SanDisk WORM SD Card Can Store Data For 100 Years 267
CWmike writes "SanDisk has announced a 1GB Secure Digital card that can store data for 100 years, but can be written on only once. The WORM (write once, read many) card is 'tamper-proof' and data cannot be altered or deleted, SanDisk said in a statement. The card is designed for long-time preservation of crucial data like legal documents, medical files and forensic evidence, SanDisk said. SanDisk determined the media's 100-year data-retention lifespan based on internal tests conducted at normal room temperatures. The company said it is shipping the media in volume to the Japanese police force to archive images as an alternative to film. The company is working with a number of consumer electronics companies, including camera vendors, to support the media."
That's what they said about CD-Rs (Score:5, Insightful)
.. then they started to rot at 3-5 years, in my experience..
Post this again in 100 years, until then, it's just more bullshit marketing.
Re:That's what they said about CD-Rs (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly, I would be curious to know what sort of "room temperature" tests can tell how reliable something is going to be in 100 years.
Re:That's what they said about CD-Rs (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure they mean accelerated aging tests, but I have no idea if they really are applicable for real world scenarios or just good for research. Maybe someone with a bit better scientific background can comment on such.
Re:That's what they said about CD-Rs (Score:5, Informative)
TFA article is wrong. If you look at sandisk's actual press release [sandisk.com] they say the 100 life span is "based on reliability data from internal, accelerated lifespan testing for cards stored at normal room temperature, with humidity and static protection".
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Who knows what "room temperature" will be in 100 years... I mean, did they take global warming into account?
If the average temperature fries electronics any time soon, we'll have bigger problems than data retention.
Btw, room temperature means "comfortable for human beings".
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll quote someone else [slashdot.org]. Room temperature means something very particular:
When I learned basic chemistry "room temperature" specifically meant 20 degrees Celcius. It is a fixed value.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_temperature [wikipedia.org]:
"For scientific calculations, room temperature is usually taken to be 20 or 25 degrees Celsius, (293 or 298 kelvin (K), 68 or 77 degrees Fahrenheit)."
Re:That's what they said about CD-Rs (Score:4, Funny)
bullshit marketing
Seriously? I think it's brilliant marketing. Who wouldn't want to throw a WORM into their card reader?
I'll have 2, thank you.
Re:That's what they said about CD-Rs (Score:5, Funny)
Post this again in 100 years...
Yeah, I'll be here yelling DUPE!
Re:That's what they said about CD-Rs (Score:5, Funny)
.. then they started to rot at 3-5 years, in my experience..
Post this again in 100 years, until then, it's just more bullshit marketing.
yes but this one comes with a money back gauretee if you can't read your data in 100 years.
Of course there won't be any software that can read the format. Even if it were unformatted data, We've gone from ebcdic to ascii to unicode is a very short time.
in 100 years logic will all be spintronic coupled quantum states locates in googles tritium powered headquarters on mars. You'll communicate with it by quantum entanglement of the implants added to your brain when you were an infant. The division between thought and recall will not be perceptible and you won't even be aware that information storage actually exists. the idea of possessing a physcial storage device will confuse people, so no one will actually know what it is.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm rather disappointed with the lack of unicode support for a lot of things, in 2010. (slashdot for example).
I'd Imagine SDRSUFHC (Secure Digital Really Super Ultra Fucking High Capacity) card readers will be bac
Re: (Score:2)
He’s not talking about 10 years. He’s talking about 100!
Are you even aware of what an exponential curve is?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Except historically, it's not been character encoding that's the problem. It's been lifespan of suitable media reading equipment.
I defy you to find a cheap, easy way to read 50 year old media, even if the media itself is in pristine condition. Hell, I'll even make it easier for you and set the limit at 30 year old media. There are one or two companies around that specialise in getting data from old media onto newer media, and they charge an arm and a leg. There's a reason for this.
Re:That's what they said about CD-Rs (Score:5, Informative)
A SD card has a lot more in common with a ROM chip than it does with a 30 year old spinning disk, the way I see it. You call pull data off it using SPI interface, which pretty well every microcontroller made in the last decade has in hardware, and if not, you can bit-bang it half-drunk and blindfolded. All the information is available, I just can't see it being lost to the sands of time if you can bang up a reader for peanuts.
