5D ‘Superman memory’ crystal could lead to unlimited lifetime data storage

Supposing it's not, it would be useful only for big archives : you want to use the full 360 Tb available, because the crystal can be expensive. An average user don't have 360 Tb to write everyday.

If the crystal was cheap, or if you could build smaller crystals that store less Tb , it would be different.

As lifeformed said, nothing is said about the reading speed.

It would be disruptive, same as every other couple of orders magnitude storage in the past and in the future.

ISPs would probably be pressured into finally going big or going home with their bandwidth, too, which is a good thing.

Instead, longevity and data density is emphasised, and application for long-term storage. Sounds like a replacement for tape.

…or it could go the other way and they would be able to offer "eternal cumulative storage" for a low fee. This tech will be big and expensive before it's small and ubiquitous. There may be a first mover advantage to being able to afford the early models.

It's well known that several hundred patents a year get swept up under a "secrecy order" and disappear. But most of these are from a) defense contractors working on military systems and b) nuclear research.

Occasionally (maybe 20 per year), an inventor unaffiliated with the government will attempt to get a patent, and have it get swept up under a secrecy order.

But a new type of data storage? I would surely think the government would let this get developed and refined in the private arena.

Cutting edge development is a sinkhole for massive amounts of money. Just think how many hard drives a billion dollars could buy? I don't think it makes sense economically, when there is a commonly available alternative.

What worries me more is the possibility that the oil industry has spies with control over this "secrecy order". The fabled "200 mile per gallon carburetor" type stuff.

It is quite easy for me to believe that a trillion dollar industry would attempt to protect itself by any means possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasicrystal

Going by the same logic you could store all entropy of the universe in an infinitely small cube which is not possible unless the universe had zero entropy.

And is this lossless or lossy compression?

Here's a stack exchange question with a good answer (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4716116/what-is-the-best-...)

> If file sizes could be specified accurate to the bit, for any file size N, there would be precisely 2^(N+1)-1 possible files of N bits or smaller. In order for a file of size X to be mapped to some smaller size Y, some file of size Y or smaller must be mapped to a file of size X or larger. The only way lossless compression can work is if some possible files can be identified as being more probable than others; in that scenario, the likely files will be shrunk and the unlikely ones will grow.

As a simple example, suppose that one wishes to store losslessly a file in which the bits are random and independent, but instead of 50% of the bits being set, only 33% are. One could compress such a file by taking each pair of bits and writing "0" if both bits were clear, "10" if the first bit was set and the second one not, "110" if the second was set and the first not, or "111" if both bits were set. The effect would be that each pair of bits would become one bit 44% of the time, two bits 22% of the time, and three bits 33% of the time. While some strings of data would grow, others would shrink; the ones that shrank would--if the probability distribution was as expected--outnumber those that grow (4/9 files would shrink by a bit, 2/9 would stay the same, and 3/9 would grow).

If you mean "all the data" as in "all the important data we actually care about", that's been feasible for decades.

So basically, any new or exciting sense of the question leads strongly to the answer, "No".

I'm sure if the technology is commercialized, someone will come up with a cute nonsensical name for it, but I can absolutely see a subhead somewhere saying "Advanced Five-dimensional storage technology!", just because it sounds cool.

  Google's 2007 study found, based on a large field sample 
  of drives, that actual annualized failure rates (AFRs) for
  individual drives ranged from 1.7% for first year drives to
  over 8.6% for three-year old drives

Memory, of course, has other problems:

http://www.ewh.ieee.org/r6/scv/rl/articles/ser-050323-talk-r...

[1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/05/shaping_...

The internet makes that unnecessary.