Western Digital Invests in Ceramic Storage Firm That Claims 5,000-Year Data Retention (tomshardware.com) 45
Western Digital has made a strategic investment in German startup Cerabyte, a company developing nearly indestructible ceramic-based data storage technology. The partnership aims to accelerate commercialization of Cerabyte's ceramic-on-glass material, which the company claims can preserve data for 5,000 years.
Cerabyte recently demonstrated its technology's resilience by boiling storage devices in salt water and subjecting them to oven-level heat. The company states its ceramic storage withstands fire, moisture, UV light, radiation, corrosion, and EMP bursts. Beyond durability, Cerabyte aims to enable massive capacity increases as the industry moves toward what it calls the "Yottabyte era," while targeting storage costs below $1 per TB by 2030.
Cerabyte recently demonstrated its technology's resilience by boiling storage devices in salt water and subjecting them to oven-level heat. The company states its ceramic storage withstands fire, moisture, UV light, radiation, corrosion, and EMP bursts. Beyond durability, Cerabyte aims to enable massive capacity increases as the industry moves toward what it calls the "Yottabyte era," while targeting storage costs below $1 per TB by 2030.
Pole reversal? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Pole reversal? (Score:4, Informative)
... preparing for a cataclysmic event like pole reversal ...
The last pole reversal was 41,000 years ago. We obviously survived. They are more slow-motion events than any thing else.
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We survived but none of our digital devices did. Not being reliant on them probably helped us out there.
So many other things.... (Score:2)
So many other things external to the durability of the media have to go right for that data to read or want to be read that far in the future. It's difficult to tell whether technological society will have collapsed or just evolved to a point where all this is meaningless. In either case it may not be very useful. With a collapse, you have to bounce back to a recovery by that point. There is a minute chance that someone could discover the media an archeological style dig AND be able to read it with wh
Re:So many other things.... (Score:4, Informative)
It's not impossible. There are 5000 year old Sumerian cuneiform writings which are legible and we *can* read them.
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True, but the writing on those tablets isn't measured in microns, or packed into densities measured in GB/cm2
The limiting factor in both durability and age stability are still any electronic controllers and physical hardware to read and process that data into a human readable form
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"True, but the writing on those tablets isn't measured in microns, or packed into densities measured in GB/cm2"
It depends. If they're clearly labeled as something important, they'll be examined with something capable of seeing things measured in microns. And if they're designed to be easily reverse-engineered (and given their purpose, they will be), the data encoding will be reverse-engineered.
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Don't go in the kitchen, I dropped a million books (Score:3)
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It may well be immune to heat, cold, and, uh, salt, but the company's website says that the substrate is glass, and obviously there are lots of things that glass is not immune to. For one, we must hope that no bulls get loose in the library over the next 5000 years.
DVDs were expected to last 100 years; however some of my collection is less than 20 years old and is unreadable. I'm taking that 5000 years with a very large grain of salt.
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i'll take the 500 year media
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"Glass" can mean a lot of things. There are forms of glass that will stop bullets. There are certainly forms that easily withstand being dropped, and some forms are stronger than steel. [slashdot.org]
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Bullet proof glass won't be 1 mm thick.
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For one, we must hope that no bulls get loose in the library over the next 5000 years.
That might not as dangerous as you think. MythBusters - Bull in a China Shop [youtube.com] ...
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According to the whitepaper the glass is flexible and is 100 nm thick [cerabyte.com]. So, dropping and breaking glass is not an issue.
The process used here is to actually etch the bits on the surface of the glass/ceramic sandwich and read them optically. This is a very close analogy to Sumerian clay tablets which are readable and were deciphered 5000 years after the earliest were created. This media does not require any special technology to make it readable, any surface scanning technique will work. And broken "tablets"
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They better not put them near a baseball stadium, golf course or anywhere kids might find some rocks to throw.
Yet another clay/glass storage medium (Score:3)
Clay writings have been around for 5000 years, and absent breaking the clay tablets, the information on the clay media should last forever. For both clay and glass, the real issues for permanence are the permanence of the writer/reader, the performance and convenience of the writing and reading process, and economic viability.
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Breaking clay tablets does not destroy the information -- they pieces can be read, and they can be reassembled. This storage medium is like that also. Bits etched on the surface are still readable if the wafer is broken.