Guys have hooked these up to (home) routers, bitbanging the data off GPIOs that were originally relegated to flickering LEDs, and are able to use them as storage. (under linux)
Here is a pdf on the interface.
http://www.sdcard.org/developers/tech/sdcard/pls/Simplified_Physical_Layer_Spec.pdf
Section 7 is what I'm on about. The speed is reduced in the simple SPI mode, but if the data is important, I suppose that is irrelevant.
Re:That's what they said about CD-Rs (Score:4, Insightful)
Hang on a minute, you sound like you know what you're talking about. WTF are you doing on /. ?
Re:That's what they said about CD-Rs (Score:5, Insightful)
I defy you to find a cheap, easy way to read 50 year old media, even if the media itself is in pristine condition. Hell, I'll even make it easier for you and set the limit at 30 year old media.
Challenge accepted: The vinyl record.
Records made 50 years ago are still readable using my Numark TTX turntables I bought last year, using the Shure M44-7 needle I bought at Christmas. I'd dare say that most records made 80 or 90 years ago - though encoded in mono - are still able to be played back presuming the media itself is intact.
Granted back then there wasn't much in the way of digital information being written onto vinyl, but there is now - it's called timecode (i.e. Serato, Traktor, Torq, etc.). So it's not THAT much of a stretch to essentially record data modulated into sound similar to an old dial-up modem on a record, then playing it back circa 2110 assuming that it doesn't spend a sunny summer day in my car.
What about barcodes printed onto paper, or some digital variant of braille? It's not necessarily the most IDEAL way of storing data for easy retrieval - in both cases the storage density is very low and thus an admittedly low capacity - but it satisfies your requirements of being a storage medium that has survived for 50 years and is still readable by hardware in active production.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Quantum entanglement is a reasonably well-understood phenomenon which isn't a method of communication. Please don't use it as a name for your unrelated hypothetical future technology.
Re:That's what they said about CD-Rs (Score:5, Funny)
remind me never to watch Star Trek with you. Or play Mass Effect. Or anything.
Thanks, Mr. Buzzkillinton.
Re:That's what they said about CD-Rs (Score:4, Informative)
"Quantum entanglement is a reasonably well-understood phenomenon which isn't a method of communication."
Except you're wrong and we've been trying to build single-bit quantum radios for quite some time, now.
And guess what Quantum Computing will involve? Communication. That data isn't just going to magically appear.
Re:That's what they said about CD-Rs (Score:5, Interesting)
You're not being imaginative enough. One very hot topic of research in reliable computing right now are self-describing file formats. They are less space-efficient but they should effectively solve the software-side problem of long term storage. Interesting enough, the US National Archive is one of the biggest players on the block when it comes to thing kind of research.
Re: (Score:2)
yes but this one comes with a money back gauretee if you can't read your data in 100 years.
Of course there won't be any software that can read the format.
eBay has a punch card reader available right now. Granted, the thing is probably more durable (and repairable) than the average SD card reader, but the odds look pretty good.
And Linux, at least, will still read FAT.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, of course, money-back guarantee...
So some company in 1925 sells new movie reels. The new film is guaranteed to last 100 years, money-back guarantee! You buy ten, for cost of a brand new Ford Model T.
And so, 2010 comes and you want to play back the movies. They should be good for another 15 years. But they all turned to sludge. Oh, the company is still in business, unbelievable! You even kept the receipt! So you go visit them and ask for refund. Yes, sir! Here's your $24 per reel of film, and we're sorry
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
You should buy better media. My oldest CD-Rs (Mitsui Gold, Philips/Ritek) were burned 02/1998. All of them still read perfectly.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There are Archival CDs that exist, and some of mine have lasted a good 15 years so far with no errors on 100+ CDs. Only problem is, they're REALLY expensive.
For an example: http://www.delkin.com/products/archivalgold/cdr.html
$199 for 100 of these things.
You buy 10 cent CDs, you get 10 cent CDs =)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Naked on the floor of a basement isn't the best way to store CD-Rs, by the way.
How your mom puts CDs in my basement is really unrelated to how long they last.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
My CD's are working fine too - wish I could say the same about the numerous CD and DVD dives or players I have had over the years.
I really hate CDs and DVDs - the medium itself is way too easy to damage, but worse, the bloody CD drives / players just have too many points of failure in them.
