Chinese boffins find way to use diamonds as super-dense and durable storage medium Researchers at China's University of Science and Technology published research this week in which they detail how they achieved record-breaking storage density of 1.85 terabytes per cubic centimeter by encoding information in diamonds. To put it in context, advanced hard disk drives can achieve around one terabyte per cubic …
... what would happen if a miner dug up a Diamond or Zircon that had been cut by some entity millions of years ago? Cut gemstones are some of the few things that humans have created that really could last millions of years, and pass through a geological subduction zone and out again without much damage.
"Diamonds are highly stable by nature"
But easy to chip. We used pairs of diamond dies (industrial diamonds cut as flat-topped pyramids, rather like Tudor gen-sones) for IR spectroscopy of short* lengths of fibre. They needed careful alignment before applying pressure. A colleague had a slight accident which spalled of a substantial proportion off of one of them.
* Short in most people's terms, fairly long in ours.
Like all crystals, diamonds have fracture planes. They are very hard in some ways, but can shear.
"While diamonds are exceptionally hard, they are not immune to damage. One key vulnerability lies in their crystal structure. Diamonds can split along specific planes of weakness, which is why diamond cutters meticulously study the gem's structure to maximize its brilliance while minimizing the risk of fractures."
From: https://www.jamesandsons.com/blog/can-a-diamond-chip-or-break#:~:text=Diamonds%20can%20split%20along%20specific,upon%20encountering%20a%20strong%20impact.
They are also not usable to cut steel or iron as they get hot and you get iron carbonates forming where the diamond reacts with atmospheric oxygen and the iron. See: https://cadem.com/why-diamond-tools-cannot-cut-steel/
Still, very impressive density of information storage achieved
I think it was in the course of organising a replacement for the damaged die that my colleague was on the phone to the states - a rare thing in those days - talking to what he took to be a very small company producing such a specialized piece of laboratory kit. Given that USians aren't renowned for appreciating irony let alone Belfast humour making a joke about supposing he worked for de Beers in his other job wasn't a good idea.
Using the bounding box dimensions for a MicroSD card (15x11x1mm) gives a volume of 0.165 cm3, so with 2TB per card now, that gives 12.1TB/cm3...
..which, quite frankly, is insane. I mean, even being able to shovel 2TB of data onto something the size of a fingernail still blows my mind, but the thought of being able to store 12TB in the space taken up by a sugar cube or a D6, when it really wasn't all *that* long ago being able to store even 1GB on a 3.5" hard drive was every bit as mind blowing at the time, really does make me stop and think about just how far we've come in such a short period of time, and what sort of similar mind blowing technological advances are yet to come over the next few decades.
And since we have all this space the software can be even more bloated and inefficient than every before!
And we can store enough drivel & porn to keep us occupied for millenia.
Bring back core storage, Hollerith cards and punched tape for backup I say.
(I also miss pen plotters, especially when they catapulted a leaky pen across the drawing office. "Incoming!")
"Pen plotters. Mesmerising to watch."
Agree 100%.
When I left the tools and started in the CAD office we had a HP Draftmaster 2. Because the PC sending the data would lock up until the plot was complete I could stand and stare transfixed as it did its thing.
I'm sure there was some logic in the way it'd organise the process but I couldn't figure it out. It'd do a section of text, leave an individual letter patially formed, swan off to a far corner and do some geometry there then get back and finish off the letter and the rest of the text after it. Utterly bonkers. Miss that noisy bastard.
Most of an SD card is packaging and connectors. The actual chip or chips in the SD card, the actual silcon storing the data, are much smaller. And yes the total volume might be comparable, but see how long the data on an SD card lasts while storing it at 200C. See how long the card itself lasts.
[Edit: my bad; the silcon itself having less volume does reinforce your point about density, but I stand by my longevity statement.]
"How many parity bits are you going to need ..."
I think Hamming discussed that in "Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers" back in the early 1960s. My copy went missing about five moves ago in the early 1990s. I don't recall the details very well, but I think the answer might be surprisingly few check bits are needed for error correction even after allowing for the check bits sometimes being wrong.
Someone around here probably knows the answer off the top of their head. Maybe we'll hear from them.
I think straight ASCII text and ALGOL math notation might be good for more than a few decades. Probably Unicode as well. We can, after all, read many 2000 year old and older documents. The problem for the most part isn't the content, but deterioration of the media. Heck, in High School I was forced to spend an unconscionable amount of time reading Ceasar's commentaries on the Gallic War in the original Latin. In retrospect, Spanish would have been more useful.
But you're right, Microsoft er. al. will undoubtedly do their damndest to deprecate anything simple that actually works. They seem to be rather better at that sort of thing than at quality control.
> 1.85 terabytes per cubic centimeter
Diamond weight / size is measured in Carats. With one carat being 200mg (one six-hundredth of a cheeseburger, for anyone who still uses old-fashioned units). Diamond has a density of about 3.5gm / cm³. So we are talking about a rock of 17.5 carats, around $1.5mn
Please don't. It will just give Customs and Border Patrol an excuse to confiscate jewlery on the pretense that it could be used for smuggling intelligence info or kiddie porn. The way they seize cash now. Because of a remote probablity of drug trafficking, despite the absence of probable cause.
So if it's difficult to delete things from GitHub, can you imagine the world of hurt you'll be in if you accidentally wrote you API keys / private keys to a Diamond™ DriveⓇ and it's good for millions of years?
And I cannot think of a more effective encouragement for somebody to steal your data: Palooka breaks into your house, finds a box of diamonds sitting on the desk. Off goes terabytes of data in one fell swoop.
And you've encrypted all your precious secret data gems on your Crystal Carbon™ device using the latest DES tool available. 10 years from now quantum computing is the norm and it takes a fraction of a nanosecond to decipher everything you have.
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