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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)

#201
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way more than that many people couldn't care less about Gutenberg though. Point being the bible is the most read book in the world.

Since Christianity is not the largest religion, I find that claim needs additional proof.

Really? It's a google search away https://www.businessinsider.com/the-top-10-most-read-books-i... And it's in the Guinness book of world records.

Also, Christianity is the largest religion... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_populations

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

#202
post #181
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Room temperature" is a pretty meaningful rough measurement for storage of anything.

But the temperature was 462K (about 189C), far beyond room temperature, or what we'd expect to store data at. This is just the temperature at which the expected lifetime is the age of the universe, which has no bearing on the technology itself.

[deleted]

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

#203
post #183
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using the Bible could be interpreted as ‘this is one of humanitys most important works so let’s preserve that first’ Yet the majority of people on planet earth are not Christian. I’ll go with the Gutenberg homage though

Way more than that many people couldn't care less about Gutenberg though. Point being the bible is the most read book in the world.

No doubt that is true. I was referring to the scientists motivation to ‘engrave’ the Bible

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

#204
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely nothing. The only theory I can come up with is that GP is a snobby atheist who associates Bibles with morons.

Using the Bible could be interpreted as ‘this is one of humanitys most important works so let’s preserve that first’ Yet the majority of people on planet earth are not Christian. I’ll go with the Gutenberg homage though

The Tanakh also has the distinction of being one of the few works of literature that has survived for 3000 years largely intact, and I think it's considerably longer than the older parts of the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

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

#205

Earlier 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.

No, 4MB.

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

#206

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…

It's fairly standard Physics jargon. Physicists don't like saying the word "impossible", because there's always someone out there that can't stand hyperbole. So they often refer to something as "not likely to happen within the age of the universe" rather than "impossible", hence the 13.8bn year estimate here.

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

#207

There's a long and mostly bad history of claims around 3D storage. About twenty years ago I followed a company called Constellation 3D, later Terastor. They made many strikingly similar claims, smaller absolute numbers but a similar multiplier vs. what was already in the market. At least they only claimed three dimensions. I can sort of accept orientation as an effective fourth dimension, but size seems like a real s…

To me it feels like a similar (or is it reverse?) problem to deep space telescopes and that they used to 'image' that black hole. You need so many fractions of an arc-second in order to 'see' the distance object. Only in this case you also have to arrange the other objects so they don't occlude the ones behind them. Imagine trying to lay out a warehouse so you can do inventory without walking through the building. Ju…

You don't have to avoid occlusion with nanogratings and other interference phenomena; occlusion only adds a little noise.

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

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, actual museum-grade archival is so much more than just having an aging-resistant media. You also need to be able to read and decode it many years into the future, which is really tricky to guarantee - you can't assume the future generations will know how to make a reading device and remember your formats/encodings. So it's a bit like unzip.zip problem.

>You also need to be able to read and decode it many years into the future, which is really tricky to guarantee Not really, those future people don't just come out of nowhere. It's a gradual, incremental change as there are still systems using tape storage the technology or formats are not lost but migrated.

think nuclear war that wipes out 99.999% of earths human population. Even the few computers that remain would become useless because there's no power, fall apart due to degredation/weathering, and ignored because people will have much higher priorities like finding food and surviving, than preserving what would then be the previous generation's technology.

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

#209

There's a long and mostly bad history of claims around 3D storage. About twenty years ago I followed a company called Constellation 3D, later Terastor. They made many strikingly similar claims, smaller absolute numbers but a similar multiplier vs. what was already in the market. At least they only claimed three dimensions. I can sort of accept orientation as an effective fourth dimension, but size seems like a real s…

According to the paper, their laser pulse rate is 500kHz; if they're writing a single 1 bit per pulse, and half the bits are 1 bits, and there's no coding overhead from something like 8b/10b, that's 125 kilobytes per second, so 10 seconds per 1.2 megabyte 5¼" DSHD floppy. At this rate, filling the 360-terabit capacity of the disc would take 11 years. You would not expect such a slow storage system to be able to compete in the market with 50-megabyte-per-second SD cards, unless data retention of centuries or more was a key selling point, so the fact that such storage systems have failed in the market provides no evidence against the claims made in the paper.

Bubble memory, similarly, does work; it was just too slow to compete with DRAM and not dense enough to compete with spinning rust, except in a few niche applications.

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

#210
post #139

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…

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 ("phony", as you put it)! 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.…

"They did not, however, simply make up a number with no justification..."

Right, the concept of storing data in crystalline like structures is not new and there's good technical reasons to believe the technology is a goer. (See my more general comment hereunder giving reasons.)

BTW, this is a truly exciting development, let's hope the practical implementation doesn't stall.

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