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."
A billion years? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's great. Will the readers and systems able to display such information be around for even a hundred? Will they even accept the same power?
Re:Main problem (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Finally an archival format we can use. (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem with CD-Rs, DVD-Rs, tapes, and so on is that they have extremely short lifetimes (6 to 3 years for most optical media, 10-20 years for most magnetic media).
I call Horseshit.
Yes, some of them die early, but I have CD's from 10 years ago that are fine. I took a stroll down memory lane this weekend and looked at some old CD's I had, so i have direct experience as of yesterday. Some commercial CD's of games (Critical Path circa 1994..wow, what a stinker) I just looked at yesterday are fine. Kirk's Comm disk from 1994....no problem at all.
I also have casette tapes from the 70's and 80's that are fine.
VHS videos from the early 80's, disk drives from early 90's....and with a few exceptions, most are totally servicable.
I would say that most will live longer than your claims, yet maybe 10% to 20% will not, instea
Unfred called it (Score:3, Interesting)
I knew this had the ring of truth about it
http://www.scribd.com/doc/13855395/Weaseljumper-Read-Me-First/ [scribd.com]
Re:Main problem (Score:4, Interesting)
Hard drives and tape drives still carry data from the 1970s
Interesting side note to this. My sister's computer recently wouldn't work. She brought it to a computer tech to be fixed. (I wouldn't fix it for two big reasons. 1) They live too far away and 2) I've fixed it in the past only to have them disable the protections I put in place - firewall, antivirus, etc - because they were "too annoying.") As my sister was telling me of what the tech said he needed to do, I stopped her on one important point. He was insisting on replacing the hard drive because "they only work for 3-5 years so this one's likely to die any day now." I told her that I had hard drives work for 8 or more years and there's no reason (short of abuse) why a hard drive shouldn't last over a decade. Whether the drive's space limits will make it useful past 10 years is another question entirely, but it should still be usable. I advised her that the tech was just trying to sell her stuff that she didn't need. Of course, during my next phone call to her, I won't be surprised to hear how she replaced the hard drive because it was 5 years old and going to die soon.
Is our stuff that important? (Score:3, Interesting)
I guess the question is, is the data of today's living really that important? I mean, sure, you might wish you had every bit of minute info from the builders of the pyramids, but, does it really undermine our life to not have it? Indeed, can the imagination and argument required to envision how the past was actually make the past more relevant to us today?
I almost wonder if, instead of having data that lasts forever, if we should have data that deletes itself when you die.
Re:Sure it can (Score:5, Interesting)
More interesting: now that we know how to make these, we might find these already on our planet (left by a super intelligent species who abandoned our planet a billion years ago :-)
Refund? (Score:2, Interesting)
Do I get a refund if the memory fails before a billion years?
Re:Main problem (Score:2, Interesting)
Ten years ago, hard drives could last ten years, easily. (I've got plenty of drives from the late 90s that still work fine)
As of five years ago, hard drives can't reliably last five years. (I have one working five-year old drive)
As of two years ago, hard drives are not reliable for more than six months. (I've replaced enough now to know: Yeah, it 'could' last five years, but it's statistically unlikely)
Re:Ken. Meet Barbie. (Score:2, Interesting)
> In another 50-100 years we ourselves may not be able to read
> those audio messages we sent out to space on those golden records.
Why not? You should be able to play them back with any sharp metal wire poked through a sheet of paper or plastic. Put the disk on a turntable, poke a wire through a thin piece of plastic or paper, lay the point of the wire in the groove while holding the sheet. When you turn the disk, the needle will vibrate the sheet and you'll hear the sounds.
Of course, you'll probably scratch the shit out of it.
Kids: Don't try it with your Dad's mint condition LPs (the black disks sealed in the plastic sleeves that he only handles while wearing gloves). Ask your grandmother if your aunt's 45s are still in her attic ;-)
As long as we can still figure out that the squiggly grooves are sounds, we should be able to play them fine. Hell, if there's no wire you might be able to get it working with an oak splinter.
Re:Main problem (Score:5, Interesting)
A few years ago I had four hard drives fail within two weeks of each other resulting in near complete data loss. Luckily I went and bought a big HDD right after the first died so I saved something like 30% of the data because I had somewhere to put it ... but anyway
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.
That, to me, sounds like they were killed by an environmental factor, just not one you were aware of. It could be anything, but I'll name a few: Humidity, excessive vibration, excessive read/write cycling, excessive power up/down of motor, poor power supply, excessive heat, static electricity, or a physical abuse by somebody else. Assuming these were your only 4 drives (based on your claim of 'near complete data loss'), it's highly unlikely that all 4 drives would die at the same time due to regular wear-and-tear.
