Hitachi presents a storage medium that should last forever

http://www.neowin.net/news/hitachi-presents-a-storage-medium-that-should-last-forever

by muon • 14 years ago

49 48 14 years ago

Sounds great - but maybe I'll wait until it can be done on a material thats not incredibly brittle and thus easy to accidentally break...

stephengillie• 14 years ago

Like pyrex?

Edit: Like borosilicate glass?

Peroni• 14 years ago

Pyrex is a brand. The material you are referring to is borosilicate glass.

aw3c22• 14 years ago

Following the news spam after news spam, here is the AFP story all the submitted page and "sources" copied from: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hrS0Kp5RL...

Kudos• 14 years ago

That link won't work without a Google referrer.

aw3c22• 14 years ago

Seems to work for me without sending any referrer.

mistercow2• 14 years ago

Doesn't work for me even with a Google referrer. Paste into Google search, click first link, and I'm back at the Google homepage.

This seems to be the same article though: http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/computers/glass-slivers-t...

protomyth• 14 years ago

If you look starting 6 days ago, this story has been submitted 5 previous times.

bad_alloc• 14 years ago

Just to be a smartass: I guess it will last for a significant timespan, but not actually "forever" unless Hitachi also finds out how to reverse entropy or how to leave this universe. If they don't a lot of stuff might get their data, like proton-decay, the upcoming black hole era or the fact that everything is liquid on very large timescales. Further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Futu... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_decay http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe

StavrosK• 14 years ago

It's for small values of "forever".

vectorbunny• 14 years ago

Nothing last forever... except hyperbole.

zem• 14 years ago

The stars and Galaxies died and snuffed out, and space grew black after ten trillion years of running down.

One by one Man fused with AC, each physical body losing its mental identity in a manner that was somehow not a loss but a gain.

Man's last mind paused before fusion, looking over a space that included nothing but the dregs of one last dark star and nothing besides but incredibly thin matter, agitated randomly by the tag ends of heat wearing out, asymptotically, to the absolute zero.

Man said, "AC, is this the end? Can this chaos not be reversed into the Universe once more? Can that not be done?"

AC said, "Hang on, I have the answer inscribed on a Hitachi glass tablet somewhere."

-- Isaac Asimov, "The Last Tablet"

fratido2• 14 years ago

How about a disc that is made of glass, has a capacity of a DVD and can be read by standard dvd players and can be bought today, for a mere of €160? THIS is amazing. http://www.syylex.com/index.php/home_english.html

brazzy3• 14 years ago

The reflective layer is still made of metal and the two layers are glued together. You have to take the maker's words on how durable those actually are.

fratido2• 14 years ago

Well, sure - but even if the reflective layer loosens, you still have the glass layer - then it would be the same as the hitachi concept: read the glass pits with a miroscope. Or add a new reflective layer.

JoeAltmaier• 14 years ago

And much more useful than Hitachis. What is HItachi's storage capacity/density? Read rate? Any useful information at all? Vaporware.

simonh2• 14 years ago

re the original AP report, people aren't replacing LPs and CDs because the media are wearing out, they're replacing them because newer media have higher storage densities, are more physically convenient and in some cases because they allow higher fidelity recording.

Yes this medium will last longer than LPs, CDs etc, but it will do nothing at all to remedy the actual reasons these older media are being superseded.

Edit: I'm reminded of the old Domesday Book BBC project that recorded everything on laser discs and played the data on BBC microcomputers. The discs are still fine, but it got to the point where there were no machines left physically capable of playing them. There was a project to fix that but I don't know how it went.

cturner• 14 years ago

The second part of your comment is interesting. Can electronics be designed in a way so that it has a very long life?

The idea - hard-code information to silicon and preserve it. e.g. Chips on PCBs that are completely encased in substrate. Provide fused power prongs and a serial port interface to this. Future systems can integrate to this to consume the data.

ajuc• 14 years ago

You just described cartridges like in C64 or some video game consoles :)

pmjordan• 14 years ago

Can electronics be designed in a way so that it has a very long life?

NASA seem to be pretty good at that. I guess it's a question of cost more than anything else.

pjmlp• 14 years ago

CD/DVD/BlueRays do wear out, specially if they are from cheap brands.

The coating layer just vanishes, leaving you with an unreadable piece of plastic.

simonh2• 14 years ago

I understand that, but how many of the people moving on from CDs to other storage and playback technologies are doing so for that reason? Media wear is only one reason a medium gets superseded, and not a major one. This new medium may have a role in long term archival applications, but comparing it to consumer technologies like tapes and CDs is misleading.

pja• 14 years ago

The data has all been recovered: There's a full implementation of the Domesday Book project on a large touch-surface table at the National Museum of Computing ( http://www.tnmoc.org/ ) at Bletchley Park, as well as a couple of the original readers.

