This long-term data storage will last 14 billion years
"the medium is silica crystal, similar to optical cable, it's highly durable. It's also capacious: The technology can store up to 360 TB of data on a 5-inch glass platter."
https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/14/sphotonix_moves_5d_memory_crystal/Open linkView original on lemmy.world461
Comments166
@[email protected] 14,000,000,000 years
And then again 13,000,000,000 years later.
Remember that CDs, CDRs, and so on were originally pitched as surviving 100 years. Turns out they last a highly variable amount of time but potentially as little as 2-3 years before they degrade, depending on the construction.
So I'll just say, this is clearly a theoretical value.
Edit: Words.
I mean...sorry, but this is wrong. Mitsui CDRs for example are still being sold on retail sites advertising 100+ (and sometimes 300+) year longevity. Similar to bitrot, internet rot makes it hard to find advertisements from the 90s, but I am comfortable that was true then too and not limited to "gold" high quality discs like Mitsui.
So it's 2 to 3 percent of original estimate? That means it'll last anywhere from 280 to 420 million years. Dead on arrival tech.
How can you be so sure they haven't already done durability testing??
Because they weren't invented in 1925? Any durability testing you do today is about assumptions where you accelerate the process for a year by heating it or exposing it to water or whatever will degrade it most to some factor above normal and then extrapolate. That extrapolation was wildly wrong with CDs and it could be with this medium too. Or it might last a lot longer. What they have not done is written to a bunch of them and stored them in a variety of ways for 100 years and concluded they last that long.
Oh, I see the confusion.
I was talking about the new media in the article, not CDs.
So… so are they. The new media has not yet been tested for 100 years because they were not invented 100 years ago
The ones with metal pigment are still waiting to fail, the ones that died used a cheap organic dye, coz profit. This is Silica (i.e. quartz, a long lived rock) with variances in polarization and intensity,( hence 5D when combined with a 3D Crystal))
OK generic marketing crap and will you have their special reader in a century, but it's a solid way to project knowledge into the far future (gotta wonder if we need to re-examine some quartz crystals with this in mind ;}
I wonder what the read write speed is. Imagine storing your entire movie collection in a crystal the size of a coaster.
Might not be for home consumers anytime soon, article says: “In the next 18 months, the company hopes to have a field-deployable read device that customers can use to read archived data. But SPhotonix isn't presently targeting the consumer market. Kazansky estimates that the initial cost of the read device will be about $6,000 and the initial cost of the write device will be about $30,000.”
Then goes on to mention they need about 3-4 years of R&D so they can be ready to license the tech
If it's slow, then it's the central backup and you use anything else for regular use. Just having it as a fallback for recovery would be huge.
I’ll have a crystal collection that’s actually useful
Stargate SG-1 was ahead of its time with crystals
We desperately need a non-magnetic storage for obvious reasons ... But making a new thing is freakish difficult.
In case you missed it in the article, the transfer speeds are mentioned just two paragraphs prior to the one you cited:
Writing 360 TB at 4 MB/s will take over 1000 days, almost 3 years. Retrieving 360 TB at a rate of 30 MB/s is about 138 days. That capacity to bitrate ratio that is going to be really hard to use in a practical way, and it'll be critical to get that speed up. Their target of 500 MB/s is still more than 8 days to read or write the data from one storage platter.
One counterpoint - even with a weak speed to capacity ratio it could be very useful to have a lot of storage for incremental backup solutions, where you have a small index to check what needs to be backed up, only need to write new/modified data, and when restoring you only need to read the indexes and the amount you're actually restoring. This saves time writing the data and lets you keep access to historical versions.
There's two caveats here, of course, assuming those are not rewritable. One, you need to be able to quickly seek to the latest index, which can't reliably be at the start, and two, you need a format that works without rewriting any data, possibly with a footer (like tar or zip, forgot which one), which introduces extra complexity (though I foresee a potential trick where the previous index can leave an unallocated block of data to write the address of the next index, to be written later)
I was so blind sided by the fact that the tech isn’t for consumers that I forgot to mention the r/w speeds
That's the joke. The speed of a lot of these tech would require twice the time the data retention to write it.
We can place atoms in order on the head of this pin and store 30 Pb. Write speed? 1KB/min
Did you read the article? 30mbps is faster than a lot of people’s internets. It’s not fast, but for a prototype, it’s not bad.