I had yet another DVD drive fail on me this week - I don't watch that many movies or burn a lot of stuff, but I have gone through at least 4 DVD drives, and quite a few CD drives over the years, not to mention 3 stand al
Re: (Score:2)
For consumer purposes, where Joe User doesn't want to have to be an electrical engineer just to look at the photos he took 20 years ago, a reader is pretty much a necessity. That is fair enough. A
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The only realistic way that the things could become unreadable would be if SanDisk fucked it up and decided that some sort of uber-proprietary DRM/obfuscation nonsense was absolutely vital...
Even then, this is not data we're burying and hoping to dig up and read in 100 years (indeed, it's only guaranteed for 100 years so unless we're copying it before then we're risking losing the data anyway) - this is likely data we're going to need to access throughout that period, therefore the technology to read them won't disappear while they're still the best format. To address GP's point - the reason we can't find 5.25 floppy readers is because we don't need to - nobody is crazy enough to still be stori
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
100 years sounds good... (Score:5, Insightful)
Until you realize that the last reader for it will be extinct in 20.
I'll buy one so I can put it in my time capsule along with my 8" floppy and punch cards.
Re:100 years sounds good... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In my case that move was "yesterday". Am I doing it wrong?
I've lived through ISA/VESA/PCI, SCSI/IDE/SATA, serial/parallel/USB... nothing fits or connects any more. I really don't believe there'll be SD card readers in shops in 100 years time.
Re:100 years sounds good... (Score:4, Interesting)
"Until you realize that the last reader for it will be extinct in 20."
Not necessarily. They still make turntables for LP records.
Also, if the specification is well documented, then someone can always build a reader if it really matters. File formats are likely to be more troublesome.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Portions of the specification are secret [4centity.com].
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"Until you realize that the last reader for it will be extinct in 20."
Not necessarily. They still make turntables for LP records.
Also, if the specification is well documented, then someone can always build a reader if it really matters. File formats are likely to be more troublesome.
The LP was a medium that lasted almost a century, in a period when nothing really happened with new media. (Yeah tape, cassettes - but those came decades later and lasted for decades as well, and that's about it.)
If it really matters.... If it really matters for a big company or a government - yes. But if it matters for the average Joe Nobody, who will pay for it?
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re:100 years sounds good... (Score:5, Interesting)
Egyptians mostly used papyrus, it was the Sumerians who used clay tablets for documents. If baked, they are virtually indestructible (there are plenty 5 or 6 thousand years old) and museums now have millions of them slowly being collated and translated.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I'm sure some of them say: Dupe!
Re:100 years sounds good... (Score:4, Informative)
I'm more worried about the fact that much electronics may suffer from natural changes in soldering. Especially lead-free solder is suffering from this since tin (used for soldering) changes characteristic when it's stored too cold.
The chip may be good for 100 years but the carrier for the chip may not.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If someone were to take an SD card and send it to me 20 years in the past, I could have easily read the contents of it. With some transistors to deal with the 3V system and some fairly primitive circuitry. Using simplistic setups you can't read it very fast, but you can read SD.
I would expect 50 years from now, off the shelf components would be easily combined to read these SD cards. A little circuit to deal with the control voltages. a little processor to wiggle the data lines. Pretty straight forward. tal
tamper proof (Score:4, Interesting)
card is 'tamper proof' and data cannot be altered or deleted, SanDisk said in a statement
To what value of highly funded and motivated attacker? They left that part out of the marketing hyperbole.
Re: (Score:2)
If nothing else works use a paper punch.
Re:tamper proof (Score:5, Insightful)
Get an identical card. Copy the data to HDD, tamper away, rewrite to new card.
Tamper proof my arse.
Re:tamper proof (Score:5, Informative)
For non-repudiation [wikipedia.org] purposes, digital data can have a cryptographic hash computed on it. It can also be signed with a timestamp by a trusted third-party. If you're concerned about data being tampered with after it is on the card, the police can simply publish a cryptographic hash of every card they archive after they have written to it. In fact they can do that regardless of how they store the data.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
the police can simply publish a cryptographic hash of every card they archive after they have written fabricated evidence to it.
