Nanotech Memory Could Hold Data For 1 Billion Years 239
Hugh Pickens writes "Digital storage devices have become ubiquitous in our lives but the move to digital storage has raised concerns about the lifetime of the storage media. Now Alex Zettl and his group at the University of California, Berkeley report that they have developed an experimental memory device consisting of a crystalline iron nanoparticle enclosed in a multiwalled carbon nanotube that could have a storage capacity as high as 1 terabyte per square inch and temperature-stability in excess of one billion years. The nanoparticle can be moved through the nanotube by applying a low voltage, writing the device to a binary state represented by the position of the nanoparticle. The state of the device can then be subsequently read by a simple resistance measurement while reversing the nanoparticle's motion allows a memory 'bit' to be rewritten. This creates a programmable memory system that, like a silicon chip, can record digital information and play it back using conventional computer hardware storing data at a high density with a very long lifetime. Details of the process are available at the American Chemical Society for $30."
If you don't misplace it.. (Score:3, Insightful)
If you don't misplace it..
Main problem (Score:5, Insightful)
The main problem isn't the length of time that data can be stored. Hard drives and tape drives still carry data from the 1970s, but no one can use them. Why? Because of format changes. We recently transitioned to Blu-Ray, and there are countless codecs for video at this point in time. I don't think the problem is with the length of time for storage, as useful as that is, but rather with the format in which we store them.
An excellent anecdote was mentioned on slashdot recently: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/13/005224 [slashdot.org]
Seriously? (Score:4, Insightful)
In 1 billion years... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sure it can (Score:3, Insightful)
Only if it is stored properly. There are plenty of other inscriptions on other stone tablets that are lost to us due to erosion.
Pay-per-view science (Score:3, Insightful)
"Details of the process are available at the American Chemical Society for $30."
Does anyone else find the trend of pay-per-view science disturbing?
All too often, if you search the internet for a topic with ongoing research, you may likely find links to papers with restricted access and not generally accessible.
Any you should assume that several patents are pending based on this ongoing research, even if the idea is a seemingly obvious application of the research.
In software, it is worse. Papers are rarely written, as there are rarely any new ideas. Most all software companies reinvent the same wheels, then attempt to patent cosmetic qualities of the wheeels. Then other companies apply effort to avoid use of such cosmetic patents. and create their own similar cosmetic features (and patents).
Re:Seriously? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wonderful, lucky you. And for everyone that *doesn't* have a subscription, the article is about as much benefit as a game of Punch the Monkey.
I'm with the GP, if it's a paid article, it has no place being linked / discussed on a "free" website.
Re:A billion years? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Main problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Unsolicited advice: If you aren't going to do the work, don't second guess the tech doing the work. Likely you are right. However, say something does go wrong with the drive... now you are the one who takes the blame. Best to go "uh huh... yea... sounds good" and leave it like that.
Re:Main problem (Score:4, Insightful)
The thing is, those drives were never abused, never hurt in any way, they just simply died because they were about 5 years old. Clicking noises. Crashy computer. Bad sectors. Death.
What I'm trying to say is that yes, storage itself should work almost indefinitely on a hard drive, but if wear&tear occurs on the bearings or the arm the drive WILL kill itself and most commercial hard drives simply aren't made to last more than about five years of regular use.
Re:Nano this, carbon nano that... (Score:4, Insightful)
It reminds me of the word "ubiquitous". Prior to 1997 or so no one had ever heard of this word, much less used it in a computer/business setting. Now I see even my boss, someone who does not come from an IT background, using it.
No offense, but is English not your first language? Because that word has been in use for nearly 200 years, and therefore was not originally IT-specific.
Re:Meh, Good start... (Score:3, Insightful)
Lots of work? Normal weathering will destroy stone carvings, and many ancient carvings are either lost completely or so faded as to be unreadable simply because they were left out in the weather for a few thousand years. The well-preserved ones are the ones that were kept in big vaults like the pyramids and protected from the weather. Also, lots and lots of stone carvings have been deliberately destroyed throughout history for various reasons, including times when invading armies tried to destroy the relics of cultures they were attempting to subdue.
Re:Ah, the psychics are here again (Score:4, Insightful)
What kind of skill is required to see a billion years into the future?
