10,000TB storage cartridges could become mainstream by 2030
techradar.com
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No. My understanding from the video is that it's a write-once solution, so if anything it would just be a replacement for tape backup, so not sure why it's comparing it to hard drives and SSDs.
My understanding is that every drive is write-once and once full it doesn’t change. Eventually, if most of the file data/blocks stored on a drive are deleted by users, the whole drive is erased and re-written.
That said, while being write-once only isn’t a blocker, my guess is seek latency will still prevent this tech from replacing spinning disks.
If the deletion is meant as a security feature, then you can "delete" a file by making it encrypted and deleting it's decryption key.
If a cloud storage provider doesn't charge for infinite version, that's not very different from offering "unlimited storage" plans: They have pretty good statistics of how much the average user really uses on an "unlimited" plan and will price their services accordingly. Revision history just adds another term to the same equation.
In the early days at one such provider I know that garbage collecting deleted user files was considered a relatively low priority cost-wise.
If you have enough capacity, write-once is enough. Indeed, MLC SSDs can often be rewritten a couple hundred times. Consumer HDDs are specified for 180TB written per year.
Would you rather have:
* A HDD that can store 22TB and can be written 180TB per year for 5 years until the helium leaks out (900TB total writes).
* A 10,000 TB storage cartridge that can initially store 10,000TB, but as you "erase" stuff the capacity falls.
The latter can tolerate 1,000 TB "erased" per year for 5 years and still store 5,000TB at the end.
Correct, but the primary reason those technologies have shorter retention times is because they are rewritable. It's an apples-to-oranges comparison that doesn't make any sense. It would make sense if the article was clear that this was about improving archival storage options, and then comparing to things like CDs/DVDs, tape, and film.
* HDDs fail, or these days helium leaks out at end of lifespan.
* SSDs slowly have the data leak out of floating cells.
For example, backing up photos is annoying. Hard drives are unreliable, cloud storage can go away, and tape is expensive.
It's a hassle at beginning to create the accounts but you can create a program that has an embedded browser (I use chromium) and then you can automate the tasks. Basically you just simulate keyboard and mouse over the chromium surface and the vendors are none the wise. I keep my info of each account into a local SQLite DB and the program does the automation, requiring minimal interaction from me. So the only real backup I need is that SQLite file. Rest is scattered around in the cloud with none having access to it but me.
Retrieval costs are pretty awful but helluva lot better than losing everything.
Also Google Drive for Desktop. I'm sure there's an equivalent for S3 but I don't know if it works as well.
Were I Google or AWS, I would buy them out immediately. If only to deny the other from getting potentially cheaper archival storage. Or even to keep the rest of the market reliant upon tapes. Want long term data storage? Only the cloud has the real technology for that.
[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-sil...
It’s high-density ceramic punch cards!
I vividly remember multiple archiving products announced, all disappeared, somehow. Same with "groundbreaking" battery solutions.
They reveal that their future system will use 5 um thick tape (good luck! that's half the thickness of Saran Wrap) so I assume the claimed TB/cm2 density includes a bunch of layers. That's fine, but the claims about 5000 year lifetime on 5 um polymer tapes with nm thick ceramic are pretty extraordinary (requiring extraordinary evidence.)
Suppose a flyby mission records a couple of these cartidges and flies back to Earth. Assume 3 years round trip (1 there, 1 record, 1 back).
That's Nx80,000,000,000,000 bits in 3 years.
Or Nx10E+16 bits / 9E+7 seconds.
Or about a gigabit per second effective rate per cartridge.
Not bad. Psyche (our best optical link from deep space), has 2 megabits/s peak rate.
I would have imagined that we could upgrade the communication equipment on a space probe much more easily than we could add fuel for a return trip.
Yup; 300km vs 600000000km. Less than a trillionth of the power comes through for the same emitted power and apertures.
So, you end up having to make apertures much larger and point much, much more precisely. You can also increase laser power some, but that's a small part of your solution.
(Or, of course, you can reduce speeds to have more energy per bit).
I don't think anyone is serious about shipping back physical data from deep space, but the station wagons full of tape thought experiment is always fun.
An on site (orbital) station could run all the models and algorithms and analysis you want on the gobs of imagery and spectral maps / cubes you can gather in real time.
Analysis is an excellent compression algorithm. But, you'd want the raw data eventually, and that means either trickling back 0.1%, or waiting a few years for the full set.
What’s your sense about SETI or the Fermi paradox, if a signal becomes so vastly diluted just within our solar system?
I’m sure the SETI people have thought about this and made various calculations, but with the inverse square law and the vastness of space, maybe “needle in a haystack” is optimistic.
Is it the wrong model to think that anything but maybe a galaxy scale civilization is just going to have it’s signals more or less totally dissolved into seemingly random cosmic fluctuations, relative to our sensors/receivers at least?
Integrating a long time to see if there's a signal there above background levels is maybe not so hard (especially if it was intended for detection in this scenario).
The big issue for data recovery is energy per symbol. If you can integrate for hours, that can still be a lot of "special photons" (whether they're on a weird radio frequency or light wavelength).
Of course, this isn't realistic, but the "station wagon full of tapes" thing is always fun.
I didn't watch the hour-long presentations though.
> https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/dna-storage...
> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dna-the-ultimate-...
I think the size of audio files is a great example of why storage needs won't infinitely grow. Although we have orders of magnitude more storage space these days, audio files haven't really gotten any bigger since the CD era. If anything, they have gotten smaller as better compression algorithms were invented.
