Minority Report?
Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)
121–130 of 256 posts
Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
A large number of people know roughly how big The Bible is. I think they picture was more about "look, this big book fits on this little thing", and less about some perceived proselytizing.
The image is misleading anyways. The whole Bible fits in 1Mb uncompressed. That image would be billions of Bibles if it is using this new technique.
They also claim it will last 13.8 Billion Years and this is the problem you have with it?
Press releases. Whatta-ya-gonna-do?
Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
That seems more like five degrees of freedom than five dimensions.
To be the devil's advocate, it is often convenient to represent states of a system with N degrees of freedom as a subset of an N-dimensional space. For example, state space of two balls linked by a rigid rod in 3D would be seen as a 5-dimensional space. That said, the article is heavy on marketing (13.8 billion year claim is not scientific, at least in spirit) and looks like PR department product.
By that definition I can double the dimensionality of the storage by adding a second disk.
Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)
#124Does 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 o…
Thank you. This sounds like a book I need to read.
Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)
#125I 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…
Heh, that number is suspiciously close to the age of the Universe. Phony indeed. "WMAP estimated the age of the universe to be 13.772 billion years, with an uncertainty of 59 million years. In 2013, Planck measured the age of the universe at 13.82 billion years."
Yes, 13.8Gy is the approximate age of the universe and yes the researchers used that number. But it's not like they made this up and conveniently landed there: they computed a range of options and worked back from that specific number to prove it'd work for as long as we could possibly care.
Turns out the biggest decay factor is nanograting and the biggest contributing physical quantity is temperature. They plotted what decay would look like on an Arrhenius plot. They both computed estimates and measured to confirm: the measurements are quite accurate. The specific claim is that they computed that at a specific temperature (462K) the medium will last 13.8Gy -- but their point is that it would last as long as the age of the universe at that temperature, not that the pulled a number out of their backsides.
The actual paper is here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/297892219_Eternal_5...
Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
That seems more like five degrees of freedom than five dimensions.
Hmm... so the D could be for 'D'egrees of freedom? Who knows... like someone said, it is marketing, and hence a lot could be lost in translation just for easy/popular optics.
What is the difference between dimensionality and degrees of freedom? The standard definition of degrees of freedom is "number of variables that make up the state of the system" and the definition of the dimensionality of the state vector is...
Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the distinction? Wikipedia seems to think there isn't one: "In mathematics, the dimension of an object is, roughly speaking, the number of degrees of freedom of a point that moves on this object." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimension
The difference is that people don't read the titles of press releases with pre-conceived notions of what a degree of freedom is, so it's not as useful for making clickbait.
5D has been a term of art for years, and was not made up by this article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage
Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)
#128These articles pop up every few years, and it always makes me shake my head. Such storage solves no market need. Technology hardly lasts five years let alone fifty years let alone five billion years. Virtually nobody is worried about being able to read their media 500 years out.
And even if that was a reason to pursue a technology, the actual storage capacity is meaningless on its own. 360TB of spinning disks isn't very expensive to buy, rack, or run. And you can read and write to them at a decent clip. Managing failures is fairly predictable. What benefit does a magical glass (or, in previous incarnations, quartz or other crystal) disk have? Optical media isn't known for its amazing random access speeds. Write-once media has very limited use and is almost never fast to write to.
So who's buying this? Who has data that needs to last that long, or needs to store lots of permanently immutable data that's read back sequentially? I honestly can't think of a market for this. The article says "museums" but I don't know of any museums that would prefer glass disks for their backups over an S3 bucket. This is "on prem backup" taken to a comical extreme.
I can see the academic value of exploring the technology, but this space has been exhausted many times over. I remember seeing similar articles in Technology Review and Scientific American about identical developments twenty years ago. It's just not a good idea.
Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
That seems more like five degrees of freedom than five dimensions.
To be the devil's advocate, it is often convenient to represent states of a system with N degrees of freedom as a subset of an N-dimensional space. For example, state space of two balls linked by a rigid rod in 3D would be seen as a 5-dimensional space. That said, the article is heavy on marketing (13.8 billion year claim is not scientific, at least in spirit) and looks like PR department product.
The 13.8Gy claim is made by estimating, calculating and then confirming by experiment how quickly wear and tear works (the primary mechanism is nanograting, and the primary contributing physical quantity is temperature). It then specifically grabs 13.8Gy as an example data point because that's the age of the Universe, but they could've picked any other point on a time/temperature scale, like, say, "room temperature".
In what sense is this "not scientific"?
Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
The image is misleading anyways. The whole Bible fits in 1Mb uncompressed. That image would be billions of Bibles if it is using this new technique.
They also claim it will last 13.8 Billion Years and this is the problem you have with it? Press releases. Whatta-ya-gonna-do?
The 13.8Gy claim is made by estimating, calculating and then confirming by experiment how quickly wear and tear works (the primary mechanism is nanograting, and the primary contributing physical quantity is temperature). It then specifically grabs 13.8Gy as an example data point because that's the age of the Universe, but they could've picked any other point on a time/temperature scale, like, say, "room temperature".
Are you suggesting they pulled this out of their backside? The research very much supports that number.