You need to put the capacity into perspective with the storage speed. The comment I made simply highlighted the issue with an extreme example... For the reasoning provided. And as someone who's worked with emerging tech before... 30 Mbps is their ideal lap time in a lab environment. Do remember that 100 Mbps is considered absurdly slow for networking. 1Gbps sounds fast but even those transfer rates move into hours and days for larger file transfers.
This is explicitly stated to be for cold storage though. It doesn’t have to be fast at all. And they’re supposedly aiming for 500mbps soon.
They are at 30 presently. The "standard" is somewhere around 300-500 which, again, is acceptable for cold storage at the current tape drive size of 10-30tb.
There are minimums expected as density increases. Cold storage / backup still needs this to be viable.
I suppose it could be considered a trade-off? There’s the obvious advantages of longevity and possible size(?), it van still be viable in some niche uses where that matters. Github’s code vault from a while back could have benefited from that.
We are talking theoretical here, of course. For enterprise to even give it a realistic look it needs to outperform very time tested equipment so... Were probably looking at needing to beat on cost, capacity, speed... Or to put it simply its actual value / cost for implementation. Currently there are a few different research grade projects at various stages of lab testing... And this, like those, needs to fundamentally provide (noteworthy) gains over the existing and also be able to be consistent outside of the lab. Were a fair bit away from that yet.
I mentioned earlier that we are in dire need of meaningful, long term, non-magnetic storage... And I genuinely believe that. But while I can be interested in the tech - it still needs to be viewed with a critical eye until it can produce results.
That’s cheap enough a small business could do long term backups for individuals and other small businesses.
I had the exact same idea, you could upload your data to cloud storage, and have them write it to the doodad and send it to you.
and/or provide them cloud access to their crystal since they may not want to buy a reader
Manipulating the atoms in a crystal to store info is extremely high-precision, as is verifying the accuracy of the write). So is reading positions down to a few nanometers, But consumers wouldn't need a $6000 reader to get, say, 10GB dumped to a hard drive ... you'd carry your crystal and 16GB drive down to the corner store and user their reader to dump sector 37BJ to the drive. No need to trust them with your platter ... but are you exposing all 360TB to potential damage from the machine?
A friendly request - please de-clickbait your headlines and say what the material is (although you do mention it in your summary).
When a post is a link to an article, I would prefer that the post title match the article. Many news communities actually require that.
Ah, righto. That was an old rule in many subreddits. Seems to vary a bit by Lemmy community, though. I just cringe at clickbait!
This grinds my gears any time that a product is touted as lasting X time. Did you put it through a typical use case or scenario for that X time? No? Then you cannot definitively say that it will last that long.
Based on their bullshit statement, I can last 7 years pounding someone's ass relentlessly without pause for any reason. Trust me bro.
The degradation of materials is pretty well understood. If it’s truly cut from a well known material with zero factors that could effect that degradation, it’s mostly safe to make en educated wish.
I'll have to remember this
"zero factors that could effect that degradation"
So in other words, only a completely unrealistic estimate can be made? After all, our sun is not going to be the same in 5 billion years, so unless the material comes along with a solution to maintain the material's temperature (as per the manufacturer's website the longevity is temperature-dependent) then 14 billion years sounds rather unlikely.
You don’t take into account external factors like that. This is like saying “oh your watch battery will last an entire year? What about if I launch it into the sun‽‽”
Honda won't honor my 10-year powertrain warranty just because I yeeted my 2-year-old Civic off a bridge into salt water!
You can put it on a spacecraft, and fling it at a bunch of star systems. Also preserving knowledge is still one of our hardest topic to solve. After the resources wars, what will computing even look like? Will we even make it another 3k years? How will we warn the next inhabitants of our pitfalls? Surely anything containing rubber gaskets will be ruined, all capacitors will have leaked. Any iron will have rusted.
I don't think the point is that you can sue them if it only lasts 13 billion years, but the under current conditions it's projected lifetime is 14 billion years. Which is a very big number, meaning it's pretty much guaranteed it won't break in 100, 1000 or 10000 years.
You can stimulate wear on different types of materials and get a general idea of how long it would last. This isn't plastic in a dvd.
Any volunteers for testing the claim?
I could go for a good ass pounding.