Umm... how about the skill of science?
Okay, to be fair, the summary exaggerates the claim from the scientific paper quite a bit. The summary implies that they are claiming to have built a device that will last for a billion years. Not so. They are claiming that the individual bits should be stable to random thermal flipping over that timescale. Whether or not a device can be built around those bits that also last a billion years is another question. In the words of the authors:
Again, they are not claiming that they have built a device that will last a billion years. But they are saying that they have at least achieved the first step for archival storage. If you want a device that will last for, say, a thousand years, then having bits that persist over at least that long is required. Of course, there are gotchas:
-A real device may have other weak points that degrade first.
-The analysis only considers some dangers of long-term storage. E.g. electric or magnetic fields could cause the bits to flip. Elevated temperatures would reduce the stability time.
-Many memory devices would in principle be stable over very long timescales if analyzed similarly. E.g. for a normal hard drive, at room temperature without any electric or magnetic fields, the actual magnetic domain orientation is also stable over very long times.
Point being, the authors of the paper are correct in what they wrote (it's not hard to calculate the kinds of things they were considering, even over timescales of billions of years), but as they point out that's not the whole story for a real device.
Re:A billion years? (Score:5, Insightful)
The papyrus medium developed by the Egyptians are still readable today
Only if they were stored under conditions conducive to them not rotting away which was the fate of most papyrus.
compared to DVD-RWs that can hold a few GBs of data, but only has a shelf life of a few years.
Stop buying cheap DVD-RWs and you don't have that problem.
Re:Seriously? (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously? We're just abandoning any pretense that these are news summaries now and just outright turning them into ads for products? We're now outright trying to sell things? Weak. Very weak indeed.
Yeah and when the summary notes that a NYT link requires registration, they're trying to get you to register at NYT. Or was that warn you? I guess you could view it either way...
There are two links to free articles with the usual amount of information and details that we get in any tech-related article on Slashdot. People always complain about this, and wonder where they can get more detailed information. Well, here they tell you where you can get it, but it happens to cost $30 to get the technical information if you aren't already subscribed to the journal.
If they had just left it at the linked articles, would that have made you happier? Is it mentioning the extra information that costs money, or the fact that it costs money (which is certainly outside of /.s and presumably the submitters control)? What is gained by not mentioning this? Maybe you or someone else is at a college with an engineering/science library that carries the Nano Letters journal and can get it for free, if only they knew to look for it.
If you're going to complain about commercialization, why not complain about the fact that this is an article about what will certainly be a non-free commercial technology that you have to pay money for, and if anything the article is vastly more oriented towards making you excited about and anticipate purchasing the technology in question? But that's "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters".
May... Meet Will. (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, you could play it like that. But will you be able to match the right speed? How about the sound volume? And like you said - scratching problem.
We MAY not be able to read those messages.
Most people WILL not be able to read them pretty soon due to obscurity.
As you've implied - many kids today don't know they can play a record without electricity.
Heck, a dedicated tinkerer could relatively easily make a magnetic tape player from scratch.
Not so likely with CDs. Nearly impossible with DVDs.
The point of the post was that the recording mediums often become unreadable through becoming obsolete BUT that the data recorded may well be readable for a much longer time.
Attaching instructions how to read it to the device (as they did with Voyager disks) that should be readable in the distant future is a matter of adding 2 and 2.
Re:May... Meet Will. (Score:3, Insightful)
We MAY not be able to read those messages.
Most people WILL not be able to read them pretty soon due to obscurity.
Obscurity is not a problem for any sufficiently advanced civilization.
Its not like the records on Voyager were meant for your teen-ager to play on your old dusted off turntable from the attic.
The point made by the GP is that it is easily readable by any society likely to recover Voyager (unless it crash lands on Planet of the Apes).
Yes, they might initially mistake it for a Religious symbol, or random etching by a long gone microbe, or dismiss it all together because its JUST a physical object and the physical was long abandoned in their society.
But in the fullness of time any civilization capable of and interested in investigating wandering engineered objects would be able to read it.
And if they got the speed exactly right wouldn't matter a bit.
Re:Main problem (Score:2, Insightful)