5 ms·
This USB flash drive can only store 8KB of data, but will last you 200 years
- blackoil 2y agoWhat will be the cost to engrave in stone covered in resin?
- portaouflop 2y agoresin covered stone has terrible write cycles
- nottorp 2y agoresin covered stone is WORM.
- qwery 2y agoTaking this way too seriously[0], quite likely more than the USB drive, given its retail price of €29.95[1]. Note that I've omitted any shipping fees -- that comparison is likely to fall in the USB drive's favour, in any case. [0] but ignoring obvious simple answers like "depends on the size of the stone" [1] https://machdyne.com/product/blaustahl-storage-device/ https://machdyne.com/product/blaustahl-storage-device/
- kayodelycaon 2y agoFor 8KB, you’re better off just using paper and storing it properly.
- 404mm 2y agoOr a stone tablet. Encryption won’t matter in 200 years anyway
- AshamedCaptain 2y agoAfter having to retype a couple of armor'ed PGP keys printed on paper, your opinion may change.
- wheybags 2y agoQr codes on paper?
- kayodelycaon 2y agoGood idea, nothing wrong with including a QR code on the first page. Would serve as a Rosetta Stone for other QRs if specification gets lost.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mxmlnkn 2y agoIs OCR still not working reliably with all the recent innovations in ML?
- bartonfink 2y agoif it's important enough to archive for hundreds of years it's worth that. Your whataboutism helps nothing, champ.
- M95D 2y agoPaperBack is a free application that allows you to back up your precious files on the ordinary paper in the form of the oversized bitmaps. If you have a good laser printer with the 600 dpi resolution, you can save up to 500,000 bytes of uncompressed data on the single A4/Letter sheet. Integrated packer allows for much better data density - up to 3,000,000+ (three megabytes) of C code per page. For 600 dpi printer you will need a scanner with at least 900 dpi physical (let me emphasize, physical, not interpolated) resolution. https://ollydbg.de/Paperbak/#1 https://ollydbg.de/Paperbak/#1
- cdchn 2y agoNow I'm curious what other parts of this device could last 'over 200 years.' Whats the next weak link on the chain? Is contact corrosion the ultimate limiting factor?
- vlovich123 2y ago> It incorporates a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller, making it suitable for various secure storage applications in case it can fit into a tiny amount of storage space. I'm going to make a safe bet that there's no way any of the capacitors involved survive anywhere near that long. Now of course, technically the data is still there, but I doubt it in 200 years it's going to be all that easy to replace the microcontroller while retaining that data. A competitor in this race would be the connector: > The Blaustahl includes 4MB of NOR flash for firmware and a USB Type-A male port that requires no additional drivers on most operating systems. Something tells me that USB type-A is unlikely to survive the next 200 years.
- AshamedCaptain 2y agoIronically by having its firmware in its NOR flash they are now subject to the same lifetime limitations.
- nottorp 2y agoAre you sure? You^H^H^H your grand-grand-grand-grand children will probably be able to get an usb-g to usb-f to usb-e to usb-d to usb-c to usb-a adapter chain. Hey, what happened to usb-b?
- mrabcx 2y ago200 years, will "computers" then even have a usb interface?
- marvinborner 2y agoThe seller[1] mentions that: 'In the event that the USB interface were to become obsolete or the RP2040 were to become non-functional, it should still be possible to recover the FRAM data using a SOP-8 test clip. The FRAM IC is marked “RS64”.' [1]: https://machdyne.com/product/blaustahl-storage-device/ https://machdyne.com/product/blaustahl-storage-device/
- kjhcvkek77 2y agoEverything today has USB. The historians and collectors of the future will be able to read it no doubt. A typical computer, maybe not
- benjaminpv 2y agoDo things like the upgradable firmware and integrated text editor live in a path that's separate from the 8KB of data? If not I'd fear it would die before the actual storage did. I also vaguely recall that Sonic 3 used this storage type? Like it was a weird outlier for cartridge-based saves IIRC. Edit: Yeah, it did: https://hackaday.io/project/13425-sonic-3-feram-adapter https://hackaday.io/project/13425-sonic-3-feram-adapter
- user90131313 2y agoIt's just marketing BS. 0 chance they tested durability for years.
- lyu07282 2y agoCould just buy the chip itself for less than a dollar, connect it to Arduino or rpi and write it yourself: https://www.lcsc.com/datasheet/lcsc_datasheet_2112091730_FUJITSU-MB85RS64PNF-G-JNERE1_C8741.pdf https://www.lcsc.com/datasheet/lcsc_datasheet_2112091730_FUJ... Or go with the 64kb version for 6 dollars.
- dbolgheroni 2y agoIn general it's good to have products with reliability as a first class citizen, but the best way to keep data for lots of years is to replicate them onto a reliable media from time to time.
- harry_ord 2y agoApart from written down/printed well is there any other really reliable long term storage?
