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Project Silica proof-of-concept stores movie on quartz glass
- hongzi 7y agoI think storing movie archives is really a nice fit for this technology. Reading/writing data on glass is too slow right now to host applications with interactions. I would imagine read/write movie archive only happens once per month or even years. That said, glass storage should also apply to never-change log data like bank transaction history (or stale blocks in block chains)
- Verdex 7y agoWe should probably store a bunch of video evidence of historical events before we get the ability to do cheap and easy photo-realistic CGI on demand. There's going to be so many alternative video evidence for everything that historians are going to appreciate a known record that is difficult to update.
- vijaybritto 7y agoWhat if some one mischievous records the fake video instead of the real video? What if they get swapped post etching. I think the storage medium itself will not secure stuff for the future!
- smush 7y agoI hope to get this someday even at crazy prices. Permanent cold-storage of digital data can 'kinda' be done with M-Disk Blu Rays, but that is estimated good for 1000 years...which probably translates in reality to 100 or less years. DVDs, HDDs etc. have severe bit rot in comparison to that and are all likely to be gone within a decade +- a few years depending on medium and storage. This glass? Write it and don't physically smash it and it should be good to go for the rest of your life +, if the claims in this article hold up. Then digital data will have a cold-storage equivalent to a piece of paper. Stick it in a box in the attic, get it out in 80 years and as long as its not smashed or burned it should be GTG.
- omarhaneef 7y agoI am confused by your comparison of M-Disk Blu Rays (estimated 1000 years, but actually only 100 years) with the glass (rest of your life+). Are you anticipating living a lot longer than 100 more years? And even then, isn't the M-Disk a better tech by your math?
- jszymborski 7y agoPresumably, this is to store things that future generations might also want to have.
- smush 7y agoThe M-Disc claim of 1000 years is based on a few estimated tests and while they mostly hold up, we have objective proof that glass left alone over 1000 years does not change to the point that if you wrote something on year x, time-travelled with your reader to year 1000x , the reader would be unable to read it. I don't expect to crack 90 years myself, but my great-great-grandchildren might want or need whatever data there is on that glassdrive, even if it is only pictures and not something important like legal documents. The 'rest of your life+' claim is simply my shorthand for saying that while the glass will likely last for thousands of years, how long the readers exist that can read that particular glassdrive and interpret its data (ANSI or Unicode text, PNG or PDF display capability) may or may not last as long as the glassdrive itself can (see Voyneuch manuscript which exists, but we no longer can read and interpret it).
- mywacaday 7y agoI am aware of a company that user to sell a long term DVD like storage disk that they claimed would last for 100+ years, 5-6 years in disks started to lose data, I now take lifetime claims with a big pinch of salt.
- smush 7y agoExactly. But glass is glass, so the amount of believing we have to do with a pane of glass / quartz with this system is much less of a leap than with a pressed circle someone made in cheap-as-possible-for-profit-margins-increases factories, organic dye or not.
- dhosek 7y agoAnyone else disappointed the quartz glass isn’t shaped like the stick-like storage units that appeared in the Superman movies?
- godzillabrennus 7y agoMark Russinovich gets to play with some cool tools. I still remember how advanced Winternals software was for sys admins. Microsoft really got some sharp guys in that acquisition.
- kickscondor 7y agoThey mention in the article that some of the old black-and-white Superman film is stored on glass as well - but what really amuses me is that (if I recall correctly) Superman HIMSELF stores film on glass (or long crystal shards) in the 1978 film that is the subject of this article. My sister and I used to pretend in winter that icicles were our VHS tapes and we’d put them in the snow to “watch” them.
- Teknoman117 7y agoI think they said the old glass recordings were radio serials, not movies.
- kickscondor 7y agoAh ok - thanks!
- kpU8efre7r 7y agoIs that why this particular film was chosen?
- d--b 7y agoOf course! The movie is hardly a masterpiece...
- hirundo 7y agoIn the movie Kryptonian interactive holographic media is stored on irregular crystal shards. It's disappointing that this quartz media instead just look like squares of clear glass. I bet they're not even bothering to store them in a super cool Fortress of Solitude somewhere deep in the arctic wilderness.
- w-m 7y agoOne of the figure captions says they are storing 75.6 GB on one of these sheets. But I couldn't find any data on how long it takes to read and write, other than it's slow. Does it take minutes, hours, days, weeks? And I guess at least the reading can be somewhat parallelized to speed up?