The thing is, human hearing only has so much resolution. Sure, we could be sampling audio at 64-bits with a 1MHz sample rate these days if we wanted to, but there's just no reason to. Similarly with pictures: if you can't see any pixels standing a foot away from a poster-sized print, why bother increasing the resolution any more?
The big consumer-range data hogs are 1) video torrents, and 2) games. Both of them have a natural upper bound due to human perception. They might still grow by an order of magnitude or two, but it won't be much more before it just becomes pointless.
Enterprise is a bit of a different story, of course - especially now that AI is rapidly increasing the value of data.
For video games there is a huge "storage waste" factor. A factor that I think is more important than the human perception limit. If you look at modern games you can probably throw away double digit percentage signs of most games if a capable team would have the time to optimize for disk space. It's simply not done because it has little advantage. I think this wastage factor will scale with the complexity of video games regardless of graphical fidelity.
4k family videos would like to have a word with you.
4k video * lifetime is greater storage requirements than available to consumers today.
You miss the point, sadly.
Yeah storage is getting larger and cheaper but modern cameras/phones/etc take photos that are way larger than they used to do.
My first digital camera in like 2001 or so could only take either 20 "large" (640x480) bitmap photos or 80 "small" pictures, taking a few tens of kilobytes each at most.
My 2022 iphone se takes high quality pictures that are easily in the 7-8MB range (i just checked).
So yeah, disks keep getting larger, but so does the media.
Photos are however constrained by physics. There are only so many photons captured in a certain area in a given time, so no matter whether we talk about the tiny lenses and sensors of smartphones or the much larger versions on dedicated cameras there's a very real limit (and phones are pretty close to the limits imposed by their sensor size)
My first computer stored data on audio cassette tapes. When I started college, the new hot machine in the server room was a DEC VAX 11/780 running VMS.
For nostalgia purposes, I have a virtual VAX 11/780 running VMS in my phone, it only takes about 3 GB. I don't do much else with the phone, so I have plenty of room left over.
I can imagine ways to fill up a petabyte personally... but not much past that.
The thing is, there are only 24 hours in a day. There is a hard upper limit to the amount of content you can consume. You're not going to be downloading 1000 hours worth of content every single day, just because it is physically impossible to use it.
But, in this case... I have a hard time believing in a "Thousand Year Write" ;-)
There's no way that something that thin and ceramic isn't going to somehow become embrittled, or fracture, in 100 or more years.
This begs the question: on which performance measures does it fail to compete? Supposedly not on capacity.
Read speed? Write speed? Power use? Cost? Sadly they don't say.
I don’t even feel too bad about this one, because it’s so easily misunderstood. May as well let it go.
> Beg the question first appeared in English in a 1581 text of Aristotle’s Prior Analytics, and this translation has had semantic ripples down the centuries. The phrase is opaque because its use of beg is really not a good fit – it’s no wonder people have interpreted it ‘wrongly’. Had the original English translation been assume the conclusion or take the conclusion for granted instead of beg the question, there would be far less uncertainty and vexation.
> 269 out of 300 examples of begs the question used it to mean raises the question, more or less. That’s 90%. This figure show its huge predominance in contemporary discourse. Outside of formal debates and philosophical or semi-philosophical contexts, the traditional meaning of beg the question is hardly ever used. The evade the question use is rarer still.
> This is why insisting on the original use, as prescriptivists do, risks confusing many readers. It’s not a practical or constructive stance. Correctness changes with sufficient usage, yet sticklers still refuse to accept there can be more than one way to use this phrase. By adopting the tenets of one phrase → one meaning and original meaning = true meaning, they have painted themselves into a corner.
> The expression is ‘skunked’, to use Garner’s term. Grammarphobia agrees that it’s ‘virtually useless’, and Mark Liberman recommends avoiding it altogether. In formal use I advise caution for this reason, but in everyday use you’ll encounter little or no difficulty or criticism with the raise the question usage.
Additionally the LangLog link shows that "begging the question" is a result of badly translating a less than perfect translation. Greek to Latin and Latin to English.
> Some medieval translator (does anyone know who?) decided to translate Aristotle's "assuming the conclusion" into petitio principii. In classical Latin, petitio meant "an attack, a blow; a requesting, beseeching; a request, petition". But in post-classical Latin petitio was also used to mean "a postulate"
> Why begging the question? Well, petitio (from peto) in this context means "assuming" or "postulating", but it has other (and older) meanings, from which the notion of logical postulate or assumption arose: "requesting, beseeching". So rather than use some fancy Latinate term like postulate or assume, people decided to use the plain English word beg[ging] as a sort of calque for the "requesting" sense of petitio. But even in the 16th century, I think, it was a bit odd to warn people against presupposing the end-point of their argument by telling them not to beg their conclusion.
If enough people make one particular "mistake", eventually that mistake becomes the "correct" usage. See "literally" as an example:
> The phrase "begs the question" is also commonly used in an entirely unrelated way to mean "prompts a question" or "raises a question", although such usage is sometimes disputed.[4]
but will try to refrain from doing so in future...
:P
It could be that the "writer" costs $1 mil right now, so might only make sense in a data center.
I saw writable bluray disks recommended as they would last for decades, however 25GB for a standard disk is by far not enough for a photo collection, and many disks gets clunky.
I'm willing to bet you on that, it's a lock. Easiest money possible.
One can dream though....