FTFY
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:tamper proof (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, for some super high-profile case, the NSA can probably just 'ask' Sandisk to produce as many writable duplicates of the allegedly unique cards as they need, and have Verisign or whoever provide a 'secure' timestamp for whatever time they require. For the overwhelming majority of cases, though, that'd be overkill. Heck, the tampering would probably be more likely to cause scandal than would the existing techniques for getting the results you want. Compared to the surprisingly useless; but emotionally compelling, junk like eyewitness testimony, photographs would be practically objective, particularly if a "common photoshop artefacts detectomatic" software package can be put together so that all but the most useless defense attorneys can trivially check for mediocre hackjobs.
Most likely scenarios (Score:3, Insightful)
Good for 100 years or your first fire, flood, or other natural disaster that destroys the physical media.
Also, even if these do last for 100 years, it's a certainty that there won't be any hardware left that's capable of reading SD cards. Even if there's some piece of hardware in a museum, it won't be able to interface with existing technology. Given the rapid pace of the tech industry, anything beyond 25 years is just fodder for marketing.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Most likely scenarios (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it funny that people actually think we won't be able to recreate old technology and we would have to go to museums to get the latest working readers.
Furthermore data will just be copied and copied and copied to the latest hype so these usb cards probably won't still be around by then.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I find it funny that people actually think we won't be able to recreate old technology and we would have to go to museums to get the latest working readers.
This story was on /. just last week:
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/06/18/162204/80-Year-Old-Edison-Recording-Resurrected [slashdot.org]
Two engineers spent two years building a machine to playback some recordings they found.
They had to look at the original patent and work from that, because no players had been saved.
We should be so lucky that every last player + software will get saved in a museum somewhere.
Re:Most likely scenarios (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time I hear one of these "but.. but but nobody will have the technology to READ these things in 100 years!" all I hear is "everyone will be stupid in the future".
Someone recently created a device to read some crazy obscure technology produced by Edison to record sound on film, and that wasn't even all that valuable.
The real deal is, if the data is important enough someone will maintain the technology to read it, or re-create it.
Re: (Score:2)
Have you *seen* the kids on my lawn? That stupid future is getting here real fast.
Re: (Score:2)
Have you *seen* the kids on my lawn? That stupid future is getting here real fast.
You're lucky, the present is getting stupid here real fast.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Even if there's some piece of hardware in a museum, it won't be able to interface with existing technology.
SD card reader plugged into a USB adapter plugged into an Ethernet adapter plugged into an optical encoder plugged into whatever they need in the future. [halolz.com]
100 years in what conditions? (Score:5, Insightful)
So they state 100 years, based on tests at room temperature. Can we assume that the media will always be stored at room temperature in 100 year period? My experience generally shows this is wishful thinking, because air conditioning breaks down, heating fails, the room is not always dark, can have direct sunlight etc. Provide me something that can last a 100 years in conditions of, at least, 30 degree centigrade variation, and then it might be interesting. Certainly I won't be around to appreciate the end results, but for archival this is a requirement, IMHO.
Re: (Score:2)
Paper tape last several decades at minimum, and possibly much longer depending on paper quality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_tape [wikipedia.org]
Punched paper tape is tried and true technology, but is slow and highly mechanical.
There's a newer variant of paper tape designed for archival purposes, that's not punched, but rather has lots of small dots printed on it.
Many DIY approaches skip the tape approach, and instead archive large amounts of data to ordinary printer paper...
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/07 [codinghorror.com]
Re: (Score:2)
If it's really important enough, it'll hopefully end up in some archival vault in a mountain somewhere with would be very stable. However, if we're going for the post-apolalyptic scenario then it's a good question... if the power supplies are nuked, the vault abandoned for years, how much can be recovered then?
lifespan depends on attention span (Score:2)
Over time, it's likely people will eventually stop caring about the data archived on these memory cards a
What about EMP (electromagnetic pulse) (Score:4, Interesting)
This looks like a solution in search of a problem.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You're right. It's also vulnerable to flamethrowers, grenades, and the incredibly stupid who think it's a cheeseburger.
WTF? It's not supposed to be a solution to survive every conceivable and improbable disaster. It's just supposed to be reasonably reliable for archival purposes.
Allow me to expand your knowledge (Score:5, Informative)
with a useless bit of trivia
Kodak- 100+ years
http://www.kodak.com/global/en/service/faqs/faq1632.shtml [kodak.com]
Re: (Score:2)
What does marketing bullshit have to do with knowledge.
I remember back in 2000 or so, when a magazine did an extensive test with all optical media on the market. Including those.
The gold ones lasted the longest, that’s true. But that was only 10 years. After that they all died. And indeed now, 10 years later, they aren’t readable anymore.
