A research team in China says it has developed a technology that allows a massive data set – equal to about 5.8 billion indexed web pages – to be stored in a device the size of a desktop computer. For perspective, if the data was stored using 1-terabyte hard drives, the devices would cover an area about the size of an average playground. “This technology makes it possible to achieve exabit-level storage by stacking nanoscale disks into arrays, which is essential in big data centers with limited space,” the team wrote in an article published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature. The scientists are from the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Peking University, as well as the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics and Key Laboratory of Photochemistry, both under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). The global data volume is projected to reach 175 zettabytes by 2025, according to global market intelligence provider International Data Corporation (IDC). One zettabyte is 1 trillion gigabytes.
The scientists used optical data storage (ODS), a light-based storage method commonly used in DVDs. It is cost-efficient and durable, but its capacity is limited since it usually stores data in a single layer. The Chinese team said they created a three-dimensional architecture to store data across hundreds of layers instead of one, resulting in the optical data storage capacity reaching the petabit level for the first time. The layers of the disk are just 1 micrometer apart, allowing it to remain as thin as a regular DVD. The scientists wrote and read the data using laser beams. “The ODS has a capacity of up to 1.6 petabits for a DVD-sized disk area through the recording of 100 layers on both sides of our ultrathin single disk,” the researchers said, adding that it can store 24 times the data of today’s most advanced hard disk drives. “It will thus become possible to build an exabit-level data center inside a room instead of a stadium-sized space by stacking 1,000 petabit-level nanoscale disks together resulting in a large number of cost-effective exabit data centers.”
Existing data centers require vast amounts of energy to operate, while internal devices generate immense heat, which requires even more power for cooling. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimated that data centers across the world consumed about 1% of total global electricity demand in 2022. In China, the National Energy Administration (NEA) said the total electricity consumption by the country’s data centers was 270 billion kilowatt-hours in 2022, almost triple the amount of power generated in the same year by the Three Gorges hydropower station – the world’s largest power-generating facility. The consumption totaled about 3% of China’s total electricity usage, the South China Morning Post reports.
