Hitachi presents a storage medium that should last forever | Hacker News Reader

Hitachi presents a storage medium that should last forever

neowin.net

49 pointsmuon48 comments

Following the news spam after news spam, here is the AFP story all the submitted page and "sources" copied from: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hrS0Kp5RL...

That link won't work without a Google referrer.

Seems to work for me without sending any referrer.

Doesn't work for me even with a Google referrer. Paste into Google search, click first link, and I'm back at the Google homepage.

This seems to be the same article though: http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/computers/glass-slivers-t...

If you look starting 6 days ago, this story has been submitted 5 previous times.

re the original AP report, people aren't replacing LPs and CDs because the media are wearing out, they're replacing them because newer media have higher storage densities, are more physically convenient and in some cases because they allow higher fidelity recording.

Yes this medium will last longer than LPs, CDs etc, but it will do nothing at all to remedy the actual reasons these older media are being superseded.

Edit: I'm reminded of the old Domesday Book BBC project that recorded everything on laser discs and played the data on BBC microcomputers. The discs are still fine, but it got to the point where there were no machines left physically capable of playing them. There was a project to fix that but I don't know how it went.

The second part of your comment is interesting. Can electronics be designed in a way so that it has a very long life?

The idea - hard-code information to silicon and preserve it. e.g. Chips on PCBs that are completely encased in substrate. Provide fused power prongs and a serial port interface to this. Future systems can integrate to this to consume the data.

You just described cartridges like in C64 or some video game consoles :)

Can electronics be designed in a way so that it has a very long life?

NASA seem to be pretty good at that. I guess it's a question of cost more than anything else.

The oldest stuff NASA has out there is what, 35 years old? Hardly a "very long life". And it's floating in vacuum, which is pretty much the ideal storage environment. Making stuff last in space is much easier than on Earth (and much easier than getting it there, of course).

It seems that the high levels of radiation could make it much less than the ideal storage environment

Plus temperature extremes.

CD/DVD/BlueRays do wear out, specially if they are from cheap brands.

The coating layer just vanishes, leaving you with an unreadable piece of plastic.

I understand that, but how many of the people moving on from CDs to other storage and playback technologies are doing so for that reason? Media wear is only one reason a medium gets superseded, and not a major one. This new medium may have a role in long term archival applications, but comparing it to consumer technologies like tapes and CDs is misleading.

The data has all been recovered: There's a full implementation of the Domesday Book project on a large touch-surface table at the National Museum of Computing ( http://www.tnmoc.org/ ) at Bletchley Park, as well as a couple of the original readers.

Here's an article about the new hardware: http://www.tnmoc.org/news/news-releases/bbc-domesday-touchta...

I saw it in action on a work trip to TNMOC earlier this year: it's quite nifty.

These kinds of technologies have been tried before (and largely abandoned.) The real problem in long term data storage is figuring out how to interpret decades old binary formats for which the software no longer exists. It doesn't matter if you have a thousand perfect PDFs if Adobe has been out of business for a hundred years.

The other issue with long term data storage is that the whole advantage of using digital technologies in the first place is that data is easy to copy. Using specialty technologies like this totally nullifies that advantage.

If your goal is simply long-term data storage/archival, you'd do better to just use durable and popular media of the day, to maintain an index of your collection, and to upgrade/migrate your media and file formats regularly to keep up with the times. If you're going for really long term storage, such that might go multiple human lifespans without being needed or needing maintenance, you might as well just skip the digital to begin with.

You could potentially store them inside/along with a virtual machine image which would be capable of rendering them, and then document the crap out of the VM (which would require as few, and as simple, external interfaces as possible), such that it could be easily re-created/ported to future OSes.

I think quite a few places where continuity over decade timescales (especially in the embedded world) are storing VM images with the exact versions of various parts of the toolchain they use, to ensure compatibility.

And of course, there's plenty of precedent with things like the Hercules IBM mainframe emulator[1], as well as things like VMWare, Bochs, QEMU, etc.

I think I've come across old DOS games being re-released wrapped with dosbox or something similar as a compat layer for modern OSes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_%28emulator%29

Just to be a smartass: I guess it will last for a significant timespan, but not actually "forever" unless Hitachi also finds out how to reverse entropy or how to leave this universe. If they don't a lot of stuff might get their data, like proton-decay, the upcoming black hole era or the fact that everything is liquid on very large timescales. Further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Futu... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_decay http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe

It's for small values of "forever".