If you can get me safely to .999 C, slow me down, and get me back to Earth at .999 C, sure. The entire trip for me would only be about two years, provided a consistent 1 G of acceleration. Just please make it so that reversing acceleration doesn't completely screw me, so my spaceship doesn't have to do a complicated flip a bit after the halfway point on each trip. I'm certain that wouldn't be good for my stomach.
I mean, people do predict things based on evidence. Galileo didn't actually go to outer space and verify that the earth was going around the sun.
Didn't they think in those days that your eyes sent beams out to touch whatever they were looking at?
I wonder if he thought his eyes were sending beams out into space.
I don't see how that's relevant here.
If his eyes were sending out rays, they did go out into space.
But that's not actually how it works. Although it is how it works in video games (raytracing).
I think it is just a fun way of thinking about it.
In reality, things from space were travelling to earth to interact with Galileo's retina.
Oddly specific fetlife bio
Unsure if joke or not, ha. I don't even remember what I set in my bio for FL, its been a couple years since I set that account up...
Beyond that, the sun has about 5 billion years before we might not be able to starlift it back to a "younger" state, so The Earth and Venus may not exist at all if we don't get our asses in gear for sustainable intragalactic life in the next century or so.
I am failing to connect the two time scales you mention.
The storage device can't outlast the Sun.
there is some chance that earth may be ejected from the orbit into the space when the time comes, in which case this device could theoretically survive, but its users definitely won't.
How hf can you have 5D space within 3D space? This sounds like marketing bullshit.
Oh, I get it now. It's a five-dimensional mathematical space which is given by the three physical space dimensions plus the difference in light orientation and the difference the light strength.
5D is the wrong term, the correct term is multiplex.
It is the correct term if you look at it from a Hilbert space point of view. You have 5 probe options (vector 5D) that give you 5 read options (vector 5D).
It's not strength, but rotation. Shoot a photon at the cube at a certain spot, you get data out of it. Hit the same spot in the cube with light that is polarized perpendicular to the first, and you get different data out of it.
Er... that's what it sounds like, anyway...
Pondering my backup orb
What if some civilization in the past already had something like this, and there are 'plates' or pieces of rock out there (under sand dunes? written in the sides of those vases from ancient Egypt?)
Could they make portable readers that can at least spot old pottery chunks that are probably FULL of videos?
Given that it's the engine Egyptians, they'll be cat videos.
LOL I would NOT be surprised !!
Excellent, I will catalog my journals of my metamorphosis into a giant worm on these.
Giant worm that shits mind enhancing drug, to be more specific
Best prank idea: Put someone's browsing history on one of those.
See, now this is the tech I would understand pouring billions into. Give every nation on earth a durable copy of the last 100 years of medicine, physics, biology. That's what a reasonable ruling class ought to do.
At least give them to the nations which aren't currently trying to ignore and undo the last 100 years of medicine, physics, and biology. (Sorry, United States.)
those are the places that most need it though
Eh, we earned it.
if they were reasonable, they wouldn't be a ruling "class"
Once you have the tech fully worked out, the budget to make them is going to be cheaper. Easier for all nations to get their own
and just like every other storage medium, it will last for eons..and die about .5 femtoseconds before you have a critical need to pull data off.
Finally some worthy storage for memes!
Eat your heart out Ea-nāṣir.
Those aliens from the future will be so amazed when they find a disc with 360 TB of cat videos.
You mean various levels of fucked up porn.
Yeah but they aren't amazed by that, tons of porn in literally every civilization. But cat videos are novel
prints article out
places it on an overflowing, ancient pile of documents of promising, science proved data storage methods that haven't made it to public use yet
Remember Memristors? They're commercially available today, at 200 EUR per bit.
wow, sign me up for a couple of dozen terabytes of that!
I also remember people burning pitts on scotch tape, then rolling it up and reading it in 3d :)
Nor ever will
I'm up to 45TB of actual used storage. I just want another tape analog. I want inexpensive, slow, long-term storage I can move off-site easily. This paying double to keep disks around and then moving them in boxes is just bad, and online storage is stupid expensive at those sizes.
Was running on Backblaze for years until they screwed around with my client enough that I can't backup my NAS reliably. I'm not a company, I'm not going to pay the cost of my disks every year to store the content of my disks.
I've been considering for a few years standing up a 2u box in colocation.
Oh good it can fit the next Call of Duty game.
But is it safe from the cats? 😼
glass shattering sounds
Is anything, really?
Not even cats are safe from cats.
It will not.