- ben_w 7y agoOne week to write, 3 days to read: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/11/microsofts-project-silica-offers-robust-thousand-year-storage/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/11/microsofts-project-s...
- faeyanpiraat 7y agoIts a 1 Mbit / sec write speed if I calculate it correctly.
- acqq 7y agoSo why are they so happy when there's already 100 GB M-DISC which is much faster? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
- mey 7y agoCan't find much info on M-DISC, but https://www.verbatim.com/subcat/optical-media/m-disc/ https://www.verbatim.com/subcat/optical-media/m-disc/ has it as hundreds of years. Silca is claiming a thousand years.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- skykooler 7y ago> Microsoft senior optical scientist James Clegg loads a piece of glass into a system that uses optics and artificial intelligence to retrieve and read data stored on glass. How are they using "artificial intelligence" for this?
- tantalor 7y ago"machine learning algorithms decode the patterns created when polarized light shines through the glass" Unclear why ML is required versus old-school methods.
- black6 7y agoThat was my thought. If the data is written in some specific format, shouldn’t it be able to be read just as easily, without resorting to ML?
- ben_w 7y agoI think the idea is to make it readable even if civilisation ends and we don’t have any record of the format when the tech is re-invented afterward — A built-in Rosetta Stone.
- EpicEng 7y agoBut you'd still need to be able to run the classifier, right? What's the difference between that and a piece of code that just knows the format? There's still a format here, regardless of how it's being decoded.
- ben_w 7y agoI’m not sure I follow. The idea (if it works is another matter) is that a future civilisation can say “we don’t know what this format is, let’s throw machine learning at it” and even though that machine learning system doesn’t know anything about the format when it starts, it can work it out on its own.
- nayuki 7y agoThe article seems to talk about the same concept as a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubblegram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubblegram . I like write-once optical storage media because it protects me from accidentally modifying or deleting files. Also I don't have to worry about HDD reliability issues like head crashes, circuit board failures, etc., and it's easier to keep optical discs in cold storage with zero maintenance effort. While hard drives have been getting bigger and cheaper every year, is anyone else disappointed that write-once media technology has stagnated? A rough timeline of when writable optical discs became popular and affordable: CD-R 700MiB (~2000); DVD+/-R (+DL) 4.7GB/8.5GB (~2005); BD-R 25GB (~2010); BD-R XL 100GB (~2015). Various holographic discs have been proposed but are vaporware. The problem today is that all these disc formats are tiny compared to the 10TB HDDs you can pick up easily.
- jsjohnst 7y agoMy big issue is that optical media reliability isn’t where it needs to be for me to want to trust it for long term archival storage. Yes, some brands and media types are better than others, but it’s still enough a concern that I feel I can’t trust it in general.
- vel0city 7y agoWhat technology do you trust for long term archival storage? Magnetic and NAND media need refreshing for long term storage. I'm unaware of any kind of storage media which will last decades at a time on a shelf, other than printing it on acid-free paper with inorganic inks/dyes.
- jsjohnst 7y ago> What technology do you trust for long term archival storage? Lots of copies on different platforms / storage formats sadly.
- ofrzeta 7y agoYou can try M-DISC that's supposed to store data a thousand years. No idea if it keeps its promises, though. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
- 52-6F-62 7y agoSo it's a modification of this process I guess: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage https://www.5dmemorycrystal.com/technology/ https://www.5dmemorycrystal.com/technology/
- johnohara 7y agoHopefully someone at Universal Music Group reads this story and reaches out. I'm not being sarcastic either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire
- 52-6F-62 7y agoAgreed. That was a tragedy.
