“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.”
Oh good it can fit the next Call of Duty game.
It’s amazing to see all the effort we all put in perfecting technology to long-term store our porn. 360TB? I’d like to order 2 please.
“a 5-inch glass platter.” Found the weak point…
But is it safe from the cats? 😼
glass shattering sounds
“We are a technology licensing company”
This is good news from the point of view of being able to create devices that can read these crystals; as a comment on the linked site says:
The realistic lifetime of storage is the life of the last manufactured or surviving retrieval device.
Tbh my own personal use case is getting buried with all of my data and become some kind of data-“Tollund man” in the year 4000, when they dig up my data cube and study it endlessly.
I expect them to build a reading device to do this; it’s the least I would expect if they want to study the holiday I was on in Bergen, or completely misunderstand the two hotdog pictures I happen to have as some kind of fellatio training device.
“Myes, we do believe family structures were loosely organised around the remote picture beaming devices that used to be called “te levision”
I’m thinking of it the same way, and not having the readers be trade secrets but published specs is good for future digital archeologists.
For example, Dyson uses trade secrets instead of parents, so it would be harder to recreate their tech in the future.
Waiting for the consumer reader and writer of those things, call me then
Totally. This is the data equivalent of a “new battery tech will revolutionise your phone” post.
Crystalline / Holographic storage has been hyped since the 80s… still not production ready.
Pondering my backup orb
What if some civilization in the past already had something like this, and there are ‘plates’ or pieces of rock out there (under sand dunes? written in the sides of those vases from ancient Egypt?)
Could they make portable readers that can at least spot old pottery chunks that are probably FULL of videos?
Given that it’s the engine Egyptians, they’ll be cat videos.
LOL I would NOT be surprised !!
This grinds my gears any time that a product is touted as lasting X time. Did you put it through a typical use case or scenario for that X time? No? Then you cannot definitively say that it will last that long.
Based on their bullshit statement, I can last 7 years pounding someone’s ass relentlessly without pause for any reason. Trust me bro.
Oddly specific fetlife bio
Unsure if joke or not, ha. I don’t even remember what I set in my bio for FL, its been a couple years since I set that account up…
The degradation of materials is pretty well understood. If it’s truly cut from a well known material with zero factors that could effect that degradation, it’s mostly safe to make en educated wish.
“zero factors that could effect that degradation”
So in other words, only a completely unrealistic estimate can be made? After all, our sun is not going to be the same in 5 billion years, so unless the material comes along with a solution to maintain the material’s temperature (as per the manufacturer’s website the longevity is temperature-dependent) then 14 billion years sounds rather unlikely.
You don’t take into account external factors like that. This is like saying “oh your watch battery will last an entire year? What about if I launch it into the sun‽‽”
I mean, people do predict things based on evidence. Galileo didn’t actually go to outer space and verify that the earth was going around the sun.
You can stimulate wear on different types of materials and get a general idea of how long it would last. This isn’t plastic in a dvd.
Beyond that, the sun has about 5 billion years before we might not be able to starlift it back to a “younger” state, so The Earth and Venus may not exist at all if we don’t get our asses in gear for sustainable intragalactic life in the next century or so.
I am failing to connect the two time scales you mention.
The storage device can’t outlast the Sun.
@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.
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
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?
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.
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
We desperately need a non-magnetic storage for obvious reasons … But making a new thing is freakish difficult.
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
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
A friendly request - please de-clickbait your headlines and say what the material is (although you do mention it in your summary).
Best prank idea: Put someone’s browsing history on one of those.
Would be cool as a backup medium. Unload a bunch of warez from my main disks, store on this read-only medium taking up very little space, providing a huge collection to my media server.
Ridulan crystal v0.01
Every year or so some company comes along and announces some new storage technology that exponentially increases capacity or lifetime or both. Then nothing more is ever said about it and it never appears.
At one point we said the same thing about solid state drives