Re:Ah, the psychics are here again (Score:3, Interesting)
Just the single bit isn't stable for a billion years. It's merely theorhetically stable from a single influence for a calculated billion years. That's pure bullshit.
If you're saying that there is always room for us to discover new effects and revise our calculations, then I agree. But if you're saying that we cannot make any kind of predictions, with useful error bars, about events over long timescale, then I have to disagree.
Rocks used to be stable -- until general weathering was observed. And it wasn't observed on the first day.
That's a good example. Apparently you accept the general theories of erosion and weathering, even though we have not measured them over the timescales we think they operate. It wasn't observed on the first day, but we also have not watched a mountain for 100,000 years... and yet we accept explanations and predictions that invoke those timescales. Similarly for plate tectonics, star formation, radioactivity, chemical stability, and so on. The long timescales certainly have effects on our predictions (e.g. error bars, predicting details, etc.), but we can still make statistically-significant predictions.
Tell me, what _does_ affect nano-scale devices? The answer is that no ones been looking for very long.
Okay, the last decades or century of science is nowhere near the billions of years timescale. But we can still make sensible predictions. We know what forces are operative on nano-scales (quantum mechanics is quite well-established). If our theories didn't account for some really-longterm effect, then we would expect to see measurable deviations from our predictions in the composition of the universe, decay rates, chemical stability, or something else. Are you suggesting that an N2 molecule isn't stable over billions of years? Are you saying that there is some as-yet-undiscovered process that causes it to break-down over a timescale of billions of years? If so, where's the evidence? On the other hand, if you accept our theories can make sensible predictions for some nano-objects, why can they not make sensible predictions for other nano-objects?
I promiss you that within a billion years, some effect, some dynamic, some event will break the device.
I am certainly willing to accept that some future scientific discovery will modify our current best theories. But absent such evidence, why should we not trust a spectacularly successful physical model? Just because the timescales are long? (The timescales of plate tectonics, star formation, cosmology, etc. are long, and yet we trust our theories because they work...) Your declaration that "something" will happen, without any particular evidence, isn't scientific and isn't convincing.
Re:Ken. Meet Barbie. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:A billion years? (Score:3, Interesting)
How are you storing these CD's? I have 10 year old disks that read just fine.
Note: I don't write on the back of the disk which helps them last longer.
Re:A billion years? (Score:1, Interesting)
You didn't answer the GP's question...
You claim that there are some CDs and DVDs that are not cheaply manufactured. Well, what brand(s)?
CD/DVD ReReRedundentttt recording (Score:2, Interesting)
Would someone explain to a simpleton why there isn't a multiple redundent opensource backup system for using recordable media?
My understanding of the failure mode of CD's and DVD's is that they go bad a bit or a sector at a time, not all at once everywhere.
Given that, it should be possible to design a multiply redundent data scheme to make recovery possible.
My prof told a story of one of the early vacuum tube computers. A 'bit' was stored in a shoe box sized module that had 7 tubes in it. ANY 5 of the tubes could die and the device would still work. (Everything was drawer mounted Grad students with shopping carts full of vacuum tubes would run through the halls replacing tubes on the fly)
E.g. Reed Solomon codes can make it possible to correct an X bit error, and detect a Y bit error in a block. I don't know if these are the best encoding scheme for redundency.
Record onto two disks, both with RS error detection. If you know which block is bad, you have good odds to recover the corresponding block form the other disk.
Use a format so that losing one sector only loses you one sector of a file, not the entire file/directory/disk. This requires additional redundency for meta data, and it will mean don't use compression or encryption schemes that require the previous block to be read correctly to read the current block.
If someone does this I suggest a tier of standards, based on the desired probability of full recovery, and the probability of a read error on the media.
So for example Level 1 is based on making 2 copies + RS codes + redundant metadata on a single disk.
Level 2 is based on making at least 2 copies, and enough recovery code so that ANY one scratch across the face of the disk can't delete all the data.
Level 3 is based on making two copies of the disk, and labeling appropriately.
Level 4 is based on making 3 copies of the disk, with one labeled for cold storage.
It may be to do this, you will need to modify the media writer to access arbitrary locations on the media -- e.g. if the chunk of the disk that says what the disk is is bad.
So why isn't this done?
Or is it, and I've just not heard of it.