Yeah, my first thought even before reading the article, was "What about seek times?". Maybe it can be improved, but thinking of web apps specifically, I'm not sure what kind of use case you would have for something that is this slow to access.
New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray
21–30 of 137 posts
Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray
#22> promising incommensurate storage in a palm-sized device
Incommensurate with what, one might ask.
Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray
#23This is all well-and-good, but how do we read all that data in 500 years time, or even 20 years time? People were busily archiving data to CDs and DVDs two decades ago, thinking 'yeah this digital storage media will last for centuries!'... Loads of bit-rot combined with complete lack of DVD drives still in common [computer] usage, has totally shown that the more complex the storage media the shorter it's useful lifet…
I think right now the most permanent way to store digital data is have enough redundant copies on enough impermanent media one is likely to survive. For example my CD copy of 1998's HARDWAR might be lost due to disk rot, but there's enough copies of copies of copies floating around on various places it's still easily accessible.
Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray
#24The other day I was talking with a friend about the high cost and perceived fragility of tape drives for long term personal archival while bemoaning the loss of higher density optical storage technology. It's not easy to backup or shuffle around terabytes of personal video, audio and pictures. Hard drives aren't exactly the right media for safe deposit boxes. In the 90's I had an Iomega Ditto 250MB drive that held 12…
Nooooooooooo, you're supposed to back it up to the cloud and pay some startup jerk $XX/mo for the privilege! [/s]
Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray
#25The other day I was talking with a friend about the high cost and perceived fragility of tape drives for long term personal archival while bemoaning the loss of higher density optical storage technology. It's not easy to backup or shuffle around terabytes of personal video, audio and pictures. Hard drives aren't exactly the right media for safe deposit boxes. In the 90's I had an Iomega Ditto 250MB drive that held 12…
I have been talking and asking about this for years. And was told about Archival Disc [1] on HN.
500GB per disc right now, and only came out in 2019. 1TB per disc in the future but I suspect not in the next two years.
I wish they have a more consumer, or prosumer friendly version though. The current drive goes for about $9K [2]
There are Archival BluRay disc that offer 50 + year storage, but they are only in ~50GB per disc.
[1] https://panasonic.net/cns/archiver/optical_technology/
[2] https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1549175-REG/sony_odsd...
Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray
#26The other day I was talking with a friend about the high cost and perceived fragility of tape drives for long term personal archival while bemoaning the loss of higher density optical storage technology. It's not easy to backup or shuffle around terabytes of personal video, audio and pictures. Hard drives aren't exactly the right media for safe deposit boxes. In the 90's I had an Iomega Ditto 250MB drive that held 12…
Why are tape drives fragile? I use them for my long term backups of personal files I thought they were robust ?
iomega stuff was generally rather precarious. LTO drives are solid.
Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray
#27This is all well-and-good, but how do we read all that data in 500 years time, or even 20 years time? People were busily archiving data to CDs and DVDs two decades ago, thinking 'yeah this digital storage media will last for centuries!'... Loads of bit-rot combined with complete lack of DVD drives still in common [computer] usage, has totally shown that the more complex the storage media the shorter it's useful lifet…
Let's not forget actual rot too. I peered into a stack of CD's not long ago to find that a lot of them have quite literally rotted while sitting in a dark and dry closet. No dust, no humidity, no smoking, no abuse, just a spindle of CD's recognizable only by their sharpie'd identifiers covered in pits of rotted foil.
Regular CD's and DVD's have an organic layer that will rot away. There are alternative styles of discs which use a ceramic layer instead of organic which are rated to last a thousand years. These discs can still be burned and read in most standard burners and readers.
Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray
#28This is all well-and-good, but how do we read all that data in 500 years time, or even 20 years time? People were busily archiving data to CDs and DVDs two decades ago, thinking 'yeah this digital storage media will last for centuries!'... Loads of bit-rot combined with complete lack of DVD drives still in common [computer] usage, has totally shown that the more complex the storage media the shorter it's useful lifet…
> This is all well-and-good, but how do we read all that data in 500 years time, or even 20 years time?
I know it won't last due to bit-rot but all my CDs burned in the nineties are still readable.
> Loads of bit-rot combined with complete lack of DVD drives still in common [computer] usage...
They are still very common: both in desktop and as USB-connected readers/burners. You can find countless models on Amazon. I don't think they're going away anytime soon.
> People were busily archiving data to CDs and DVDs two decades ago, ...
That's precisely why they're not going away anytime soon.
There are even companies like FB would, at some point, were burning insane amount of data to Blu-Ray discs.
> Compare this to books, which can still be read a millennium later.
Having a book from 1575 here I do agree (not quite a millenium but still). However the solution to disc bit-rot is simple: once every ten years or so, read your discs and burn them on the new fancy tech of the day (say CDs to DVDs, DVDs to Blu-Ray, now Blu-Ray to these 5D thinggies, rinse and repeat).
It's not as if new mediums had less capacity than older ones.
Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray
#29Yeah, my first thought even before reading the article, was "What about seek times?". Maybe it can be improved, but thinking of web apps specifically, I'm not sure what kind of use case you would have for something that is this slow to access.
I don't care about seek times if we can have media with orders of magnitude more storage capacity and life expectancy. (of course if you can also have good seek times, it would be icing on the cake)
Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Temperature? I've yet to experience rot on decades old discs at home. Most sit in a basement that doesn't exceed 68*F
It's a well known problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot
Yup it's a well-known problem, but several of us still have CDs decades old that still do read totally fine. That doesn't mean we rely on them as backups: mine have long since been copied to DVDs, then more recent DVDs but also backup'ed on harddrive / servers etc.