More info (Score:4, Interesting)
Wondering WTF this tech is? Whitepaper: https://www.cerabyte.com/wp-co... [cerabyte.com]
What a world we live in when the news for nerds is about the money instead of the tech.
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Looks like they could cobble together the prototype with COTS components. Sputter some silicon nitride on gorilla glass, fibre pulse laser, pulse rated long working distance microscope objective, DMD ... bobs your uncle. If this works, why hasn't anyone done this before?
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If this works, why hasn't anyone done this before?
If by laser etching on ceramic/glass surface for data storage, it has [reddit.com]. Ultra-thin glass displays (UTG) is relatively new on the market (~5 years ago it appeared I think), so it is not like this could have been attempted as a business ages ago. This is a specific commercial offering of this general technology -- not the first time this technique has ever been demonstrated. You don't even have to be first to market with a technology offering to succeed -- many who are, don't.
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"the data is not corrupted even when exposed to electromagnetic pluses". What about minuses?
+R or -R? (Score:3)
Back in the days of the DVD-ROM, we needed long storage for medical study data (I think 15 years was required by law). The DVD could hold a lot of data, but while the medium was great, the formats on that medium were so undetermined that it was totally useless for long term storage. Just think that you would have picked +R while a year later the world would have settled on -R.
Hardware is nice, but as long as software formats and planned obsolescence are a thing, it is useless.
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Overall, I'm glad both formats kept going, although DVD-R should have fallen to the wayside, as it has less checksumming than DVD+R.
I just wish we had a better optical format than BDXL.
Storage media choices suck right now... you have hard disk, and LTO tape, for large storage. That's it.
Waste of time (Score:4, Interesting)
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These are bits written on the surface, read with laser light now, but any surface scanning technology would be able to read them. This is quite unlike any electronic device storage or magnetic storage
But even a lot of magnetic storage could be read in principle, even if the commercial drives designed to do it are not available. Retrieving ancient data is not like looking up you wedding photos. No drive to read the media -- wedding photos unavailable today. Archaeologist with intact disk 1000 years from now
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This is, of course, for archival purposes - not day-to-day use. The idea is lots of copies of a relatively small subset of human culture. It's not (re)writable, not exactly random access, you'd need to re-digitize it to feed into a computer (or the far off futur
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If the data is interesting enough, someone will (re)build the devices. But only if one doesn't know already that the medium is unreadable.
.PICT files (Score:2)
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PICT is the Apple equivalent of WMF where it just records the actions taken to draw the image and throws them into a file stream. WMF does the same but with Windows GDI functions (and, for a long time, WMF files were just executables that could call any internal Windows DLL function).
The only thing I know that even opens PICT is Irfanview but it won't be able to export as a vector, but Scribus claims some limited support.
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True long term storage must include directions to start from scratch. Including a language course, because in 5000 years it's unlikely anyone will be speaking the language you're using today.
You can assume an intelligent person who would want to access the data if they knew what it was, because without that assumption there's no point, but you have to be ready to teach that person how to read the library of books required to reconstruct the devices for processing the data you stored.
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Pshaw. You have the files? You can read them fine -- you just can't decode them into images. But you could write software that did that if they were of sufficient interest to you.
Huge difference between "data unrecoverable" (no data), and "data not conveniently accessible".
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Follow the recipes on the web, get UTM and Mac OS 9.2.1 as a VM and you're back in 2001.
Open and edit PICT files in Simple Text, Claris Draw, Claris CAD, Microsoft Word 6, etc. Edit them with the contemporary tools and/or export them by printing to PDF.
It's a real trip down memory lane and, on an Apple Silicon, MacOS 9.2.1 runs faster than it did on the original G3 hardware and looks great on a retina display.
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ImageMagick supports .PICT files.
5,000 years? (Score:2)
It's adorable they think anyone will be around that long. Let's start with 3.6 years ...
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Excellent, if affordable (Score:3)
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Don't worry about data formats - specs can and should be archived with the documents.
Unfortunately there's a huge gap between "should" and "is". From the Los Angeles Times of January 13, 1991 [Paywalled]: History Fades Away as Data Is Lost on Computer Tapes [latimes.com]: "One of the biggest headaches is sloppy record-keeping. Everyone who designs a computer or a program for it is supposed to write down--on paper--how the machines operate, how the program organizes data and what information is on each tape. Often, they didn't. 'Generally it's the last thing you do and pay the least attention to,' said