The future of long-term data storage is clear and will last 14 billion years

After decades of research and development, humanity finally has a data storage medium that will outlast us. 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 …

[Doctor Syntax]

The realistic lifetime of storage is the life of the last manufactured or surviving retrieval device.

[b0llchit]

So, basically about 8..9 orders of magnitude smaller than the advertised longevity of the storage device. And, if anybody still exists to try, nobody knows it is a storage device by the time we are at 7 orders of magnitude smaller than the advertised longevity of the storage device. And aliens who shine a light through the (severely worn) device would not even know how to decode the content, at any order of magnitude in time and all they see is a miniaturized disco ball.

[layer#8]

Re: disco ball

And aliens who shine a light through the (severely worn) device would not even know how to decode the content, at any order of magnitude in time and all they see is a miniaturized disco ball.

How come you know what "Aliens" in a far distant time will know or be capable of?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: disco ball

Good point. They may not even know how to disco dance..

:)

[MyffyW]

Re: disco ball

I've watched the 1970s Buck Rodgers, trust me in the far future they cannot disco dance.

[flicks her hair in the style of Erin Grey]

[Fr. Ted Crilly]

Re: disco ball

' Prayer Fans '

Thanks Fred....

[Will Godfrey]

Not just that, but someone who...

A can understand what it is.

B has the knowledge to interpret it.

C has access to the necessary and correct power source (whatever that may be).

Bah! Ninjad :(

[Doctor Syntax]

I'm not sure that would be limiting. There are plenty of us here who have outlived several generations of storage device.

[b0llchit]

I fear the consequences of that statement... Either technology cannot withstand the test of time or we are just (very) old (farts)?

[LBJsPNS]

¿Por qué no ambos?

[Anonymous Coward]

We're just more robust than storage devices.

Although I can state with a degree of certainty that I'm not quite as reliable in faithful reproduction.

Actually, reproduction in general :)

[MyffyW]

Though we are a similar age, I spin with more grace than your average disk platter from the 1970's.

I will admit my average seek time has increased with age, and the information recalled is rather more tangential.

Thankfully my reproductive days are behind me.

[Flocke Kroes]

Given a cassette, could you get the data off it today? How about a 5¼" disk? An IDE hard disk? Given time I might be able to do something with a photo of a punched card.

I avoided the problem by moving data while legacy->USB dongle was still easy to source. The time is approaching for DVDs: replacement drives are still available but no longer come as standard. Mdisk is too small without an auto changer and too expensive even if I assume DVD players will still be available when I die.

[cdegroot]

Which is why I'm now the proud owner of an LTO drive.

[layer#8]

Given a cassette, could you get the data off it today? How about a 5¼" disk? An IDE hard disk?

Yes this is possible. Lots of offers for services like that.

Greetings from Berlin, Germany

[Pickle Rick]

Back in The Good Old Days one of the the chaps at our local Atari club was asking how to transfer stuff from cassette to 5.25". I explained a simple and cheap way to do it was to cut the appropriate size disc from a cornflakes packet. Then, feed the tape from the cassette and very carefully cut tiny Vs along one edge of the tape, so that the tape could be laid flat on the cardboard disc in an ever decreasing spiral, being glued in place along the way. We were all pretty surprised when he believed me. Needless to say, I explained the intended joke before sending him on his way.

[Elongated Muskrat]

I think what I would probably do there, is hook up a cassette player (still easily available) to an audio input on a sound card, and then record the waveform off the cassette. From there, it's just a matter of software, since tapes just stored data in an audio waveform. If there's not something available already to convert the modulated wave to binary data, I'm sure it wouldn't actually be that hard to write from scratch, or even get one of those "AI" LLMs to do it for you; it's one of the few jobs it could probably manage without screwing it up to badly. A 5.25" disk might be harder to manage, you might have to build a drive from scavenged parts if you couldn't find a working one, although we're talking about 40-year-old technology here, an IDE hard disk, I'd just plug into the USB adapter I have in a drawer next to me, assuming the platters hadn't seized; if they had, then there are (very expensive) data recovery outfits that could read the data off the platters using a SEM or similar device. The thing is, the information about how these devices store(d) data still exists, and is no doubt readily available, so if the data is important enough, you could always rebuild the devices needed to read them. More difficult is retrieving data that is stored in proprietary or encrypted formats for which the information is not publicly available.

