SPhotonix Touts 5D Glass Storage To Preserve Data For Billions Of Years

SPhotonix is the latest big name in 5D glass storage technology, and it's proving to be quite ambitious in its goal to bring the technology to market, estimating "another three or four years of R&D" to get it there.

5D glass storage, for the uninitiated, refers to a technique where high-density, high-durability silica glass is used with a combination of laser technology to form 3D pixels (or voxels) from which five dimensions of data encoding become possible. Reportedly, SPhotonix can currently produce 5-inch silica glass platters that can store up to 360 terabytes of data and last up to 13.8 billion years. But like other 5D storage tech we've reported on, there is a key downside: read and write speeds, which would firmly limit this storage to being used for archival purposes.

At time of writing, SPhotonix only reports a current write time of 4 megabytes (32 ...