On the '5D' claim: "The information encoding inside the disc is realised in five dimensions - the size and orientation of the nanostructures, in additional to their three-dimensional positions inside the disc." Those nanostructures are generated by a laser which alters the polarization of the material.<p>Is that even five dimensional? Polarization is one more, but can each point in space contribute to an arbitrary (or even just large) number of different polarization? I do not see where the fifth might come from.<p>The billion year claim does not seem to be validated, unlike similar research which used tungsten and silicon carbide[1], i.e. two different materials. The million/billion year durability was verified by substituting long periods of time with higher temperatures, i.e. heating the storage medium, and then checking the error rate.<p>[1]: <a href="https://doc.utwente.nl/74827/1/Vries2010MME.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://doc.utwente.nl/74827/1/Vries2010MME.pdf</a> / <a href="https://www.utwente.nl/en/news/!/2013/10/141415/a-mega-to-giga-year-storage-medium-can-outlive-the-human-race" rel="nofollow">https://www.utwente.nl/en/news/!/2013/10/141415/a-mega-to-gi...</a> (not peer reviewed?)
I guess the real problem with all such storage media is that, OK, you may encode your message in a certain way- but how do you know that anyone who comes across it will be able to read it?<p>How do you figure out that you need to look at nanosctructures inside a chunk of glass (or whatever) and that there's a message in there stored in a certain encoding?<p>As a way to preserve technological and scientific knowledge in particular, it's a bit pointless. You need to already possess the technology and the science to a) discover the message and b) decipher it.
Oh crap! Those holographic storage cartridges I've been expecting for a a dozen years have been obsoleted by a new storage tech that will never come to market either.<p>Hopefully ibm will soon start to market their 3D write with lasers in gel like substance that will replace hard drives in ten years as they announced circa 2002-2003 .<p>Maybe not, and this new media release is no different than the others breakthrough storage tech we hear on a regular basis but are never turned into a reality.<p>What good would a media that last billions of years when 50 years later there is not a device able to read those discs ?
If a proprietary format then it will lack the documentation to be able to build a device to read the disc and interface with the computers of 2060.
If an open format and standard then how to keep the specs along with the discs as storing it on the discs would defeat its purpose.<p>Hopefully some investors will burn some money in this tech that will never come to light for consumers and will not keep up to its overhyped claims.
Several commenters here protest that the information might not be readable by any devices 50 years from now. But the application of the tech isn't a new media player. It's preserving the literature of our civilization across potential dark ages. If future civilizations discover these media, they'll easily discern that they contain encoded information, and crack the code. Imagine we were able to recover indestructible, encoded books from the library of Alexandria. Cryptographers would soon discover the code.<p>The intent isn't to illuminate the dark ages when it might be impossible to decode the texts. The intent is to preserve for a time beyond the dark ages, when knowledge and culture return.
It <i>sounds</i> nice. But I have been fooled before. During my training I found a paper on IBM joining some company to create a "HD-ROM", using gallium ions instead of a Laser, which supposedly would have stored some 150 GB on a medium the size of a CD or DVD, and that mediumd could been literally anything, rock, iron, a diamond, whatever, ... but apparently, it never came to pass.