[Flocke Kroes]

Re: someone who can understand what it is.

Two generations appears to be the limit. Somewhere on the internet is a video of some children trying to use an old PC. Most could not find the power switch*. The few that figured that out did not realise the machine could do almost nothing without a boot floppy disk. (To be fair, if I had to saddle a horse to get to the shops I would need to phone a friend.)

* It is on the back to avoid routing high voltages to the front, because an extra always on low power supply would be expensive and because batteries of the time would not last long with a circuit of the time able to start the power supply from a small signal from the front.

[Michael Hoffmann]

Re: someone who can understand what it is.

As a former equestrian, I can tell you that saddling the horse would be the least of your problems, if you wanted to ride to the shops!

[Martin an gof]

Re: someone who can understand what it is.

avoid routing high voltages to the front

Or, as I have seen fairly often not just in ancient PCs but also in HiFi kit and the like, a physical button on the front panel attached to a long, rigid length of (usually) plastic, which presses the actual power switch on the PSU at the rear of the case. Actually, now I come to think of it, pretty certain that's how the power supply on the RiscPC worked too. And whatever happened to a switched power outlet near the computer's power inlet?

(yes, yes, "old fart", I know...)

M.

[Luiz Abdala]

Schlock Mercenary treats this topic...

The folks at the comic found a Moon. It had engraved patterns across the whole surface. Zooming in, showed more patterns all the way up to the atomic scale.

The pattern had a binary logic to it. It was data.

An entire planet was used to store information, and we were the aliens bumping into it.

[EricM]

Not necessarily.

Open Source the spec, including laser properties, wavelengths, encoding/positioning dependencies, etc., and refrain from designing in DRM enshittification: You are good to rebuild devices as needed.

Similar to our current ability to recreate tape devices from the 70s or floppy disk drives from the 80s.

This is just not done that often, as most media from that time is already gone.

[John Robson]

But you're then got to store that spec somewhere....

And what better than this newfangled tech, oh wait a moment.

Papyrus has been demonstrated to have a reasonable shelf life, but language changes over time as well.

Maybe longevity is best achieved by regular updating of the medium (and translation of the original, or at least clarification in an ever expanding appendix to make sure future readers have a chance of understanding the original information.)

[Anonymous Coward]

You'll find that practically every decent museum and large library has had the conversion fight and it's far from easy so the archival question will remain with us for quite some time.

TBH, the only long term storage I have is some &( or so Psion Organiser II datapaks; They're EPROMs, and they're still fine to read from. Provided you still have an Organiser II, of course, QED..

[Anonymous Coward]

&( => 15.

Pardon my French. The eternal issue with living with both QWERTY and [censored] AZERTY..

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

I can feel your pain. I had to use french keyboard once time in my life, and I had to activate the on-screen keyboard since it was remote. Confusing layout.

[Will Godfrey]

Here that's comes out as 79

https://xkcd.com/927/

[Anonymous Coward]

Re ..lifetime of storage is the life of the last manufactured or surviving retrieval device.

Read our tale of woe!

A senior colleague in an R&D department passed away last year. In his lab, we found two boxes of 5 1/4" floppy disks -- not the kind of boxes that used to hold 10 of the disks, but 30-40 -- the ones that had a key so you could protect your data treasure!

Fortunately, he left the keys, and some labels on the disks indicated that there were some documents that could be of historical interest. What we didn't have was a 5 1/4" floppy drive. After asking around, I got one brand new (!), that was in storage, in case we ever needed one of those things again. Now all I needed was to connect it to an existing desktop... none of which have the 34 Pin Ribbon Cable connector. I wasn't able to find an old enough computer to try and connect the drive.

