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New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray

tomshardware.com

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Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray

#31

Post by GhettoComputers »

tomc1985 wrote: post #24
MisterTea wrote: post #3

The 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]

Says whom? Most cloud storage have huge free tiers. I have unlimited storage on telegram.

Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray

#32

Post by GhettoComputers »

mattowen_uk wrote: post #2

This 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…

What kind of data is even worth storing? If it’s text based it’s not hard and it’s not very large. If it’s media it’s probably some uncompressed videos and pictures that are overly large, phones that take 16mb photos that aren’t going to have more useful information over compressing it to 400kb. I am sick of my phone taking large photos that don’t have any clear benefit to me aside from clogging my phone with unreasonably large files that don’t look better, Apple wants to sell me iCloud by not allowing me to take lower resolution images.

Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray

#36

Post by vel0city »

mattowen_uk wrote: post #2

This 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…

Optical drives aren't common in most consumer devices but that isn't really a hurdle if you're trying to recover archived data on optical media. If you're only worried about DVDs a USB DVD drive can easily be had for ~$20. Blu-Ray drives aren't very expensive, I included one in my last desktop build for the purpose of data archival.

Many consumers figured optical disks would last a long time but many knew about disc rot from the get go. I picked optical media that marketed itself as archive quality. My oldest discs are reaching 20 years old now and I've lost less than 10% of the discs I've burned that were burned on good discs.

These days I burn data to M-DISCs which use a ceramic layer instead of organic. They're rated to 1000 years and the Blu-Rays are quite durable. I've had one bouncing around my desk and outside for several years. The one on my desk has zero errors while the one outside has a few bit errors.

Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray

#37

Post by kmeisthax »

gjm11 wrote: post #10

In case anyone is wondering what they mean by "5D": they mean it's a 3D array of marks, each of which has both size and orientation. The 3D array is three 2D layers. According to this definition, a DVD or Blu-Ray disc is "4D" because it can have multiple layers each of which stores 1-dimensional data (pit versus no pit). And a book is at least "7D" because it contains a 3D arrangement of marks, and marks can vary in…

Counting size and orientation as extra dimensions would be justifiable if you could overlap dots of different sizes or orientations, even a little.

Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray

#38

Post by tiffanyh »

Off topic: if I wanted to digital store files to pass down to my children that might not be access for decades, what's the best medium to store such data?

Floppy/ZipDrive/CD-ROM/Blueray/USB-A are either obsolete or are on their way out. What's a future proof storage option? (and if you said Cloud Storage {X} - just look at how many services have folded in just the last few years alone). Secondly, what's the best file formats also that will be future proof?

Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray

#39

Post by GhettoComputers »

EastOfTruth wrote: post #29
rdevsrex wrote: post #21

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.

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)

What kind of data are you trying to store? How much of it? I can’t imagine my life being more than 100 GB and probably much smaller, probably under 20GB.

Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray

#40

Post by azinman2 »

rdevsrex wrote: post #21

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.

This is for archival purposes. Seek times don’t matter for that use case.
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