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Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

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Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#21

Post by simonh »

supermatt wrote: post #16

Im always sceptical about these claims of archive longevity. IIRC when CD-Rs were first available, they were touted as suitable for century long archives. The reality was far from that.

High quality discs are capable of that, the problem is the drives to read them all broke down. For an ultra-long term storage medium like this that's moot. If someone wants to read one of these in a billion years, they'll just have to develop the tech, but that would be true of any such long term mass storage medium. It's not necessarily a strike against this particular implementation.

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#23

Post by simonh »

benj111 wrote: post #20

Can I rant about the 5D? "It's been dubbed five-dimensional (5D) digital data because, in addition to the position of the data, the size and orientation are extremely important too" Orientation is inherently important anyway. Have you ever tried reading a book upside down, and what does size bring? Other than lowering density. And obviously position is important, it's the difference between data and randomness.

Books only have one orientation, so they're not actually making use of that dimension to encode data.

The rest of your points... oh my. None of the dimensions count at all, really? So rant away, but it's nice if the sound and fury at least signifies _something_.

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#25

Post by Krasnol »

simonh wrote: post #21
supermatt wrote: post #16

Im always sceptical about these claims of archive longevity. IIRC when CD-Rs were first available, they were touted as suitable for century long archives. The reality was far from that.

High quality discs are capable of that, the problem is the drives to read them all broke down. For an ultra-long term storage medium like this that's moot. If someone wants to read one of these in a billion years, they'll just have to develop the tech, but that would be true of any such long term mass storage medium. It's not necessarily a strike against this particular implementation.

> they were touted as suitable for century long archives.

I can't remember this statement from those times. Only people who said that tape is still the better/safer medium for music and backups. I even had a zip drive for that.

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#26

Post by bookofjoe »

Dangeranger wrote: post #12

Does anyone know a resource which explains the theoretical limit for retrievable, durable, information storage? I would assume the most dense medium possible would be a collection of neutrons, since neutron stars are the most dense object other than a black hole, but retrieving information from them doesn’t seem feasible.

"'Dragon's Egg' is a 1980 hard science fiction novel by Robert L. Forward. In the story, Dragon's Egg is a neutron star with a surface gravity 67 billion times that of Earth, and inhabited by cheela, intelligent creatures the size of a sesame seed who live, think, and develop a million times faster than humans. Most of the novel, from May to June 2050, chronicles the cheela civilization beginning with its discovery of agriculture to advanced technology and its first face-to-face contact with humans, who are observing the hyper-rapid evolution of the cheela civilization from orbit around Dragon's Egg.

"The novel is regarded as a landmark in hard science fiction. As is typical of the genre, 'Dragon's Egg' attempts to communicate unfamiliar ideas and imaginative scenes while giving adequate attention to the known scientific principles involved."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg

Superb.

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#27

Post by simonh »

Krasnol wrote: post #25
simonh wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High quality discs are capable of that, the problem is the drives to read them all broke down. For an ultra-long term storage medium like this that's moot. If someone wants to read one of these in a billion years, they'll just have to develop the tech, but that would be true of any such long term mass storage medium. It's not necessarily a strike against this particular implementation.

> they were touted as suitable for century long archives. I can't remember this statement from those times. Only people who said that tape is still the better/safer medium for music and backups. I even had a zip drive for that.

Magnetic tapes suffer from print-through though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print-through

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#28

Post by lstodd »

kijin wrote: post #5

It looks like somebody just said "it will last as long as the universe" and someone else translated it into an actual number using too many significant digits. How long can we realistically expect glass to last, judging from e.g. beads of volcanic glass embedded in the geological record?

Not much, regular glass transitions to crystal quite fast compared to those geological timescales. And who knows what the transition will do to the data stored at these densities.

Nothing in the article states what kind of glass is used (which blows the bullshit detector right there).

If they use crystalline quartz, it should last indefinitely. If it's regular glass, then 50 years if you're lucky, controlled conditions, etc, etc.

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#29

Post by nathanyukai »

YayamiOmate wrote: post #18

I dunno, but it seems to me universities increasingly focus on press releases and marketing departments... 5D and 13.8 billion years? Phony. I know no sane scientist or enigneer that would say they use more than 3D physics. Sounds like catch phrases to sell. With such logic plain old HDD is at least 4D, because it uses CHS coordinates and magnetic orientation, to store data. To me such communication style undermines…

Yeah isn't this '5D' yet another eye grabbing title? I think size and orientation are still 3D data.

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#30

Post by simonh »

fredsted wrote: post #2

What happens at 13.9B years?

I'm guessing that's the estimated time it would take for entropy in the material to render the data unreadable. They specify at room temperature, so I'm pretty sure they're talking about entropic disruption of the structure due to thermal effects.

Note that 'glass' is a hugely varied class of materials, so without knowing much more we can't make spot judgements about the validity of the claim.

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