New hard disk write head analytical technology can increase hard disk capacities

I've thought about the same thing, but I suspect the main hurdle to overcome would be recognizing it as a data storage device in the first place. If one had an inkling of that use, then some future archeologist wouldn't need to know much about the electronics or controller. They might image the magnetic fields of the platters at 1000x the resolution and sensitivity of the drives original read/write electronics, then treat it like past archeologists might have treated a tablet with cuneiform.

Ive had this idea kicking around for over a decade to make ceramic or granite slabs of sufficient dimensions as demonstrated by artifacts found from archeological digs so as to withstand elements and time and etch the surfaces of sufficient depth so as to maintain their features and then have an analog projection apparatus that uses sunlight so as to magnify the feature, also constructed of similar means. Design the components all open source buy plots in cemeteries around the world and any where else that wont be subducted via techtonics in any time soon and just bury wikipedia or whatever else. The Long now meets that scene in the time machine basically. All in the hopes of confronting this exact scenario you’ve outlined.

Off-topic question: has anyone used M-Disk BD disks to make long-term backups? I got recently interested in it after reading that US Navy tested it in Arizona and found it to be the only medium without read errors after the tests. But that was apparently more than 5 years ago and I stopped hearing about disk drives around then. Is it an unreasonable idea to buy a USB writer drive and give it a go?

Add video codecs (and the operating systems they run on) on top and you know why the library of congress decided lasering movies onto film (3 black and white rolls, one for each color channel) is the best storage format for something as simple as moving images and sound.

A cool project that responds to or takes account of this (trying to make a storage artifact that someone plausibly could learn to use without most of our technological knowledge) is https://rosettaproject.org/. It's a somewhat high-density archival storage medium that tries to give a clear hint of what it contains and how to read it, just requiring optical magnification.

Of course, that means its overall capacity is many orders of magnitude less than the hard drive you describe.

This is a fascinating thought experiment.

I think equally as interesting an experiment would be to imagine if an alien race found this drive, instead of a future human.

I imagine, to them, it would be like a modern day auto mechanic admiring all of the analog wonders of an antique car from the 1950's. Even though they may have no experience with the technology they are probably able to recognize the roots of the technology and perhaps are able to quickly deduce how it works with simple observation.

> Some days I dream of a distant future in which an average being (human or otherwise) comes in contact with [today's technology].

> “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” -Arthur C. Clarke

That is precisely the premise of the "science & sorcery" genre or hyper-sci-fi as I like to call it, where relatively primitive people regularly stumble upon ancient technology that they can't hope to comprehend but use it for its incidental effects.

For example a smartphone may be good as a compact light source but not much else, or a hard drive for its shiny sharp discs and magnets.

See the Numenera RPG, set a billion (!) years into Earth's future after several civilizations have risen and collapsed: http://numenera.com

Would a hard drive even last that long.

I hope that we have something, something like the seed bank which saves the most important data of the past. Would kind of suck if no one had a SATA in 500 years though

That's true, although the technological literacy to make them might disappear. Their disappearance could also have other knock-on effects in other industries, like shrinking the market for high-precision air bearing spindles, magnetic testers, lapping machines, and so on.

The HDD market will it disappear for a very long time - decades away. Remarkably, with energy assist technologies, write density improvements will actually accelerate over the coming decade.

It's the same with internal combustion engines. And on a smaller scale, when that bit of custom code you wrote is obsolete because someone else wrote a better library.

I find it a bit sad and hard to let go of such things. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

MEMS based storage is a thing, though the most common architecture appears to be basically a magnetic system with a very large number of read/write heads (I think: the summary papers I read were extremely vague on the actual read/write/storage mechanism). The issue mostly seems to be the storage density isn't very good: the actual size of a bit is still quite large and the read/write heads also take up a fairly significant amount of space, but throughput is potentially huge because of the many heads operated in parallel. MEMS tends not to operate at the atomic scale, features of the mechanisms are usually a fair bit larger (and mechanisms which make break/make contact are generally difficult to make reliable and long-living in MEMS: surfaces will tend to stick together when they touch and rolling/sliding interfaces will wear away quickly. Almost all industrial MEMs use involves structures which only move by flexing, not the pretty looking gear systems which tend to get media coverage).

I just bought a 14TB drive for 250 canadian - equivalent to $0.0141 USD per gb. According to a backblaze blog from 3 years ago [1], they were at $0.024 per gb four years ago.

So they certainly havent halved, but the prices are definitely still dropping.

[1] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/