We're still deciding on what to do -- the department won't give us funding to send the disks to a proper recovery company.

We also found some 16mm rolls of film. From visual inspection, it may be possible to recover the contents. The data on the floppy disks may be unreadable.

[AVR]

Re: Re ..lifetime of storage is the life of the last manufactured or surviving retrieval device.

Even with all the equipment to read them, old floppy disks may not actually be readable - my experience a couple of decades back was that time and humidity can have rendered them useless, with no data that can be extracted other than the faded labels on the outside.

[ITMA]

Re: Re ..lifetime of storage is the life of the last manufactured or surviving retrieval device.

Not to mention the issue of "floppy rot".

[that one in the corner]

Re: Re ..lifetime of storage is the life of the last manufactured or surviving retrieval device.

Look around a bit more, there are a fair number of people who do things like floppy recovery on an enthusiast level: if you can't get the cash to use a "proper data recovery service" you can use your (spare!) time instead.

You want to get a flux reader attached to your drive, rather than an "old enough computer" 'cos the computer will (very sensibly) throw a wobbly when it hits a bad patch and fail, whilst the flux reader will just keep on going (reading back the lack of properly organized flux - at that level, it doesn't care enough to throw a wobbly). Then you get to run software on your big, modern bog-standard desktop PC to recover what data is left.

Start by reading up on Greaseweazle.

Oh, and write up what you manage, successful or not, and leave us a link to that blog post :-)

[John Robson]

Re: Re ..lifetime of storage is the life of the last manufactured or surviving retrieval device.

I almost certainly have a couple of machines which would do the job...

[that one in the corner]

Re: Re ..lifetime of storage is the life of the last manufactured or surviving retrieval device.

Your downvote, and those on the chap we've replied to, makes me wonder: are there people here who don't believe that 5 1/4 inch disks ever existed and are annoyed that you're insisting on treating them as real? Youngsters who are still smarting over the way they were taken in by stories of Father Christmas and don't want to hear any more fantastic tales.

[CountCadaver]

Re: Re ..lifetime of storage is the life of the last manufactured or surviving retrieval device.

Just wait till they hear about 8" floppies.....

(More recent all the short lived high capacity floppy permutations and.... the 3" discs(???)

[Mike_R]

Re: Re ..lifetime of storage is the life of the last manufactured or surviving retrieval device.

Re 3" diskettes.

Found some old Minix installation diskettes a couple of days ago. Booted one successfully on a USB-connected floppy 3½" drive.

One of these days I'll dig out the USB floppy 5¼'" USB drive from somewhere in my memorabilia, see what happens there...

It's great being a compulsive hoarder!

[TimMaher]

Re: 8” floppies

Especially those with the pre-punched sector markers.

[ITMA]

Re: 8” floppies

Vector Graphic CP/M machines used 5 1/4" floppies with hard sectors

[John Robson]

Re: Re ..lifetime of storage is the life of the last manufactured or surviving retrieval device.

I have a downvote stalker who just downvotes everything I post.

Doesn't matter what I post, if it's not AC it gets a downvote - if it's AC it usually doesn't.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: Re ..lifetime of storage is the life of the last manufactured or surviving retrieval device.

Yeah, I had one too. I had the same thinking as you. They give up. Stop ACing around (unless you job etc is in danger (Edit: Or plan to travel to US in the near future)).

[JT_3K]

Re: Re ..lifetime of storage is the life of the last manufactured or surviving retrieval device.

Dare I ask where you are? I have a suitable machine and can help, but am unsure on the state of the 5.25'' drive. It'd be nice to see some of the collection come to external use?

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

You mean, when the last device being able to read it will be presented in Technology Connections in, lets say, 25 years? No wait, to soon, more then 30 years.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for making me laugh. I do like his posts, though.