Nothing last forever... except hyperbole.

The stars and Galaxies died and snuffed out, and space grew black after ten trillion years of running down.

One by one Man fused with AC, each physical body losing its mental identity in a manner that was somehow not a loss but a gain.

Man's last mind paused before fusion, looking over a space that included nothing but the dregs of one last dark star and nothing besides but incredibly thin matter, agitated randomly by the tag ends of heat wearing out, asymptotically, to the absolute zero.

Man said, "AC, is this the end? Can this chaos not be reversed into the Universe once more? Can that not be done?"

AC said, "Hang on, I have the answer inscribed on a Hitachi glass tablet somewhere."

-- Isaac Asimov, "The Last Tablet"

How about a disc that is made of glass, has a capacity of a DVD and can be read by standard dvd players and can be bought today, for a mere of €160? THIS is amazing. http://www.syylex.com/index.php/home_english.html

The reflective layer is still made of metal and the two layers are glued together. You have to take the maker's words on how durable those actually are.

Well, sure - but even if the reflective layer loosens, you still have the glass layer - then it would be the same as the hitachi concept: read the glass pits with a miroscope. Or add a new reflective layer.

And much more useful than Hitachis. What is HItachi's storage capacity/density? Read rate? Any useful information at all? Vaporware.

Old idea. Here's a 2009 Coding Horror post about doing the same thing with paper: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/07/the-paper-data-stor...

I still remember the promises of the holographic versatile disc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc backed by Hitachi as well, and apparently the company went bankrupt in 2010 :(

So it is 21st century digital microfiche? Clever. I do know museums will probably line up for this stuff - standard CD-ROMs start to rot after 10 years and DVDs are better but relatively untested.

I wonder how much FEC is built into them. (In other words, what is the biggest scratch you could put into it without losing data.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microfiche

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_error_correction

So in a million year, people will still have "a computer with the right software" ?

This is useless until they find an "intuitive" way to store the process to decode the binary data into something readable.

Sounds great - but maybe I'll wait until it can be done on a material thats not incredibly brittle and thus easy to accidentally break...

Like pyrex?

Edit: Like borosilicate glass?

Pyrex is a brand. The material you are referring to is borosilicate glass.

>Currently the size of the data that can be stored isn't known

Yes it is: http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/computers/glass-slivers-t...

The density is 40MB/in².

Maybe the medium will last longer, but isn't "If you have a computer with the right software and an optical microscope hooked up to it" a big part of the data decay problem on floppy disks etc.? Even if the data is there, it's useless without the right software/hardware to read it.

If it's actual visual dots on the glass, it sounds like you'd just need to figure out how to get a good enough photograph of the thing to see the dots in and spend an afternoon whipping up an image processing script in Python to convert the dots to binary code. This sounds a lot simpler than whatever would be involved in setting up the apparatus to read bits of volatile magnetic media where you'd have to interact more closely with the media, be more mindful of not accidentally destroying the stored data and rely on much less intuitive physics than looking at a thing through a microscope for the recovery process.

Those are good point. I guess I was more curious about how the data is stored — say someone 100 years from now picks one of these up and wants to read the data. Will the format in which it's stored prevent them from doing so?

A very simple format would be regular fixed dot patterns (⣿) corresponding to bytes, spaced a apart a bit. Then it's the user's responsibility to be sensible and encode stuff without too clever compression. This wouldn't guard against trying to read the image sideways or upside down though.

If you get a disc with ASCII text and can read the bits a 100 years from now, even if ASCII coding is lost to history, as long as you can figure out the thing is supposed to contain writing that uses 8 bits per letter, and still know English, a trivial pattern analysis gets you the code table you can use to read the text.

The plaintext can then be used to describe the formats for whatever other data the disk may contain.

Makes me think of the write-only storage medium used in space ship black boxes in the Gap series by Steven Donaldsson.

They're just punch cards made on glass.

CD:s are just punch cards made on aluminium.

And that's the difference. Glass is much, much more durable than both paper and aliminium.

In a fire there is little difference.

sounds fantastic. I will go buy an optical microscope and the software.

Honestly, after all this research is the best Hitachi could come up with? How about a marble stone with some dots on it? They seem to last a long time too.

It may last up to 3 billion years... unless the glass gets scratched. Oopsie.

Can they rewrite stuff on glass? Or is it a one way write?

I can imagine that one could melt the surface a bit and then rewrite it.

I wonder what would be the density of such storage

what if glass breaks ??

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