- HorizonXP 7y agoOne of the startup ideas I've had is to modernize death. Most humans want to "live forever." Given that we can't do that, we resort to procreation, and leaving behind some pieces of ourselves to be remembered by, with lots of cultures having some type of funeral practice to ensure this occurs (i.e. tombstones). With the proliferation of our digital lives, many of us have more photos, videos, and other media than we know what to do with. Furthermore, we probably don't have a great way to preserve this information. Imagine a funeral service that could comb through your digital life, archive it all, and keep it accessible to your family for generations. Bonus points for summarizing it into a beautiful montage to be played to your family at your service. Financially, it would work a lot like how funeral homes operate with deposits, insurance, and annuities, but the marginal cost should be much lower due to it being a digital vs. physical product. One of the problems I've been mulling over is the fact that digital storage isn't perpetual, which means that someone has to ensure the data is maintained in some way. Therefore, something like the quartz glass storage medium in the article would be perfect. Your data would be accessible via traditional means for 10-20 years after your death. Afterwards, it would still be accessible, but it would be on cold storage, so it wouldn't be instantaneous. It would mean you'd "never really die" since any of your descendants would be able to see what your life was like. I think that would be enough of a "hard problem to solve" to build a startup around. Of course, you could extend it to preserve other forms of data, like your DNA, or your mind like Westworld, where your descendants could communicate with you whenever you wanted. It could easily become one of the first perpetual corporations.
- ddingus 7y agoLike the scene in "Firefly", graveyard with moving pictures to remember loved ones by. Interesting idea. I am not sure I want that level of detail preserved. I also am pretty sure those to come would want it. Lots to think about with this.
- weinzierl 7y agoTombstones with pictures exist, so moving pictures would be a natural evolution.
- jlizzle30 7y ago> For years, they had searched for a storage technology that could last hundreds of years... I'd love to see a project preserve data for tens of thousands of years. The Egyptians did this by creating tombs. Surely we could do better.
- nayuki 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Project ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD-Rosetta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD-Rosetta ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation
- strig 7y ago> The team has baked, boiled, microwaved, demagnetized and scoured similar pieces of glass with steel wool — with no loss to the data stored inside. That's really cool.
- annoyingnoob 7y agoThat looks like a fun job.
- d--b 7y ago> The hard silica glass can withstand being boiled in hot water, baked in an oven, microwaved, flooded, scoured, demagnetized and other environmental threats that can destroy priceless historic archives or cultural treasures if things go wrong How about dropping it on the floor?
- colordrops 7y agoMultiple copies, and always keep some of them in padded containers.
- 52-6F-62 7y agoThat was my first question, too. I linked another company doing the same thing and they claimed it could withstand 0.5 tons of force before breaking. I’m not sure how that applies to dropping it, necessarily if there are other parameters that would cause a weakness that way.
- code_duck 7y agoThe key there is what type of force. Glass is very strong against compression, but not strong against tension.
- code_duck 7y agoThick glass like that is pretty durable, especially fused silica. I work with glass artistically and it's surprising how strong borosilicate marbles are, for instance. You can throw a 35 mm marble on concrete repeatedly before it will chip. They work like bouncy balls for a time. I doubt these thick sheets would shatter easily.
- max_ 7y agoIs this related to what Vint Cerf called “Digital Vellum” [0] [0]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0IabXOLdbAQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0IabXOLdbAQ *PS not sure if I have done the reference thing twice.
- EricE 7y agoNeat - lossless archiving of stuff is actually pretty hard. This approach seems to check a lot of critical boxes.
- rkagerer 7y agoFirst we got Communicators... now Isolinear Chips... I can't wait for Transporters!
- rkagerer 7y agohttps://www.mentalfloss.com/article/31876/12-star-trek-gadgets-now-exist https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/31876/12-star-trek-gadge...
- Anka33 7y agoAll white men
- knolax 7y agoHow do they know that it's going to last 1000 years? What kind of properties do you have to control for to insure that?
- knolax 7y agoensure
- userbinator 7y agoThe hard silica glass can withstand being boiled in hot water, baked in an oven, microwaved, flooded, scoured, demagnetized and other environmental threats that can destroy priceless historic archives or cultural treasures if things go wrong. The worst environmental threat is when your media is a proprietary format with secret specifications or even worse, DRM... even if the media could last 1000000 years, that's a moot point if the specifications have disappeared before then, or the encryption keys lost. Given the tie-ins with the entertainment industry mentioned in this article, the possibility of DRM causing the death of a format is too big to ignore.
- Animats 7y agoThere's been "M-Disc" [1] for a decade or so.[1] It's a form of DVD/Blu-Ray disc that, instead of using a dye that reacts to laser light, uses a drive with a more powerful laser to blast an indentation into the recording material. This is supposed to last a thousand years, and is much more resistant to heat and water than dye-based discs. The blanks cost about twice as much and you need a drive with the M-Disc feature, which is not expensive. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC