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Hitachi presents a storage medium that should last forever
- aw3c2 14y agoFollowing the news spam after news spam, here is the AFP story all the submitted page and "sources" copied from: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hrS0Kp5RLa8lIvZ4nTCkZbttjhuw?docId=CNG.4aeae4fa36f6e7fc476fd24e5e9b2688.191 http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hrS0Kp5RL...
- Kudos 14y agoThat link won't work without a Google referrer.
- aw3c2 14y agoSeems to work for me without sending any referrer.
- mistercow 14y agoDoesn't work for me even with a Google referrer. Paste into Google search, click first link, and I'm back at the Google homepage. This seems to be the same article though: http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/computers/glass-slivers-that-store-data-forever-unveiled-by-hitachi-20120925-26i3f.html http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/computers/glass-slivers-t...
- protomyth 14y agoIf you look starting 6 days ago, this story has been submitted 5 previous times.
- twelvechairs 14y agoSounds great - but maybe I'll wait until it can be done on a material thats not incredibly brittle and thus easy to accidentally break...
- stephengillie 14y agoLike pyrex? Edit: Like borosilicate glass?
- Peroni 14y agoPyrex is a brand. The material you are referring to is borosilicate glass.
- darkstalker 14y agoThey're just punch cards made on glass.
- geon 14y agoCD:s are just punch cards made on aluminium.
- brazzy 14y agoAnd that's the difference. Glass is much, much more durable than both paper and aliminium.
- justincormack 14y agoIn a fire there is little difference.
- bad_alloc 14y agoJust to be a smartass: I guess it will last for a significant timespan, but not actually "forever" unless Hitachi also finds out how to reverse entropy or how to leave this universe. If they don't a lot of stuff might get their data, like proton-decay, the upcoming black hole era or the fact that everything is liquid on very large timescales. Further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Future_of_the_Earth.2C_the_Solar_System_and_the_Universe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Futu... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_decay http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_decay http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe
- StavrosK 14y agoIt's for small values of "forever".
- vectorbunny 14y agoNothing last forever... except hyperbole.
- zem 14y agoThe stars and Galaxies died and snuffed out, and space grew black after ten trillion years of running down. One by one Man fused with AC, each physical body losing its mental identity in a manner that was somehow not a loss but a gain. Man's last mind paused before fusion, looking over a space that included nothing but the dregs of one last dark star and nothing besides but incredibly thin matter, agitated randomly by the tag ends of heat wearing out, asymptotically, to the absolute zero. Man said, "AC, is this the end? Can this chaos not be reversed into the Universe once more? Can that not be done?" AC said, "Hang on, I have the answer inscribed on a Hitachi glass tablet somewhere." -- Isaac Asimov, "The Last Tablet"
- fratido 14y agoHow about a disc that is made of glass, has a capacity of a DVD and can be read by standard dvd players and can be bought today, for a mere of €160? THIS is amazing. http://www.syylex.com/index.php/home_english.html http://www.syylex.com/index.php/home_english.html
- brazzy 14y agoThe reflective layer is still made of metal and the two layers are glued together. You have to take the maker's words on how durable those actually are.
- fratido 14y agoWell, sure - but even if the reflective layer loosens, you still have the glass layer - then it would be the same as the hitachi concept: read the glass pits with a miroscope. Or add a new reflective layer.
- JoeAltmaier 14y agoAnd much more useful than Hitachis. What is HItachi's storage capacity/density? Read rate? Any useful information at all? Vaporware.
- simonh 14y agore the original AP report, people aren't replacing LPs and CDs because the media are wearing out, they're replacing them because newer media have higher storage densities, are more physically convenient and in some cases because they allow higher fidelity recording. Yes this medium will last longer than LPs, CDs etc, but it will do nothing at all to remedy the actual reasons these older media are being superseded. Edit: I'm reminded of the old Domesday Book BBC project that recorded everything on laser discs and played the data on BBC microcomputers. The discs are still fine, but it got to the point where there were no machines left physically capable of playing them. There was a project to fix that but I don't know how it went.
- cturner 14y agoThe second part of your comment is interesting. Can electronics be designed in a way so that it has a very long life? The idea - hard-code information to silicon and preserve it. e.g. Chips on PCBs that are completely encased in substrate. Provide fused power prongs and a serial port interface to this. Future systems can integrate to this to consume the data.
- ajuc 14y agoYou just described cartridges like in C64 or some video game consoles :)
- pmjordan 14y agoCan electronics be designed in a way so that it has a very long life? NASA seem to be pretty good at that. I guess it's a question of cost more than anything else.
- brazzy 14y agoThe oldest stuff NASA has out there is what, 35 years old? Hardly a "very long life". And it's floating in vacuum, which is pretty much the ideal storage environment. Making stuff last in space is much easier than on Earth (and much easier than getting it there, of course).
