“the medium is silica crystal, similar to optical cable, it’s highly durable. It’s also capacious: The technology can store up to 360 TB of data on a 5-inch glass platter.”
I’ve seen this particular revolutionary technology come by about once a year for the past two decades or so, so let’s say I’m not holding my breath and I will toss this one on the large pile of “bullshit tech articles”
If it is so easy to write to, seems it would be equally easy to erase
Bro has never used a permanent marker
A little bit of rubbing alcohol and it comes right off
Depends on the surface the marker was used on.
“easy if you have a diffraction-limited watt-scale laser” I guess
Intentional deletion is a lot different to entropy-caused bitrot
and just like every other storage medium, it will last for eons…and die about .5 femtoseconds before you have a critical need to pull data off.
Open AI just bought out all the glass platter production. Not only will consumers not be able to store their data for 14gy, they won’t have anywhere to set down their drinks either
Sauce? Or sarcasm?
Really?
I been wooshed, sorry v.v
It’s like that these days. It’s hard to tell.
prints article out
places it on an overflowing, ancient pile of documents of promising, science proved data storage methods that haven’t made it to public use yet
Nor ever will
I’m up to 45TB of actual used storage. I just want another tape analog. I want inexpensive, slow, long-term storage I can move off-site easily. This paying double to keep disks around and then moving them in boxes is just bad, and online storage is stupid expensive at those sizes.
Was running on Backblaze for years until they screwed around with my client enough that I can’t backup my NAS reliably. I’m not a company, I’m not going to pay the cost of my disks every year to store the content of my disks.
I’ve been considering for a few years standing up a 2u box in colocation.
Remember Memristors? They’re commercially available today, at 200 EUR per bit.
wow, sign me up for a couple of dozen terabytes of that!
I also remember people burning pitts on scotch tape, then rolling it up and reading it in 3d :)
It will not.
For real, what am I going to do when the sun swallows the earth in 4 billion years?
You may be entitled to compensation
Any number I could call?
How hf can you have 5D space within 3D space? This sounds like marketing bullshit.
The 5D Memory Crystal stores data by using tiny voxels – 3D pixels – in fused silica glass, etched by femtosecond laser pulses. These voxels possess “birefringence,” meaning that their light refraction characteristics vary depending upon the polarization and direction of incoming light.
That difference in light orientation and strength can be read in conjunction with the voxel’s location (x, y, z coordinates), allowing data to be encoded in five dimensional space.
Oh, I get it now. It’s a five-dimensional mathematical space which is given by the three physical space dimensions plus the difference in light orientation and the difference the light strength.
5D is the wrong term, the correct term is multiplex.
It is the correct term if you look at it from a Hilbert space point of view. You have 5 probe options (vector 5D) that give you 5 read options (vector 5D).
It’s not strength, but rotation. Shoot a photon at the cube at a certain spot, you get data out of it. Hit the same spot in the cube with light that is polarized perpendicular to the first, and you get different data out of it.
Er… that’s what it sounds like, anyway…
Finally some worthy storage for memes!
Eat your heart out Ea-nāṣir.
Those aliens from the future will be so amazed when they find a disc with 360 TB of cat videos.
You mean various levels of fucked up porn.
Yeah but they aren’t amazed by that, tons of porn in literally every civilization. But cat videos are novel
@remindme@mstdn.social 14,000,000,000 years
I will remember to check my lemmy inbox right after the earth gets eaten whole by the sun
And then again 13,000,000,000 years later.
Remember that CDs, CDRs, and so on were originally pitched as surviving 100 years. Turns out they last a highly variable amount of time but potentially as little as 2-3 years before they degrade, depending on the construction.
So I’ll just say, this is clearly a theoretical value.
Edit: Words.
deleted by creator
CD-R and CD-RW discs use different methods of data encoding, and were never advertised as having similar longevity.
I mean…sorry, but this is wrong. Mitsui CDRs for example are still being sold on retail sites advertising 100+ (and sometimes 300+) year longevity. Similar to bitrot, internet rot makes it hard to find advertisements from the 90s, but I am comfortable that was true then too and not limited to “gold” high quality discs like Mitsui.
So it’s 2 to 3 percent of original estimate? That means it’ll last anywhere from 280 to 420 million years. Dead on arrival tech.
How can you be so sure they haven’t already done durability testing??
Because they weren’t invented in 1925? Any durability testing you do today is about assumptions where you accelerate the process for a year by heating it or exposing it to water or whatever will degrade it most to some factor above normal and then extrapolate. That extrapolation was wildly wrong with CDs and it could be with this medium too. Or it might last a lot longer. What they have not done is written to a bunch of them and stored them in a variety of ways for 100 years and concluded they last that long.
Oh, I see the confusion.
I was talking about the new media in the article, not CDs.
So… so are they. The new media has not yet been tested for 100 years because they were not invented 100 years ago
The ones with metal pigment are still waiting to fail, the ones that died used a cheap organic dye, coz profit. This is Silica (i.e. quartz, a long lived rock) with variances in polarization and intensity,( hence 5D when combined with a 3D Crystal))
OK generic marketing crap and will you have their special reader in a century, but it’s a solid way to project knowledge into the far future (gotta wonder if we need to re-examine some quartz crystals with this in mind ;}
Oh good it can fit the next Call of Duty game.
Denis Villeneuve nailed it years ago.
