by theAdminWave
5 subcomments
- LOL I've done holographic data storage in borosilicate glass using fs laser pulses for my masters thesis in physics more than a decade ago and guess what, this is not going anywhere. The claims are all wildly exaggerated also. Lots of buzzwords micro nano plasma explosions but the truth is hidden in the details: needs specialist hardware... Yeah like a 50.000 USD femto second laser setup that needs an entire basement and you wearing ski googles at all times to not get blind type of specialist hardware. Guess we're all gonna put that in our living rooms, won't we?
And the storage density is limited by all kinds of effects that I won't even get into it but you can roughly assume its at best half or even less of that and then it starts becoming much less impressive.
Yes you can microwave a slab of glass or go diving with it and it will still be intact but unless we make machines that read and store data much more easily, like significantly absurdly more easily, this is the biggest pipe dream of them all.
Cool tech though :)
- Current write speed (No read speed given):
Blu-ray (1×) ~36 Mbit/s
MS-Glass (single beam) ~25.6 Mbit/s
MS-Glass (multi-beam) ~65.9 Mbit/s
That's ~7-18 days per 120mm x 120mm medium (4.8TB).
Glass prices stable for now. Also, the authors make no statement about horizontal vs. vertical storage.
by Alifatisk
2 subcomments
- I swear I’ve read similar headline multiple times for the past decade. This can’t be new.
I thought I was experiencing some Mandela affect, had to Bing it. This is from 2022 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/project-silic...
- >4.84TB in a single slab of glass, (the slabs are 12 cm x 12 cm and 0.2 cm thick).
So a rough estimate, at the size of UMD, used in Playstation Portable, slightly smaller than the size of Mini Disc, it could store 1TB.
I assume we could do double layer in the future for 2TB.
For comparison that is roughly 1000x times the capacity of UMD. I would love to have this. Burn a few of these as backup and call it a day.
- I have read a variation of this headline once every 2 years since the early 2000s, yet never seen it turn into something real (that a consumer / enterprise can buy).
- Paper [Laser writing in glass for dense, fast and efficient archival data storage](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-10042-w)
- Yeah but then 1000 years from now nobody will have the right USB cable to read it.
I think we should stick to proven solutions for millennia-robust information storage and paint it on walls inside pyramids.
- I swear this happens at least once a year.
Wheres my futuristic storage guys?
- Data loses its usefulness and relevance with time. Unless it's updatable, just archiving is not going to be useful. Just like how we don't find some 2000 years old writings any useful now, except for museum storage.
- It's good to know people are finally working on long-term nonvolatile storage. To date, just about every storage syatem we've developed has had a storter lifespan than the previous one, NAND versus magnetic storage for instance.
The idea isn't new of course, just think back to Dave removing HAL's glass/crystal memory modules in 2001. Clarke/Kubrick were thinking along those lines in the 1960s.
by idiotsecant
2 subcomments
- Glass is one of the more stable things we can make. This seems pretty good! I don't have an application that requires ten thousand years of storage but I'm sure someone out there does!
- DNA?
Something I've always wondered.. could things like tree rings, or birdsong and other mating rituals (the species can survive only by replicating the sequences) be used for "data storage" by some hypothetical intelligences that think on scales of thousands of years?
- Any idea why they are reporting the estimated lifespan at 290°C? Testing seems to have been done at 440°C and above.
- The big question, is it patented to the point were no one can buy the burners and media ?
Will it run on Linux ?
by alfiedotwtf
0 subcomment
- I don’t trust my Kodak Gold CDs that advertised 40 years, let alone humans to not self annihilate within the next 400 years.
In fact, look what we’re doing right now with all our past’s relics!
- How much cheaper is it compared to those orbs you can get from the Long Now Foundation?
- also at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47065175
- 10k years ... Or until it's dropped...
- Clay tablets?
- I like that they call it a “deployable archival system” that kind of sounds like they’ve invented a laser that can read/write this stuff that can last for 10,000 years
by thaumasiotes
0 subcomment
- We've had data storage that lasts for millennia for several thousand years already. The invention of millennia-long storage more or less coincided with the invention of writing.
There isn't really a benefit. Our durably-stored several-thousand-year-old records suffer from various problems:
- They're hard to understand.
- They tend not to be relevant to much.
- Most of them have gotten lost. They're not gone, but it would be extremely expensive to find them.
Interestingly, these are the same problems that occur with stored data of much more recent vintage. But they get worse and worse over time, and the fact that the storage medium itself doesn't degrade does nothing to help. It tends to make those usability problems worse by giving people a false sense of security that the data is still there, until the cost of recovering it becomes too great and for practical purposes it isn't there anymore.
If something matters, it will be stored on ephemeral media and recopied over time onto more ephemeral media.
by pyrex2026
1 subcomments
- is pyrex a public stock
by canterburry
0 subcomment
- Very impressive new format. 10,000 years...wow. That's great.
Now, can someone please help me get some data of this Iomega ZIPdrive disc?
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