- bennettnate5 2y agoArchival quality blu-ray (such as M-DISKs) can purportedly last hundreds of years and will outlast any electromagnetic events that would destroy other magnetic/electric-based storage mediums. As others in the thread mention, the key difficulty is reading and interpreting the etched pits on the disk hundreds of years after the spec is obsolete.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bell-cot 2y agoIt doesn't matter if the the special FRAM memory cells in this gadget are good for 200+ years. All modern electrical stuff is hellishly complex, from a materials engineering PoV, and there are many other parts of this flash drive that will likely fail in <2 centuries. Plus, why would you believe that (working) systems able to read USB drives will be available in 200+ years? SO - unless the data you're storing is worth a major effort by future computer historians, just find an old daisy-wheel printer, and save your 8K to archival quality paper. That'll be good for a thousand years or so.
- lyu07282 2y agoTo be fair it's just SPI and a big package, super easy to read even centuries from now. I don't think we will somehow forget everything about basic electronics.
- pokeymcsnatch 2y agoJust need 3 switches and an indicator light
- crote 2y agoNot everything, but there might not be any surviving copies of the datasheet around. It's reasonably close to generic SPI flash chips that you could probably reverse engineer it, but it's not a guarantee.
- cozzyd 2y agoJust store the datasheet on the drive! (If you can get it to fit...)
- bell-cot 2y agoLead time / effort / skills / equipment to access printed data after >200 years: zero / minimal / basic literacy / any light source a person can easily read by Vs. reading data on this device, 200+ years out?
- agilob 2y agoThat's pretty cool, but we're already past a few generations of devices that were supposed to store data for decades and we no longer have computer with interfaces to use them. What are the chances that people will know what USB is in 50 years?
- stavros 2y agoWe need a thing where you apply 5V to and a LED flashes the data in it, one bit at a time.
- guappa 2y agoAnd a paper book to explain the encoding :D
- fsflover 2y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40414618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40414618
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y agoI'd say USB has pretty good chances, because it's everywhere. It's already (checks wikipedia) 28 years old and AFAIK completely backwards compatible; I wouldn't be terribly surprised if in 50 years we're still actively using USB 9.0 or whatever and you can still plug in USB 1.x devices to then-current computers (possibly through adapter(s), if we ever manage to obsolete the Type A connector)
- agilob 2y ago29 years is still shorter than we used cd/dvd roms
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y agoCDs yes, but point of fact wikipedia says DVDs are actually (very slightly) younger than USB. Regardless, surely that's just more examples in favor of us being able to still read widely-deployed tech in 50 years? I'll grant that with the right materials, under the right conditions, optical media might well outlive this thing, but that 1. contains important caveats (plenty of optical media degrades within <5 years AIUI) and 2. doesn't invalidate the usefulness of this, just offers other options.
- chrisjj 2y ago> It incorporates a Raspberry Pi RP2040 ... which is certainly not guaranteed for 200 yrs.
- jacknews 2y agoObviously this is just niche market to try and commercialize FeRAM. But the long term storage angle doesn't make much sense to me, you can get 8kb in a couple of QR codes. Much better would be to market the number of read-write cycles as the USP over flash - so you could use it as some kind of constantly updated but persistent, encryption key or parity code or whatever.
- qwery 2y agoThe post[0] that seems to be this article's source would be a better link. The Tom's article spins it as a pointless storage device and pushes the key feature of it including a built-in serial terminal text editor down under several paragraphs of snark. I'm not telling you to buy one and I don't know who needs one, but it's a bit unfair to judge it as an archival storage device when it doesn't even seem to be trying to be one. One extra pedantic point: assuming one could reasonably expect 200 years out of not only the FRAM but the rest of it as well... you don't really want your really good data to survive 199 years before a catastrophic slightly early failure so maybe leave instructions to access and/or duplicate the data before, say, half-time (100 years). [0] https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/05/15/blaustahl-usb-storage-device-8kb-fram-200-years-data-retention/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/05/15/blaustahl-usb-storag...
- hulitu 2y ago> The Blaustahl USB storage device by Machdyne features 8KB of FRAM and is designed for long-term text storage, potentially lasting over 200 years. It incorporates a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller Contradiction in terms. I mean, maybe i'm asking too much, but a reliability training for journalists, will be nice. /s
- Brian_K_White 2y agohttps://www.johndcook.com/blog/2024/03/03/archiving-data-on-paper/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2024/03/03/archiving-data-on-... 200k on paper. 30k if you don't want to require an actual sheet scanner to read it. To read it requires software, but it's open source software not tied to any particular hardware or os platform, and you use any kind of imaging hardware you want of the time. It doesn't matter how much cameras or os's change in the future. Also FRAM reading is destructive. FRAM internally destroys and re-creates the data every time it's read. MRAM does not. idk offhand how the two compare on things like data loss from environmental stresses like extended periods at low or high temperatures, or thermal cycling etc.
- 39896880 2y agoThe comments here are getting hung up on the 200 years claim. The point is not that the information will last literally 200 years; it’s that it will last long enough for you to transfer it to a more modern medium when the time comes.
- giuseppe_petri 2y agoIf it was put together with tin solder it's not lasting 200 years.
- dvh 2y agoThis is perfect for doing back of the envelope calculations on interstellar probes.
- hyperman1 2y agoIf you have specs for 8k and 200 years, I'd basically give you an engraved stone tablet. It even has a proven track record for this .
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jovas 2y agoIt would be good for storing passwords that you don't want to lose (assuming the USB drive is stored in a safe place.... Like in a safe or under your bed)