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This is pure buzz. Physical storage does not make any sense when light based or magnetic based storage is much faster and denser. It only makes sense if it is v

This is pure buzz. Physical storage does not make any sense when light based or magnetic based storage is much faster and denser. It only makes sense if it is very permanent, ie. Etching sapphire discs [1] The position of atoms is just one classical property. Quantum properties like spin and charge are much more numerous and versatile. [1] http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/nanoform-laser-etched-sapphire-data-storage/ http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/nanoform-laser-etched...

Nanite 10y ago
True, unfortunately most scientists are nowadays practically obligated to state a potential real world use case for their research in their publications even when they are engaging in basic research. And mainstream media rather naively picks up on these statements.
saganus 10y ago
That sapphire disc tech is very interesting. And while browsing their product sheet [1], I thought this would be great for me to store my most valuable stuff. And then it hit me... if I bought the 500 or even the 2500 document disc... what would I save there? Probably some family pictures (unfortunately it doesn't seem to support colors, understandably so), a paper I published years ago. Maybe my college thesis. Legal documents perhaps like birth certificates and such. But then I wished I could store music. Is there any graphical representation of music that would suit this format? Or is the only reasonable option to store the actual 1's and 0's of an MP3 or something like that? [1] http://www.fahrenheit2451.com/index.php/shop http://www.fahrenheit2451.com/index.php/shop
- goldenkey 10y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrogram https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrogram Fidelity is going to be a big issue though. I don't think the sapphire discs have enough storage density and capacity to hold a spectrogram of even mediocre sample rate. If you do the math let me know if I'm wrong. I'd be curious to listen to an mp3 af the simulated fidelity of a sapphire disc.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
  The resolution is too low to store even a single stereo FLAC file of a three minute song. But this isn't really a viable digital storage system. It's a nice novelty, but it's not designed for serialisation in the way that optical ROM systems are. It might be possible to increase the resolution with a better laser and optics, and make the disks serialisable. But I suspect you still wouldn't get the density you need for practical media storage.
  - aidenn0 10y ago
    I think you're wrong. Their smallest listed item (1" medallion) is 110 megapixels. Even storing just 1 bit per pixel (which is conservative) you can store almost 3 minutes of CD-quality FLAC[1]. Seeing as it's grayscale, you can almost certainly store multiple bits per pixel. At even 2bpp, you would have plenty of space for 3 minutes of flac, plus some form of BCH code. The largest listed item is 30GP, which would probably be enough for over a day of FLAC audio. 1: 110Mbit / (32bits/sample * 44100 samples/s) ~= 78s of uncompressed audio. FLAC is roughly 50% compression ratio, so ~= 2:36 of FLAC. [edit] In case people were wondering: the reason this didn't pass my "sniff" test is that War and Peace is shown on an example prototype. That is ~3MB in UTF-8 and a grayscale picture of a page of text at a readable resolution is about 2 orders of magnitude larger than the binary representation, and 300MB is obviously way more than a 3 minute FLAC.

Nanite 10y ago

True, unfortunately most scientists are nowadays practically obligated to state a potential real world use case for their research in their publications even when they are engaging in basic research. And mainstream media rather naively picks up on these statements.

saganus 10y ago

That sapphire disc tech is very interesting. And while browsing their product sheet [1], I thought this would be great for me to store my most valuable stuff. And then it hit me... if I bought the 500 or even the 2500 document disc... what would I save there? Probably some family pictures (unfortunately it doesn't seem to support colors, understandably so), a paper I published years ago. Maybe my college thesis. Legal documents perhaps like birth certificates and such. But then I wished I could store music. Is there any graphical representation of music that would suit this format? Or is the only reasonable option to store the actual 1's and 0's of an MP3 or something like that? [1] http://www.fahrenheit2451.com/index.php/shop http://www.fahrenheit2451.com/index.php/shop

goldenkey 10y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrogram https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrogram Fidelity is going to be a big issue though. I don't think the sapphire discs have enough storage density and capacity to hold a spectrogram of even mediocre sample rate. If you do the math let me know if I'm wrong. I'd be curious to listen to an mp3 af the simulated fidelity of a sapphire disc.
TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
The resolution is too low to store even a single stereo FLAC file of a three minute song. But this isn't really a viable digital storage system. It's a nice novelty, but it's not designed for serialisation in the way that optical ROM systems are. It might be possible to increase the resolution with a better laser and optics, and make the disks serialisable. But I suspect you still wouldn't get the density you need for practical media storage.
- aidenn0 10y ago
  I think you're wrong. Their smallest listed item (1" medallion) is 110 megapixels. Even storing just 1 bit per pixel (which is conservative) you can store almost 3 minutes of CD-quality FLAC[1]. Seeing as it's grayscale, you can almost certainly store multiple bits per pixel. At even 2bpp, you would have plenty of space for 3 minutes of flac, plus some form of BCH code. The largest listed item is 30GP, which would probably be enough for over a day of FLAC audio. 1: 110Mbit / (32bits/sample * 44100 samples/s) ~= 78s of uncompressed audio. FLAC is roughly 50% compression ratio, so ~= 2:36 of FLAC. [edit] In case people were wondering: the reason this didn't pass my "sniff" test is that War and Peace is shown on an example prototype. That is ~3MB in UTF-8 and a grayscale picture of a page of text at a readable resolution is about 2 orders of magnitude larger than the binary representation, and 300MB is obviously way more than a 3 minute FLAC.