The blue ones died the fastest. 2-3 years and they were done. Green was only a little better than blue. Which I also can prove by when they died in my collectio
Good timing... (Score:5, Interesting)
Ah Crap! (Score:4, Informative)
To me this is kind of a technology regression, unless one is only concerned with archiving. I used to work at a Title Company where scanned documents were stored on a WORM drive in the mid-90's. WORM as a technology in itself tends to err on the side of retention time vs. speed. Think about it, CD-R, DVD-R and every other -R is technically WORM media.
Bixby Snyder (Score:2)
I'd buy that for a dollar!
WORM? (Score:2)
What is this, Byte Magazine in 1993?
The practical solution (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
I challenge you to go more than five years without wanting to watch your kids walk for the first time. This helps remind me when it's time to update.
Oh. So that explains why all your kids are separated in age by five years.
30 Years Ago . . . (Score:5, Informative)
Only 100 years? (Score:2)
Only 100 years?
Now if they had announced 1010 years then, yeah, that would have been interesting.
Re: (Score:2)
You should consider logging in Mr. Coward.
Re:Wow... (Score:5, Funny)
Wow, I submitted that like a week ago.
Your submission was undergoing testing for the last week at room temperature and the editors are now confident enough that it will be acceptable.
better luck next time (Score:2)
Bad timing on your part, better luck next time.
funny how people feel they own a story because they found it on the internet, when it was a journalist who wrote the article.
Re:Not Enough Testing (Score:5, Insightful)
Extrapolation is a dangerous and deceptive marketing strategy. If it is supposed to last 100 years, they should test it that long.
Nobody is going to sue in 100 years anyway...
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
No, but they might sue in 5.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Summary is misleading. TFA doesn't go into detail about age testing. I imagine they temperature test these chips by "aging" them in an oven at 250C for several days.
We do that with the chips we make at my company. It's a pretty reliable indicator of data longevity.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
A large portion of RIAA's and MPAA's distributors rely on people buying copy after copy of the same media as it gets damaged or lost.
Or the shellac breaks in transit to the record store.
Re:This is going to seriously piss off RIAA and MP (Score:4, Informative)
No it's not. This is a high priced flash-based SD card with only 1GB of storage that requires you to write to each card. It's too small for video, too expensive for consumers, and not useful for media mass production.
Besides, if the content mass production industry wanted to use a transistor-based solution they'd just mass produce a much cheaper ROM cartridge. But they won't, since DVDs and Blu-Ray disks can be pressed for pennies.
Re:The Egyptians did it first (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not as simple as stating paper. There is good and there is bad paper when it comes to longevity. Papyrus (dead sea scrolls) and lint paper are good, but paper used in newspapers is decaying. The yellowish color that it gets over a few years is an indication of it's decay. It can be stopped, but at a cost.
Even laser printed paper have problems - the printed text is only sticking to the surface of the paper. Ink penetrates the paper more and bleeds into the fibers. But some ink is better than other so the ordinary inkjet ink may not be a good choice anyway. A classic ink based on metal (E.g. iron) may be a choice since even though it may change over time the print will last.
Laser etching in a glass pane would probably be safe from decay but would be hard to store safely - and be expensive. At least it would probably last long enough to allow the world to forget that this civilization did exist.
Re:The Egyptians did it first (Score:5, Informative)
Glass would deform in that time scale...
I'm guessing your talking about the urban myth that glass can flow and melt? [glassnotes.com] Sorry, but glass doesn't melt, it would hold it's form as long as it isn't shattered.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You apparently didn't bother to read the link in the parent. It specifically refutes your example and the method under which you claim it operates.
If you'd like to refute the link feel free, but please cite credentials at least as authoritative as C. Wu, Science News, Vol. 153, No. 22, May 30, 1998, p. 341 or Zanotto, E.D. 1998. Do cathedral glasses flow? American Journal of Physics 66(May):392, as the linked page does.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The tl;dr version, if my memory serves me accurately:
The panes of glass which are thicker at one side are the side effect of the imprecise glass manufacturing skill of that time. The panes were usually installed thickest-side-down because that is the most sensible from an engineering point of view: center of mass as low as possible for the most stability. However, some examples have been found of glass that was installed upside-down (thickest side at the top, either by accident or by chance), refuting the n
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)