded the five letters of “hello”, which cost from conversion to reading. 21 hours, the accuracy of simultaneous reading needs to be improved.
It can be seen that although DNA storage technology does have the potential to completely solve the problem of global data storage, there is still a long way to go in the future.
Is it possible to permanently store data?
As technology matures, humans are pursuing the ultimate in information storage in both time and space: ultra-high storage density and timeless storage time.
No one knows if this can be achieved, because no one can live forever. The earliest written records of human beings are only the cuneiforms left by Sumerians 5,200 years ago. However, the Internet was born only 50 years ago, 50 years ago. How much data is still intact today?
In the future world of science fiction “Three-body”, even a grain-sized quantum storage can put down the data of a large library, but it can only be stored for up to 2000 years. In the end, the only feasible way to store information for 100 million years is to “put the words on the stone.”
Liu Cixin summed up well:
Civilization is like a 5,000-year rush, continuous progress drives faster progress, and countless miracles have spawned even greater miracles. Humans seem to have the power of God.
But it was finally discovered that the real power in the hands of time, leaving footprints is more difficult than creating the world. At the end of this civilization, they can only do things that were done in the ancient babyhood, engraving the words on the stone. .