Following the news spam after news spam, here is the AFP story all the submitted page and "sources" copied from: <a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hrS0Kp5RLa8lIvZ4nTCkZbttjhuw?docId=CNG.4aeae4fa36f6e7fc476fd24e5e9b2688.191" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hrS0Kp5RL...</a>
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.<p>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last longer than LPs, CDs etc, but it will do nothing at all to remedy the actual reasons these older media are being superseded.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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 <i>really</i> 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.
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:
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Future_of_the_Earth.2C_the_Solar_System_and_the_Universe" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Futu...</a>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_decay" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_decay</a>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe</a>
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. <a href="http://www.syylex.com/index.php/home_english.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.syylex.com/index.php/home_english.html</a>
Old idea. Here's a 2009 Coding Horror post about doing the same thing with paper: <a href="http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/07/the-paper-data-storage-option.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/07/the-paper-data-stor...</a>
I still remember the promises of the holographic versatile disc <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc</a> 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.<p>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.)<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microfiche" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microfiche</a><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_error_correction" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_error_correction</a>
So in a million year, people will still have "a computer with the right software" ?<p>This is useless until they find an "intuitive" way to store
the process to decode the binary data into something readable.
>Currently the size of the data that can be stored isn't known<p>Yes it is: <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/computers/glass-slivers-that-store-data-forever-unveiled-by-hitachi-20120925-26i3f.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/computers/glass-slivers-t...</a><p>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.
sounds fantastic. I will go buy an optical microscope and the software.<p>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.