“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.”

  • ReallyActuallyFrankenstein@lemmynsfw.com
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    4 months ago

    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.

      • ReallyActuallyFrankenstein@lemmynsfw.com
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        4 months ago

        CD-R and CD-RW discs use different methods of data encoding, and were never advertised as having similar longevity.

        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.

  • ieatpwns@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    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

    • Zachariah@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      That’s cheap enough a small business could do long term backups for individuals and other small businesses.

    • Yggstyle@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      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

    • kalkulat@lemmy.worldOP
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      4 months ago

      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?

  • dparticiple@sh.itjust.works
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    4 months ago

    A friendly request - please de-clickbait your headlines and say what the material is (although you do mention it in your summary).

    • tate@lemmy.sdf.org
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      4 months ago

      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.

      • dparticiple@sh.itjust.works
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        4 months ago

        Ah, righto. That was an old rule in many subreddits. Seems to vary a bit by Lemmy community, though. I just cringe at clickbait!

  • Midnight Wolf@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    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.

    • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      4 months ago

      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.

      • grindemup@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        “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.

        • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          4 months ago

          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‽‽”

          • GamingChairModel@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            Honda won’t honor my 10-year powertrain warranty just because I yeeted my 2-year-old Civic off a bridge into salt water!

        • Spice Hoarder@lemmy.zip
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          4 months ago

          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.

    • nexguy@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      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.

    • arbitrary_sarcasm@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      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.

      • sem@piefed.blahaj.zone
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        4 months ago

        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.

          • sem@piefed.blahaj.zone
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            4 months ago

            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.

    • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      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.

  • sem@piefed.blahaj.zone
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    4 months ago

    How hf can you have 5D space within 3D space? This sounds like marketing bullshit.

    The 5D Memory Crystal stores data by using tiny voxels – 3D pixels – in fused silica glass, etched by femtosecond laser pulses. These voxels possess “birefringence,” meaning that their light refraction characteristics vary depending upon the polarization and direction of incoming light.

    That difference in light orientation and strength can be read in conjunction with the voxel’s location (x, y, z coordinates), allowing data to be encoded in five dimensional space.

    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.

    • AppleTea@lemmy.zip
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      4 months ago

      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…

  • AppleTea@lemmy.zip
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    4 months ago

    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.

  • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    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.

  • Sundray@lemmus.org
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    4 months ago

    Oh yeah? Well take a look at these Elder Scrolls over here.

    Wait no, not literally! 😵‍💫 🔥