:)

[DS999]

Its "just" documentation

None of the old "unreadable" media is truly unreadable (assuming the media itself hasn't degraded) it is just unreadable because there wasn't enough surviving documentation of how the reading hardware operated. That's why some weird proprietary format used by a minicomputer from a defunct company that sold only a few thousand of them can't be read, but 5.25" PC floppies still can. That hardware is well documented, so if reading the data mattered enough failing everything else you could build your own floppy drive to read it (if the floppy IS still readable at all)

The next step of course is the data format. That has to be documented, including any framing, encryption, error correction and so forth so you can turn a stream of bits into source code or PDF files. Which means there are further steps - if you save a .tar.gz file that tar and gzip documentation has to survive. Same if you save PDF files. Then go another level, documentation about the 'C' language, the 'x86' or 'ARM' ISA, etc. has to survive for a .tar.gz Linux tarball to be useful. If you're talking beyond a few thousand years, you may need some sort of Rosetta stone to understand the English language. And going in the other direction, we're just gonna have to assume the finder already has access to a laser...

All this documentation has to be kept somewhere ELSE, because it doesn't do much good if it is placed on the media you can't read until you can build the reading device, understand the format of the files it contains, and so on down to understanding English or Mandarin or whatever language(s) were used. If you put that on paper, even really long lived not-exactly-paper-but-similar that's going to be your weak link.

"Here's this massive room filled with filing cabinets of documentation you must read and understand before you can use the data in this shoebox filled with 100 PB of glass platters containing all human knowledge as of 2025"

[Fred Daggy]

Re: Its "just" documentation

TL;DR Open Standards are just as important as Open Source.

Open Standards can get lost, ignored, misfiled, etc. But less likely to be lost than really closed standards.

[Francis Boyle]

Re: Its "just" documentation

Or you could just clone Alan Turing. Seriously, given how successful the Bletchley Park people were in recovering information that was deliberately meant not to be recovered, I wouldn't be so pessimistic about the case were the problem is mere carelessness.

[CountCadaver]

Re: Its "just" documentation

Hmmm

I wonder if you could feed a neural net all of his papers related to ciphers and decryption, (as well as other code breakers / mathematicians) and task the neural net with decoding the data

Better yet if you had the names of those who designed said minicomputers and could pull any papers / presentations they gave - ask the neural net to scour them for data encoding and add it to its dataset.

If the net wasn't so enshittified (like 10-15 years ago when Google still....worked) then (without all the SEO slop ) then tasking a bot to crawl the web and pull in all information related to xyz computer company/model and then apply said neural net to peruse the data set - that might yield the info required

(But we live in a world of shit..... :/ )

[Anonymous Custard]

Re: Its "just" documentation

I was going to say it was a lot more people than Turing who would have been required, and not just mathematicians as well.

The other (ironic) problem is the official secrets act. A lot of people who had the information were bound by it, and took it seriously enough that the information went with them to their graves.

Even those who could have been tempted to share probably saw what happened to some who did (look up the story of Gordon Welchman) and were "dissuaded" from doing so.

All in all, the numbers of "presentations / papers" would be far less than it could have otherwise been.

It may be better to use the "second hand" (in most cases) information from the fine folk who still run Bletchley Park and similar establishments as historical sites of interest (I won't call it a museum).

Been there a couple of times, and the depth that some of the volunteers know both the history and indeed how the kit actually worked (well enough to make working recreations) is breathtaking.

But if nothing else, a pint raised both to those who did it all when the country needed them to, and those who keep the memory and technology alive for we who came later.

[Anonymous Coward]

Betamax

Anyone got a Betamax recorder I can view some tapes on - they're less than 50 years old?

Come to that, how many people can still read a 3.5" floppy? Even the kit to read a data CD or DVD isn't to hand for many people nowadays - and forget about the BBC Domesday discs.

OK, that's only considering domestic use - but those media were intended for domestic use. If I think about something for commercial storage, then how about 8" floppies or DAT tapes...

[Anonymous Custard]

Re: Betamax

Some of the (very much) older kit in various 8" European semiconductor fabs for making today's less cutting edge chips still have floppy drives in them for data transfer.