For real, what am I going to do when the sun swallows the earth in 4 billion years?
You may be entitled to compensation
Any number I could call?
Oh yeah? Well take a look at these Elder Scrolls over here.
Wait no, not literally! 😵💫 🔥
Skyrim Silica Crystal Edition
Open AI just bought out all the glass platter production. Not only will consumers not be able to store their data for 14gy, they won't have anywhere to set down their drinks either
Sauce? Or sarcasm?
Really?
I been wooshed, sorry v.v
It's like that these days. It's hard to tell.
Waiting for the consumer reader and writer of those things, call me then
Totally. This is the data equivalent of a “new battery tech will revolutionise your phone” post.
Crystalline / Holographic storage has been hyped since the 80s... still not production ready.
Not the business plan. This will be used as an archiving service for $$$.
Is it rewritable to an extensive degree? If not its just a backup medium, not day-to-day storage. Still useful, but more disposable.
This is the type of thing that would be used for storage of essential human data rather than for general data backups I think
so porn collections?
Yep
I would argue, and I'm sure many historians and librarians and archivists would agree, that "general data backups" are essential human data. Storing the data allows for later analysis, which may provide important insights. Even things that seem trivial and unimportant today can provide very important insights later.
That's a fair point
If a glass platter really holds 360TB and can be made affordable, it wouldn't really matter.
The article says itis designed for cold storage of data, e.g. backups, or perhaps things that get written once and accessed infrequently.
Time for some Horizon: Zero Dawn style Vantage points.
I need this for my Star Trek collection!
You mean porn, right?
Marina Sirtis has the sexiest collarbones ever on TV.
Truth 👏
Be sure they're real isolinear chips?
Every year or so some company comes along and announces some new storage technology that exponentially increases capacity or lifetime or both. Then nothing more is ever said about it and it never appears.
At one point we said the same thing about solid state drives
Same for batteries.
Good luck finding a reading device for it in 100y, let alone 14 billion years. I doubt there will be a human civilization a few thousand years from now. :)
Remember how humanity had problems understanding the meaning of ancient egypt hyroglyphs from just a few thousand years back until The Rosetta stone was found and some really clever and dedicated guy put an awful lot of work into the translation? Good luck with JPG images or pdf documents or even ASCII text.
It's OK to make fun of non-existing/ not yet market ready devices, no?
As long as as humans haven't succumed to brainrot and still have capacity for math and logic, we can figure it out. It's encoded, not encrypted.
The classic problem of long-term nuclear waste warning messages is about conveying information over cultural barriers. This is a concrete data type, not interpretation of vague contexual meanings from pictograms. Math and logic don't change while cultures do. Images are far more retrievable than the meaning of an image.
Wait until humans find a way to divide by 0. Suddenly Cambrian explosion in science, immediate Warp civilization and whatnot.
Then they find this chip, but cannot decipher it, because they don't understand mathematics not able to divide by 0 😅.
Images would likely be the easiest possible thing to translate compared to more arbitrary codes since in that situation the output should be more easily decodable?
Also, there's plenty of easy solutions to that.
I thought it would be hard to reverse engineer the compression algorithms used in JPEG images. Or even understand what the data structure is supposed to be to begin with.
I agree. If easy accessibility for future archeologists was the goal one could maybe use 1 or more 2D matrices of scalar values to represent monochromatic images. Or just etch the pixels of the image itself in the medium - like we do with microfiche.
Why would you need to reverse engineer the compression algorithm? The output can be viewed without that. I don't need to know how you got to my party to have a good time with you :)
IIRC the thing is, you first present the key to the structure in some simple form, and then the rest of the data can be more complex.
Like the question how one would tell a future generation to not go to a dangerous place? Like a nuclear waste dump. Slightly different topic, I know.
Communicating with someone whose language and mindset doesn't exist yet could be tricky. But math could be possible.:)
I was actually thinking whichever company bringing this for the masses will abandon its support 5y later and 25y from now we won't be able to read it at all, let alone decode the bits.
We still have Ford-Ts that are alive and kicking so pretty sure in a 100 years some museum will still have a working reading device for this. If this ever comes to market. Also the claim is just to ensure businesses that their backups on this medium will still be 100% readable in a couple of decades, even when the medium hasn't been stored properly. Unlike tape that has a good chance to rot after 5 years. If it lasts a billion years it surely will survive some damp forgotten basement room for a few decades.
