Live data from Hacker News

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

tomshardware.com

11–20 of 137 posts

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

#11

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…

Why are tape drives fragile? I use them for my long term backups of personal files I thought they were robust ?

What scale are you working at and how have you made it cost-effective versus a stack of external HDDs?

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

#12
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Temperature? I've yet to experience rot on decades old discs at home. Most sit in a basement that doesn't exceed 68*F

A constant 72F, this is an indoor closet, top shelf, no moisture incidents.

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

#13
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…

A better definition then would be: Assuming each dimension is infinite, how many dimensions do you need to uniquely address a bit.

The infinite requirement is there so the answer can't be reduced to "1 dimension" every time (if you had a 10x10 matrix you could just turn it into an array of 100 elements).

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

#16

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…

In my opinion, it's best to adopt industry practices for home life here. Schofield's 2nd Law of computing comes to mind: if your data doesn't exist in two places, then it doesn't exist anywhere.

Offloading reliable backups to companies seems reasonable. It's a lot more money than archiving to physical media, but it's also a lot more reliable. NAS systems also make it easy to have reliable, hot on-site data that keeps a copy of the data backed up to a cloud service. Many of these cloud backup services are also zero-trust.

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

#17
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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

#18
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…

I think Dimension in the data sense of the word, not Dimension in the spatial sense of the word.

Multi-dimension data is a thing, and it goes a lot higher than 4, 5, or 7.

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

#19
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…

A better definition then would be: Assuming each dimension is infinite, how many dimensions do you need to uniquely address a bit. The infinite requirement is there so the answer can't be reduced to "1 dimension" every time (if you had a 10x10 matrix you could just turn it into an array of 100 elements).

Slight nit-pick, but any number of dimensions can be reduced to one, using a pairing function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pairing_function or a space-filling curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-filling_curve

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

#20
post #4

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…

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.

Same - maybe something oxidised.
Post reply on HN