I know as I work with people who support them hands-on every day, and as you can understand getting hold of the discs is becoming more and more of a challenge.

Fortunately as a well known hoarder, I have a large plastic box in the bottom of one of my cupboards in the office that's full of recovered discs (from when other colleagues have left, retired or just had a clear-out) that is now a guarded source of them to help keep things going.

Amazing sometimes how many brownie points (and beers) can be earned for supplying a few floppies from the stash...

[jake]

So it's not ready for prime-time as yet ...

... but they are announcing now, in order to get in on some of those lovely, lovely AI dollars, before the bubble bursts?

[Empire of the Pussycat]

There are days when I think punched cards will outlast us.

<grumpy>

[cyberdemon]

As soon as we can encode an LLM onto this

Then we can safely launch the nukes, knowing that humanity's legacy will be preserved!

/s - but probably what they are thinking

[Neil Barnes]

barring some mishap

Pillock! It's as old as the universe, and _you_ just dropped it!

Meh. Notched quanta are the only way to go.

[Bebu sa Ware]

"will last 14 billion years"

Just don't store it near a vat of hydrofluoric (HF) acid.

I was curious about the birefringence in fused silica but it seems that it arises from the thermal stress of the encoding laser pulse.

Given most of us won't want to resume possession of our CD/DVD collection at end of the Universe† a less ambitious product made from recycled glass, requiring a sub starwars laser and lasting around 100 years might be a more profitable product.

† Imagine the recording angel handing you your copy of a Spice Girls' CD or a Bay City Rollers' vinyl - très embarrasant even, or especially, after 14byr.

[blu3b3rry]

A true test of any hardware....

is simply to give it to a software developer, preferably a freshly recruited graduate. If it lasts for more than five minutes, it's definitely robust.

[trevorde]

Fast forward 1 billion years ...

... and an octopus is decorating it's cave with a bright, shiny cube of silica

[eldakka]

"The technology can store up to 360 TB of data on a 5-inch glass platter."

That's nearly big enough to store my porn collection!

[segfault188]

porn collection

That's nearly big enough to store my porn collection!

You think that 5 inches is almost sufficient?

[JLV]

Re: porn collection

Now stop that jivin' it's not the size that matters, it's what's stored on it.

> She gets all excited

> When she begs for my small five inch

> Record of my favorite porn

[ExampleOne]

Re: porn collection

That’s what she said!

[ITMA]

Re: porn collection

"You think that 5 inches is almost sufficient?"

Maybe... If it is 5 inches.... From the ground....

[cschneid]

follow-up tasks

We now merely need to document every extant file format, publish a reference implementation (not on this medium), instructions on how to construct a computer and how to build a read/write device for the medium starting with only hydrogen and helium.

[Scotech]

Re: follow-up tasks

And then we can store a recipe for apple pie on it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Desk decoration...............

So......we can't read 92K CP/M floppies....no hardware......no software....and that's back to 1985!!!

How long will the SPhotonix hardware and software be available......twenty years maybe!

Yup.....and after that the silica blob will be a pretty desk decoration!

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: Desk decoration...............

Actually we could read 92K CP/M floppies. It is just that nobody either wants to or invest in the hardware to do so. Constructing the reader, with today's reading heads available, should be possible. Those tracks are wide enough you can actually manually place the head "on track" and read the analogue data, the rest is decoding. Just be careful no to destroy the data layer.

For the silica block... Shine a laser on it... "Oh pretty!", and in the right angle "Oh, nasty!"

[layer#8]

Re: Desk decoration...............

A simple search found several sources offering services about that.

Greetings from Berlin, Germany

[layer#8]

Re: 92K CP/M disc not only desk decoration...............

A simple search for such services brought several offers to do the job.

Greetings from Berlin, Germany

[An_Old_Dog]

Obvious Question

When I was in high school, I had an idea like this. Write bits by 3 lasers shooting into *some* sort of medium, which only changed when the power was high enough -- when all 3 lasers converged on a point.