Fair. I agree with your arguments.
But I tried to clarify that I'm making fun of a not yet market-ready product (many are just fantasies to collect investor money and there won't be a product ever.) and its exaggerated claims by pointing out that the sun will have died by then and no one cares about your excel sheets anymore. And more practical limitations like missing software and devices to read and understand the contents in a much shorter time frame. I exaggerated back if you will. ;)
Denis Villeneuve nailed it years ago.
Similar concepts have been developed before, Microsoft and Southampton University were working on glass cubes with 3D laser etchings in the centre around 2015-16
(now divorced)
If you squint this is a weird shrine to a fictional marriage between Elvis and Britney Spears
I saw Shakira and that chef on YouTube who makes ornate sculptures out of chocolate and has a weird, fixed PanAm smile the whole time.
Okay yeah, now that you've said it I can see that too XD
Meh…. Japan’s been pitching holographic data storage since the early 2Ks — at least —LMK when I can buy a magic holographic zip drive and I’ll be back.
...but only one million years into it's life span the human race is gone and aliens are unwittingly melting them down for raw material.
1 million years? You mean 200 top!
That's the spirit! 👍
Well... I was trying to identify the time that the aliens would come, not that of our demise, but... point taken.
(i.e. "it" was supposed to point to the memory crystal)
This is good news from the point of view of being able to create devices that can read these crystals; as a comment on the linked site says:
Tbh my own personal use case is getting buried with all of my data and become some kind of data-“Tollund man” in the year 4000, when they dig up my data cube and study it endlessly.
I expect them to build a reading device to do this; it’s the least I would expect if they want to study the holiday I was on in Bergen, or completely misunderstand the two hotdog pictures I happen to have as some kind of fellatio training device.
“Myes, we do believe family structures were loosely organised around the remote picture beaming devices that used to be called “te levision”
I'm thinking of it the same way, and not having the readers be trade secrets but published specs is good for future digital archeologists.
For example, Dyson uses trade secrets instead of patents, so it would be harder to recreate their tech in the future.
Edit: patents not parents 🤦
It's amazing to see all the effort we all put in perfecting technology to long-term store our porn. 360TB? I'd like to order 2 please.
All of this is useless because they can't be used to replace an ssd
I'm pretty sure I still hear of people using tapes for extremely long term but not often accessed storage. This sounds, just from the title, like it could be useful for that.
Idk about "useless". But the way the article doesn't seem to want to mention the read/write speed is definitely indicative of some drawbacks to the medium. They repeatedly stress "cold storage" which could mean its a useful form of long term archive or backup for static data. Plenty of demand for that kind of information, especially in an era when real time overwriting by malicious actors and artificial engines has been fucking with historical data retention.
But its not going to replace your hard drive any time soon.
Permanent storage. Like the Wayback massive and internet archive I hope will fully take advantage of these. As well as project Gutenberg. So much else. I've been waiting for something like this for a long time
I've seen this particular revolutionary technology come by about once a year for the past two decades or so, so let's say I'm not holding my breath and I will toss this one on the large pile of "bullshit tech articles"
If it is so easy to write to, seems it would be equally easy to erase
Bro has never used a permanent marker
A little bit of rubbing alcohol and it comes right off
Good point. In my lab I've used ethanol and acetone as well.
Depends on the surface the marker was used on.
"easy if you have a diffraction-limited watt-scale laser" I guess
Intentional deletion is a lot different to entropy-caused bitrot
"a 5-inch glass platter." Found the weak point...
Ridulan crystal v0.01
Would be cool as a backup medium. Unload a bunch of warez from my main disks, store on this read-only medium taking up very little space, providing a huge collection to my media server.
Not if I have anything to do with it
So, you're telling me magnetic taps is not our real end solution? I'm not buying your new fancy ideas.
Anyone get the IO on this device? Cause I'm guessing its going to be less good than magnetic storage.
and the winner is still paper
Well, in a way that's true. You don't need any specific tech or device to read it, just your eyes.
If someone dug this thing up in a billion years, will they have the device to read it?
this isn't new, "making smaller marks on a rock" has been mankind's method for expanding data storage for thousands of years
edit - hmm, needs workshopping I guess. maybe something like: "over thousands of years, humans have refined data storage from its most primitive beginnings as marks on rocks, to its most advanced novelty, different marks on different rocks"