Similar concepts have been developed before, Microsoft and Southampton University were working on glass cubes with 3D laser etchings in the centre around 2015-16
(now divorced)
If you squint this is a weird shrine to a fictional marriage between Elvis and Britney Spears
I saw Shakira and that chef on YouTube who makes ornate sculptures out of chocolate and has a weird, fixed PanAm smile the whole time.
Okay yeah, now that you’ve said it I can see that too XD
…but only one million years into it’s life span the human race is gone and aliens are unwittingly melting them down for raw material.
1 million years? You mean 200 top!
That’s the spirit! 👍
Excellent, I will catalog my journals of my metamorphosis into a giant worm on these.
Giant worm that shits mind enhancing drug, to be more specific
I wonder what the read write speed is. Imagine storing your entire movie collection in a crystal the size of a coaster.
Might not be for home consumers anytime soon, article says: “In the next 18 months, the company hopes to have a field-deployable read device that customers can use to read archived data. But SPhotonix isn’t presently targeting the consumer market. Kazansky estimates that the initial cost of the read device will be about $6,000 and the initial cost of the write device will be about $30,000.”
Then goes on to mention they need about 3-4 years of R&D so they can be ready to license the tech
If it’s slow, then it’s the central backup and you use anything else for regular use. Just having it as a fallback for recovery would be huge.
I’ll have a crystal collection that’s actually useful
“This one’s for memory.”
“You actually believe in that garbage?”
“No, you don’t understand…”Stargate SG-1 was ahead of its time with crystals
We desperately need a non-magnetic storage for obvious reasons … But making a new thing is freakish difficult.
In case you missed it in the article, the transfer speeds are mentioned just two paragraphs prior to the one you cited:
Over the next three to four years, Kazansky said, SPhotonix aims to improve the data transfer speed of its technology from a write time of 4 megabytes per second (MBps) and read time of 30 MBps to a read/write speed of 500 MBps, which would be competitive with archival tape backup systems.
Writing 360 TB at 4 MB/s will take over 1000 days, almost 3 years. Retrieving 360 TB at a rate of 30 MB/s is about 138 days. That capacity to bitrate ratio that is going to be really hard to use in a practical way, and it’ll be critical to get that speed up. Their target of 500 MB/s is still more than 8 days to read or write the data from one storage platter.
One counterpoint - even with a weak speed to capacity ratio it could be very useful to have a lot of storage for incremental backup solutions, where you have a small index to check what needs to be backed up, only need to write new/modified data, and when restoring you only need to read the indexes and the amount you’re actually restoring. This saves time writing the data and lets you keep access to historical versions.
There’s two caveats here, of course, assuming those are not rewritable. One, you need to be able to quickly seek to the latest index, which can’t reliably be at the start, and two, you need a format that works without rewriting any data, possibly with a footer (like tar or zip, forgot which one), which introduces extra complexity (though I foresee a potential trick where the previous index can leave an unallocated block of data to write the address of the next index, to be written later)
I was so blind sided by the fact that the tech isn’t for consumers that I forgot to mention the r/w speeds
That’s the joke. The speed of a lot of these tech would require twice the time the data retention to write it.
We can place atoms in order on the head of this pin and store 30 Pb. Write speed? 1KB/min
Did you read the article? 30mbps is faster than a lot of people’s internets. It’s not fast, but for a prototype, it’s not bad.
You need to put the capacity into perspective with the storage speed. The comment I made simply highlighted the issue with an extreme example… For the reasoning provided. And as someone who’s worked with emerging tech before… 30 Mbps is their ideal lap time in a lab environment. Do remember that 100 Mbps is considered absurdly slow for networking. 1Gbps sounds fast but even those transfer rates move into hours and days for larger file transfers.
This is explicitly stated to be for cold storage though. It doesn’t have to be fast at all. And they’re supposedly aiming for 500mbps soon.
They are at 30 presently. The “standard” is somewhere around 300-500 which, again, is acceptable for cold storage at the current tape drive size of 10-30tb.
There are minimums expected as density increases. Cold storage / backup still needs this to be viable.
I suppose it could be considered a trade-off? There’s the obvious advantages of longevity and possible size(?), it van still be viable in some niche uses where that matters. Github’s code vault from a while back could have benefited from that.
We are talking theoretical here, of course. For enterprise to even give it a realistic look it needs to outperform very time tested equipment so… Were probably looking at needing to beat on cost, capacity, speed… Or to put it simply its actual value / cost for implementation. Currently there are a few different research grade projects at various stages of lab testing… And this, like those, needs to fundamentally provide (noteworthy) gains over the existing and also be able to be consistent outside of the lab. Were a fair bit away from that yet.
I mentioned earlier that we are in dire need of meaningful, long term, non-magnetic storage… And I genuinely believe that. But while I can be interested in the tech - it still needs to be viewed with a critical eye until it can produce results.
That’s cheap enough a small business could do long term backups for individuals and other small businesses.
I had the exact same idea, you could upload your data to cloud storage, and have them write it to the doodad and send it to you.
and/or provide them cloud access to their crystal since they may not want to buy a reader
Manipulating the atoms in a crystal to store info is extremely high-precision, as is verifying the accuracy of the write). So is reading positions down to a few nanometers, But consumers wouldn’t need a $6000 reader to get, say, 10GB dumped to a hard drive … you’d carry your crystal and 16GB drive down to the corner store and user their reader to dump sector 37BJ to the drive. No need to trust them with your platter … but are you exposing all 360TB to potential damage from the machine?