The problem I couldn't solve was, "how do I read a bit without the intervening bits on the axis of each laser interfering with the signal?"

The same question applies here. How do they read the strength of the light reflected from the selected bit without the absorption and diffusion of that reflected light by intervening bits from causing inaccurate results?

They may have solved this problem, but TFA did not tell us what that solution was.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: Obvious Question

I suppose the problem has been solved long ago since DVD/Blu Ray went double or more layer. Current level is calculating molecular structures from the refraction (for quite a while, using X-ray), so reading that thing should be an easy task on the theory. The construction and encoding are the problem. Can we still produce such precise equipment in a few hundred years? Quite some SiFi says: Nope, we are back at C64 level at best.

[Phil O'Sophical]

Re: Obvious Question

How do they read the strength of the light reflected from the selected bit without the absorption and diffusion of that reflected light by intervening bits from causing inaccurate results?

AFAIK it's done by playing with focus, each beam enters the medium as a diffuse, spread, beam which passes around the other bits. They are all focussed to converge only on the desired bit.

[that one in the corner]

Re: Obvious Question

Perhaps by rotating the medium so that the lasers are no longer shining along the same axes as the recorded bits?

No idea if that is actually possible, except that my gut feeling is that, if it is, the answer will be either incredibly simple (e.g. it will work with the bits in a simple cubic arrangement) or incredibly beautiful (e.g. you need the bits arranged in a three-dimensional spiral thingie, probably something akin to rotating spherical shells involving the Fibonacci or a related series). 'Cos that's just maths works out.

Oh, and once we've got the answer, we'll realise that Nature got there first.

[SCP]

Re: Obvious Question

But it did give the professor's name and academic institution (and spin-off company). Quite often there are lots of publications freely available that would cover an academics earlier work in this field - they also tend to include them on their university CV page.

There was also an earlier comment about this stuff not being ready for "prime time" (it being TRL5 looking to go to TRL6). I find this type of article ineresting and think it is a fair trade off, not having full details, as that would require a deep dive which would require considerably more time and study for an el-Reg hack [intended as a fond appellation of our hardworking journalists] and difficult to justify at el-Reg's price point. There are certainly clear pointers to follow up on if the topic is of personal interest and one is moved to look into it in more - so a good article for me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Over 30 years ago

A gut on my course wrote quite a bit on this as a possibly way to store data - using lasers to adjust crystal lattices.

Weirdly the driver was how to get artificial memory to the capacity humans seem to have

[druck]

It was all sounding so promising...

...until we find out Microsoft is involved.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

"we are developing the enablement technology"

Means: We patented it to block and suck out as much money as we can and block others from doing similar. I call back in 25 years.

For comparison: There is a reason why 3D printing suddenly exploded a few years back: Blocking patents ran out. The same reason why resin-3D printing exploded a bit later: That was patented later.

[Jamie Jones]

"I gave it 120%"

Like those 3D license plates called "4D", if you're going to misuse physical dimensions, why stop there?

I'll wait for the 6D version to come about, thank-you very much. But then, I'll be waiting for the 7D version. etc.etc.

I am 120% not being too serious, by the way.

[bernmeister]

Re: "I gave it 120%"

The statement "allowing data to be encoded in five dimensional space" has me puzzled. I dont beleive it exists.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: "I gave it 120%"

Descent (the DOS game) was the only game I know with actual 4D. The engine allowed several rooms to be in the same coordinates - although for the engine they were just connected cubes, not aware of "4D"...

[ecofeco]

5,000 years from now

"What is this artifact? We think it's some kind of religious jewelry talisman the ancients used. It appears to serve no other purpose. As for the conspiracies that it holds some kind of other significance, or even secret codes, that's just nonsense."

[FirstTangoInParis]

Re: 5,000 years from now

It just contains a large number of email threads recording office flame wars of the 21st century. The readers will look at it and recognise their own flame wars, and despair.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: 5,000 years from now

Lets melt it, I need new glasses...

