News

5D Storage Technology Can Fit 500TB On A Small Disc

This method could theoretically be used to archive data for as long as 13.8 billion years.

Published

3 years ago

November 5, 2021

5d storage technology can fit 500tb on a small disc

While most consumers today are perfectly satisfied with the capacity and reliability of modern solid-state drives (SSDs), various organizations that are required to archive massive quantities of data are deeply aware of the limitations of not just SSDs but other currently available storage technologies as well.

Soon, they might be able to store up to 500TB of data on a CD-sized disc thanks to a new energy-efficient laser-writing method for producing high-density nanostructures in silica glass. Called five-dimensional (5D) optical data storage, this method could theoretically be used to archive data for as long as 13.8 billion years, and the optical discs produced by it can survive temperatures as high as 1,000 degrees Celsius.

“With the current system, we have the ability to preserve terabytes of data, which could be used, for example, to preserve information from a person’s DNA,” said Peter G. Kazansky, leader of the research team behind the new data storage technology.

superman memory crystal 5d optical storage

5D optical data storage isn’t actually an entirely new invention, but its practical applications were greatly limited in the past because of its slow write speed. To improve it, the research team from the University of Southampton in the UK used a femtosecond laser to produce an optical phenomenon known as near-field enhancement, minimizing the thermal damage that prevented earlier researchers from making 5D optical data storage truly usable.

Also Read: Japan Sets A New Internet Speed Record With 319 Terabits Per Second

“This new approach improves the data writing speed to a practical level, so we can write tens of gigabytes of data in a reasonable time,” said doctoral researcher Yuhao Lei. By a reasonable time, Lei means about 100 pages of text (roughly 230 kilobytes of data) per second.

When you compare that figure to the writing speeds of modern SSDs (anywhere from 200 megabytes per second to 4,000 megabytes per second), it becomes apparent that regular consumers won’t be replacing their storage drives with it anytime soon.

News

Google Releases Veo 2 AI Video Tool To MENA Users

The state-of-the-art video generation model is now available in Gemini, offering realistic AI-generated videos with better physics, motion, and detail.

Published

2 days ago

April 16, 2025

Nour Nasir

Google

Starting today, users of Gemini Advanced in the MENA region — and globally — can tap into Veo 2, Google’s next-generation video model.

Originally unveiled in 2024, Veo 2 has now been fully integrated into Gemini, supporting multiple languages including Arabic and English. The rollout now brings Google’s most advanced video AI directly into the hands of everyday users.

Veo 2 builds on the foundations of its predecessor with a more sophisticated understanding of the physical world. It’s designed to produce high-fidelity video content with cinematic detail, realistic motion, and greater visual consistency across a wide range of subjects and styles. Whether recreating natural landscapes, human interactions, or stylized environments, the model is capable of interpreting and translating written prompts into eight-second 720p videos that feel almost handcrafted.

Users can generate content directly through the Gemini platform — either via the web or mobile apps. The experience is pretty straightforward: users enter a text-based prompt, and Veo 2 returns a video in 16:9 landscape format, delivered as an MP4 file. These aren’t just generic clips — they can reflect creative, abstract, or highly specific scenarios, making the tool especially useful for content creators, marketers, or anyone experimenting with visual storytelling.

Also Read: Getting Started With Google Gemini: A Beginner’s Guide

To ensure transparency, each video is embedded with SynthID — a digital watermark developed by Google’s DeepMind. The watermark is invisible to the human eye but persists across editing, compression, and sharing. It identifies the video as AI-generated, addressing concerns around misinformation and media authenticity.

While Veo 2 is still in its early phases of public rollout, the technology is part of a broader push by Google to democratize advanced AI tools. With text-to-image, code generation, and now video creation integrated into Gemini, Google is positioning the platform as a full-spectrum creative assistant.

Access to Veo 2 starts today and will continue expanding in the coming weeks. Interested users can try it out at gemini.google.com or through the Gemini app on Android and iOS.