Digitization is practical, but not sustainable. With the constant increase in the flood of data, the power consumption for storing the data is increasing – and carrier media such as hard drives or CDs only last for decades at best.
Researchers from Gmunden want to solve these problems with ceramic data carriers that last practically indefinitely.
“In 2020 alone, more than 60 zettabytes (ZB) of data were stored in archives and data centers worldwide,” says Martin Kunze, one of the two managing directors of Ceramic Data Solutions. Comparing that to the data density of a book, a 60 ZB bookshelf would be ten times the diameter of the solar system.
The trend is strongly increasing. The driving force behind the enormous growth is not least the billions of smartphone users who are uploading more and more photos and videos to their accounts in ever higher resolutions.
- Matches the topic: In the APA Science podcast “Nerds on Order”, Martin Kunze tells more about the “Memory of Mankind” archive – Click here for the podcast.
“Global Alzheimer’s”
As a result, according to a calculation by the energy research company Enerdata, by 2030 up to twenty percent of global energy consumption will be attributable to sending, processing and retaining data. For comparison: in 2018 it was five to nine percent.
According to experts, in the not too distant future there may not be enough energy to store all this data – you would then have to decide which data are dispensable. The scenario is casually called “global Alzheimer’s”.
To prevent this from happening, the Gmunden-based company and a team from the Vienna University of Technology are researching long-term storage on ultra-thin, flexible glass. On top of this is a ceramic layer into which a laser engraves information using deep ablation. The storage density of a Blu-ray disc, i.e. 125 gigabytes, can currently be achieved on one of the ultra-thin ceramic-glass plates measuring ten by ten centimetres.
“Conventional digital storage media only last three to five years, then they have to be replaced. Our global memory is based on that, it’s a very weak foundation,” says Christian Pflaum, the other half of the managing director duo. Glass-ceramic, on the other hand, withstands corrosion, moisture, radiation, acid and extreme heat and can store information for hundreds of thousands of years. In addition, no electricity is required for data storage and no greenhouse gases are emitted.
Archive in the salt mine
Kunze invented the process of immortalizing information on ceramic plates. The graduate ceramist is the initiator of the “Memory of Mankind” (MOM) archive founded in 2012. The MOM initiative has set itself the task of conserving a selection of the most important documents of mankind as analogue images, burned onto ceramic tiles in the salt mine in Hallstatt.
In purely mathematical terms, storing the books on ceramic microfilm could reduce the volume of the deep repository of the Austrian National Library to at least two-hundredths, Kunze estimates. Therefore, according to the project team, interest in the technology can be felt wherever large amounts of data and long-term archiving play a role.
The project, which officially runs until the end of June 2022, now aims to store information not only in two dimensions, but also in depth. “That’s very ambitious,” says Pflaum: “For analog images, we have already achieved 100 times the storage density of conventional microfilm, but we are researching digital data storage. We still want the videos that we are recording now in 20 or 50 years can see once.”
Source: Nachrichten