[Anonymous Coward]

Indestructible media

Etch the data onto Big Macs.

[Anonymous Custard]

Re: Indestructible media

Or dried cornflakes around the edge of a cereal bowl.

[that one in the corner]

394 trillion zettabytes: yawn.

Piffling.

The linked-to article gives no useful source for that number and if you do try to search for its references all you end up with marketing guff for and about the usual bit barns and LLM codswalllop. Which includes all the wastage of everyone duplicating webscrapings because businesses "need to guard *their* copy, it is so super-duper special compared to the feeble scraping *those* people did".

Totally ignoring the REAL sources of data that needs to be archived: Big Science.

Places like the LHC already have data storage problems, tending to hang onto only pre-processed data; which is fine IFF we can trust that the data reduction didn't lose anything important that we didn't even know to look for. The LHC is actually in a nice situation: they know precisely when to switch on the recorders[1] and they know what sorts of events they hope to see, so can put some boundaries on the filters, both of which reduce the amount of data needing storage for more than a few minutes or hours.

But Astronomy really, really needs to be able to record and store raw observations, noise and all, from as much continuous all-sky observing as is possible to do. In as many bands as possible. And be able to cross-reference it all, over as long a time-span as we can possibly manage. From the professionals - the data from the Square Kilometre Array, for one has pretty big storage needs! - but also amateurs who are running instruments scattered far and wide (synthetic aperture long base lines FTW - iff we can get accurate timestamps and raw observation storage; timestamps are becoming doable...). And before you pooh-pooh the usefulness of this, as some do, may I remind you of the increasing need to keep an eye on the big fusion reactor in our neighbourhood and our hopes to predict when it might get a dicky tummy.

What we are unfortunately missing still is long-term storage with a decently fast write speed.

Business data really does not need to be stored on any great timescales. But as they have the money, best just to humour them

[1] although they'll miss the resublimating thiotimoline events that occur just before they start the collider running

And they only need to switch

[BartyFartsLast]

Supremely arrogant

It might last 14 billion years but will anyone give a toss what it says?

[hammarbtyp]

Re: Supremely arrogant

The sentient cockroaches might be interested on how we destroyed ourselves, so allowing them to take our evolutionary niche...

[Pickle Rick]

I was dubious...

...until I saw they're clearly fans of HoMM3. Now I declare SPhotoix can do no wrong!

All hail Vokial!

(I've gotta get out more...)

[Tonystorcke]

12 Billion years and beyond.

This is here just in time for the Human Time System. https://storcke64.github.io/HUMAN-TIME-SYSTEM/

[Ken G]

If they don't wear out, how can we sell more?

This may be a solution that's too good for it's market.

[breakfast]

Re: If they don't wear out, how can we sell more?

From what I can tell they constraint here (apart from "only we can give back your data") is that it's write-once, so as long as there is new data there will be a need for it. Heck of a way to create a good physical media archive though.

[Anonymous Coward]

A scaled down version of this (say 100tb with a lifespan of ~100 years) would be an ideal replacement for a large amount of what is currently stored on my nas boxes.

mainly media (music / videos / photos), the content isn't going to change (added to almost certainly) so effectively treat it like a truly massive CD-R.

My main concerns would be...

1. the longevity of hardware to read the data especially once there is a little wear on the moving parts or age on the lasers and output is starting to drop.

2. concurrent usage, while a couple of seconds delay in starting to receive data would be acceptable it would become a pain very quickly if multiple users accessing different files caused delays for each other.

I suppose the 2nd one of those could be simply cured by adding an ssd as a cache to the front end of the drive so that when a user starts reading a file it dumps the complete file (or at least a large chunk) to ssd and then delivers it from there. the same ssd could also store a table of contents for the drive (as I would imagine reading the entire platter to work out what is there could be time consuming)

[that one in the corner]

> I suppose the 2nd one of those could be simply cured by adding an ssd as a cache to the front end of the drive...