Here's an article about the new hardware: http://www.tnmoc.org/news/news-releases/bbc-domesday-touchta...

I saw it in action on a work trip to TNMOC earlier this year: it's quite nifty.

grigy• 14 years ago

I wonder what would be the density of such storage

huffman2• 14 years ago

Maybe the medium will last longer, but isn't "If you have a computer with the right software and an optical microscope hooked up to it" a big part of the data decay problem on floppy disks etc.? Even if the data is there, it's useless without the right software/hardware to read it.

rsaarelm2• 14 years ago

If it's actual visual dots on the glass, it sounds like you'd just need to figure out how to get a good enough photograph of the thing to see the dots in and spend an afternoon whipping up an image processing script in Python to convert the dots to binary code. This sounds a lot simpler than whatever would be involved in setting up the apparatus to read bits of volatile magnetic media where you'd have to interact more closely with the media, be more mindful of not accidentally destroying the stored data and rely on much less intuitive physics than looking at a thing through a microscope for the recovery process.

huffman2• 14 years ago

Those are good point. I guess I was more curious about how the data is stored — say someone 100 years from now picks one of these up and wants to read the data. Will the format in which it's stored prevent them from doing so?

maverhick• 14 years ago

Can they rewrite stuff on glass? Or is it a one way write?

3rd3• 14 years ago

I can imagine that one could melt the surface a bit and then rewrite it.

sbierwagen• 14 years ago

Old idea. Here's a 2009 Coding Horror post about doing the same thing with paper: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/07/the-paper-data-stor...

dimitris99• 14 years ago

sounds fantastic. I will go buy an optical microscope and the software.

Honestly, after all this research is the best Hitachi could come up with? How about a marble stone with some dots on it? They seem to last a long time too.

yogrish• 14 years ago

what if glass breaks ??

bartl• 14 years ago

It may last up to 3 billion years... unless the glass gets scratched. Oopsie.

BitMastro• 14 years ago

I still remember the promises of the holographic versatile disc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc backed by Hitachi as well, and apparently the company went bankrupt in 2010 :(

darkstalker• 14 years ago

They're just punch cards made on glass.

geon• 14 years ago

CD:s are just punch cards made on aluminium.

brazzy3• 14 years ago

And that's the difference. Glass is much, much more durable than both paper and aliminium.

keenerd• 14 years ago

So it is 21st century digital microfiche? Clever. I do know museums will probably line up for this stuff - standard CD-ROMs start to rot after 10 years and DVDs are better but relatively untested.

I wonder how much FEC is built into them. (In other words, what is the biggest scratch you could put into it without losing data.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microfiche

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_error_correction

bnegreve• 14 years ago

So in a million year, people will still have "a computer with the right software" ?

This is useless until they find an "intuitive" way to store the process to decode the binary data into something readable.

mistercow2• 14 years ago

>Currently the size of the data that can be stored isn't known

Yes it is: http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/computers/glass-slivers-t...

The density is 40MB/in².

yxhuvud• 14 years ago

Makes me think of the write-only storage medium used in space ship black boxes in the Gap series by Steven Donaldsson.

astine• 14 years ago

These kinds of technologies have been tried before (and largely abandoned.) The real problem in long term data storage is figuring out how to interpret decades old binary formats for which the software no longer exists. It doesn't matter if you have a thousand perfect PDFs if Adobe has been out of business for a hundred years.

The other issue with long term data storage is that the whole advantage of using digital technologies in the first place is that data is easy to copy. Using specialty technologies like this totally nullifies that advantage.

If your goal is simply long-term data storage/archival, you'd do better to just use durable and popular media of the day, to maintain an index of your collection, and to upgrade/migrate your media and file formats regularly to keep up with the times. If you're going for really long term storage, such that might go multiple human lifespans without being needed or needing maintenance, you might as well just skip the digital to begin with.

shabble• 14 years ago

You could potentially store them inside/along with a virtual machine image which would be capable of rendering them, and then document the crap out of the VM (which would require as few, and as simple, external interfaces as possible), such that it could be easily re-created/ported to future OSes.

I think quite a few places where continuity over decade timescales (especially in the embedded world) are storing VM images with the exact versions of various parts of the toolchain they use, to ensure compatibility.

And of course, there's plenty of precedent with things like the Hercules IBM mainframe emulator[1], as well as things like VMWare, Bochs, QEMU, etc.

I think I've come across old DOS games being re-released wrapped with dosbox or something similar as a compat layer for modern OSes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_%28emulator%29

Hitachi presents a storage medium that should last forever

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