

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

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aw3c2
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...](http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hrS0Kp5RLa8lIvZ4nTCkZbttjhuw?docId=CNG.4aeae4fa36f6e7fc476fd24e5e9b2688.191)

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Kudos
That link won't work without a Google referrer.

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mistercow
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...](http://www.smh.com.au/digital-
life/computers/glass-slivers-that-store-data-forever-unveiled-by-
hitachi-20120925-26i3f.html)

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simonh
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all to remedy the actual reasons these older media are being superseded.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.

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cturner
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.

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pmjordan
_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.

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brazzy
The oldest stuff NASA has out there is what, 35 years old? Hardly a "very long
life". And it's floating in vacuum, which is pretty much the ideal storage
environment. Making stuff last in space is _much easier_ than on Earth (and
much easier than getting it there, of course).

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dwiel
It seems that the high levels of radiation could make it much less than the
ideal storage environment

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andrewflnr
Plus temperature extremes.

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astine
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.

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shabble
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>

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bad_alloc
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/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Future_of_the_Earth.2C_the_Solar_System_and_the_Universe)
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_decay>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe>

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StavrosK
It's for small values of "forever".

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fratido
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>

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brazzy
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.

~~~
fratido
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.

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sbierwagen
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...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/07/the-paper-data-storage-
option.html)

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BitMastro
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 :(

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keenerd
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>

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bnegreve
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.

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twelvechairs
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...

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stephengillie
Like pyrex?

Edit: Like borosilicate glass?

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

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mistercow
>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...](http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/computers/glass-slivers-that-
store-data-forever-unveiled-by-hitachi-20120925-26i3f.html)

The density is 40MB/in².

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huffman
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.

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rsaarelm
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.

~~~
huffman
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?

~~~
rsaarelm
A very simple format would be regular fixed dot patterns (⣿) corresponding to
bytes, spaced a apart a bit. Then it's the user's responsibility to be
sensible and encode stuff without too clever compression. This wouldn't guard
against trying to read the image sideways or upside down though.

If you get a disc with ASCII text and can read the bits a 100 years from now,
even if ASCII coding is lost to history, as long as you can figure out the
thing is supposed to contain writing that uses 8 bits per letter, and still
know English, a trivial pattern analysis gets you the code table you can use
to read the text.

The plaintext can then be used to describe the formats for whatever other data
the disk may contain.

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

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darkstalker
They're just punch cards made on glass.

~~~
geon
CD:s are just punch cards made on aluminium.

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

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justincormack
In a fire there is little difference.

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dimitris99
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.

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

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

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3rd3
I can imagine that one could melt the surface a bit and then rewrite it.

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grigy
I wonder what would be the density of such storage

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yogrish
what if glass breaks ??