There is a long history of handling multiple layers of storage, with increasing volume and increasing access time at each layer (from CPU register to robot tape library), so we just need to drop this into the appropriate level in the hierarchy and keep on as usual.

[CountCadaver]

If it wasn't for AI jacking the price of RAM into orbit, then the solution would be a say 64gb/128gb RAM cache, Big enough to hold the data multiple users (say up to 5) users would need to be able to stream without delay (??)

[Snowy]

13.8 billion years

No, just no!

[frankyunderwood123]

Dispilio tablet and others...

It's all very well having a storage system like this that can last until the heat death of the universe, but how could the data be accessed without the hardware to read it?

Will this hardware also last that long?

If a trove of 5D memory crystals full of data is discovered 5000 years in the future, will it be discovered with the necessary hardware to access the data?

That's before any translation of data is even considered.

The Dispilio tablet is around 7500 years old and is clearly some form of writing.

To date, it hasn't been deciphered, but at least it's accessible.

A true data store of extreme longevity should not require anything other than the artefact itself in order to access the contents, even if they cannot be deciphered.

This makes the 5D memory crystal storage longevity almost a moot point - a neat marketing trick.

Is it still an incredibly cool and viable tech? Absolutely.

Is the fact it could last until the end of the universe a useful feature? Absolutely not.

[BlipBertMon]

low yield prompt HA nuke event

this thread so sad and off..

you might just need this .. tomorrow.

pitiful few single-digit-volt electrons which are todays FLASH and SSD bits; Mega A.I. datacenters with thin tin roofs..

One high altitude low-yield (~100kT ) nuclear burst and all your financial and all other data and everyone else's in a pretty big mesoscale spot on the hemisphere - gone.

That might just take out a few regional grid EHV transformers too, which take years to order and rebuild - leaving everyone without fuels, food, first-responder and repair/dispatch telecomms and PLC systems which control most every natGas and fuels pumping station and the electric grid down to the last substation.

Incremental advances from magtape to CDs and from CDs to 'beyond' won't fix that, but they're foundational for preserving truly incomprehensibly massive libraries of electronic-only records easily obliterated by otherwise 'harmless' nukes and particularly strong Aurorae / solar storms.

Forget about billions and bzillions of years into the future think what would happen if your and everybody else's data goes away - today.

[Anonymous Custard]

Warranty

So it will last 14 billion years, but after that warranty period expires you can guarantee it will fracture into tiny pieces the next day or as soon as someone shines a laser anywhere near it...

[johnrobyclayton]

The important question

Can I get one for an upgraded Cherry3000

[JoeCool]

My Windows desktop login is already using this

"... data that can wait ten seconds or more before delivery."

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: My Windows desktop login is already using this

Yes, and a similar quote (or myth) that "100 ms minimum response time" is deemed acceptable in a desktop environment (for Windows 11).

[Fluffy Cactus]

14 billion years ?

Who needs a 14 billion year storage device, when the sun is (according to Scientific American) is going to get all poofy and swallow earth in about 7.6 billion years from now?

That kind of sales talk isn't worth about half the puffery.

Someone before me mentioned that all storage is worthless much earlier, like as soon as the company making the retrieval device goes broke.

Just try to find a 5 1/4, 3.5 inch disk drive today, and CD and DVD drives are becoming a rarity.

The shortsightedness of the tech/ciomputer age seems to guarantee the end of historic knowledge altogether. Software and tech people do not care about history,

they only are happy to cast all history aside. All the better to never learn from history.

The destructive nature of the tech/software/computer age once again becomes apparent.

The Egyptian hieroglyphs, the cuneiform script, etc have shown way more staying power.

Overall, computer science as a carrier of human knowledge has a miserable track recond.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: 14 billion years ?

> Software and tech people do not care about history, they only are happy to cast all history aside.

Actually Software and Tech people are those who care way more. Management, beancounters, politician and scammers cast history aside. Take current head of Windows department, self-indugled narcist of the worst type, not a tech. Or the "We are World Police" country, where mostly those, who were outside of the bubble at least once, see the issues inside.