- grigy 14y agoI wonder what would be the density of such storage
- huffman 14y agoMaybe the medium will last longer, but isn't "If you have a computer with the right software and an optical microscope hooked up to it" a big part of the data decay problem on floppy disks etc.? Even if the data is there, it's useless without the right software/hardware to read it.
- rsaarelm 14y agoIf it's actual visual dots on the glass, it sounds like you'd just need to figure out how to get a good enough photograph of the thing to see the dots in and spend an afternoon whipping up an image processing script in Python to convert the dots to binary code. This sounds a lot simpler than whatever would be involved in setting up the apparatus to read bits of volatile magnetic media where you'd have to interact more closely with the media, be more mindful of not accidentally destroying the stored data and rely on much less intuitive physics than looking at a thing through a microscope for the recovery process.
- huffman 14y agoThose are good point. I guess I was more curious about how the data is stored — say someone 100 years from now picks one of these up and wants to read the data. Will the format in which it's stored prevent them from doing so?
- rsaarelm 14y agoA very simple format would be regular fixed dot patterns (⣿) corresponding to bytes, spaced a apart a bit. Then it's the user's responsibility to be sensible and encode stuff without too clever compression. This wouldn't guard against trying to read the image sideways or upside down though. If you get a disc with ASCII text and can read the bits a 100 years from now, even if ASCII coding is lost to history, as long as you can figure out the thing is supposed to contain writing that uses 8 bits per letter, and still know English, a trivial pattern analysis gets you the code table you can use to read the text. The plaintext can then be used to describe the formats for whatever other data the disk may contain.
- maverhick 14y agoCan they rewrite stuff on glass? Or is it a one way write?
- 3rd3 14y agoI can imagine that one could melt the surface a bit and then rewrite it.
- sbierwagen 14y agoOld idea. Here's a 2009 Coding Horror post about doing the same thing with paper: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/07/the-paper-data-storage-option.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/07/the-paper-data-stor...
- dimitris99 14y agosounds fantastic. I will go buy an optical microscope and the software. Honestly, after all this research is the best Hitachi could come up with? How about a marble stone with some dots on it? They seem to last a long time too.
- yogrish 14y agowhat if glass breaks ??
- bartl 14y agoIt may last up to 3 billion years... unless the glass gets scratched. Oopsie.
- BitMastro 14y agoI still remember the promises of the holographic versatile disc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc backed by Hitachi as well, and apparently the company went bankrupt in 2010 :(
- keenerd 14y agoSo it is 21st century digital microfiche? Clever. I do know museums will probably line up for this stuff - standard CD-ROMs start to rot after 10 years and DVDs are better but relatively untested. I wonder how much FEC is built into them. (In other words, what is the biggest scratch you could put into it without losing data.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microfiche http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microfiche http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_error_correction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_error_correction
- bnegreve 14y agoSo in a million year, people will still have "a computer with the right software" ? This is useless until they find an "intuitive" way to store the process to decode the binary data into something readable.
- mistercow 14y ago>Currently the size of the data that can be stored isn't known Yes it is: http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/computers/glass-slivers-that-store-data-forever-unveiled-by-hitachi-20120925-26i3f.html http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/computers/glass-slivers-t... The density is 40MB/in².
- yxhuvud 14y agoMakes me think of the write-only storage medium used in space ship black boxes in the Gap series by Steven Donaldsson.
- astine 14y agoThese kinds of technologies have been tried before (and largely abandoned.) The real problem in long term data storage is figuring out how to interpret decades old binary formats for which the software no longer exists. It doesn't matter if you have a thousand perfect PDFs if Adobe has been out of business for a hundred years. The other issue with long term data storage is that the whole advantage of using digital technologies in the first place is that data is easy to copy. Using specialty technologies like this totally nullifies that advantage. If your goal is simply long-term data storage/archival, you'd do better to just use durable and popular media of the day, to maintain an index of your collection, and to upgrade/migrate your media and file formats regularly to keep up with the times. If you're going for really long term storage, such that might go multiple human lifespans without being needed or needing maintenance, you might as well just skip the digital to begin with.
- shabble 14y agoYou could potentially store them inside/along with a virtual machine image which would be capable of rendering them, and then document the crap out of the VM (which would require as few, and as simple, external interfaces as possible), such that it could be easily re-created/ported to future OSes. I think quite a few places where continuity over decade timescales (especially in the embedded world) are storing VM images with the exact versions of various parts of the toolchain they use, to ensure compatibility. And of course, there's plenty of precedent with things like the Hercules IBM mainframe emulator[1], as well as things like VMWare, Bochs, QEMU, etc. I think I've come across old DOS games being re-released wrapped with dosbox or something similar as a compat layer for modern OSes. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_%28emulator%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_%28emulator%29