Hitachi Says Data Lives Forever in Quartz Glass

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Hitachi? Oh yeah, they bought out the IBM Deathstar drives!

When I wiped and recycled OLD HDs - (Toss and Hammer) the 60GB IBM drive made a strange noise... opened it up, shattered glass. Oh yeah, the "stardust" drives... they used glass platters!

Seriously thou - for long-term PERM. storage - glass is the best... needs a bit more compression and using layers will help out as well.
 
"This data can seemingly exist forever, enduring extreme temperatures and hostile conditions without degrading... at least until the sun begins to die and expend to consume the earth, that is."

Or until someone drops it.
 
For those who care a bit more about longevity & reliability, try and find Enterprise SATA or SAS.
Aria in the UK is currently offering system-pulled Hitachi Enterprise 1TB SATA for a crazy 46 UKP
each, so I bought a few, including four for an AE system I'm building for someone (they'll be
connected via an LSI PCIe 9240-4i in RAID10). Meanwhile, recently I won a 1TB SAS disk and
a 1TB Enterprise SATA on eBay for good prices (items 290773587685 and 170907945266).

For Seagate, the 'consumer' models are the ones whose model names end in AS, while the
Enterprise model names end in NS. I know a movie company that uses hundreds of NS drives;
one time they were sent a bunch of AS drives by mistake, but nobody noticed - almost all
of the AS drives were dead within a week, they just can't handle intensive use. If you're looking
for backup storage and/or reliability, Enterprise SATA or SAS is best; they do cost more new, but
hunt around, sometimes they're available at decent prices, like the ones from Aria.

If you prefer something more along the lines of tape, consider Ultrium. Even Ultrium3 holds quite
a lot of data. The drives are frequently on eBay.

Ian.

PS. SAS PCIe cards cost diddly on eBay.

 
[citation][nom]belardo[/nom]Well... I converted my entire VHS and CDs collections into digital. ...[/citation]

I'll be starting a similar venture soon (hundreds of documentaries on VHS); gave you a thumbs-up for dedication. 8)

Ian.

 
[citation][nom]_Cosmin_[/nom]Why it need to be mechanical? Can be optical very easy. In case you don`t know the CD/DVD/BD laser cut micro holes in material which then are read back by another laser.[/citation]
Not exactly. The laser burns tiny pits into the surface of the metallic dye printed on the disc. The pits are somewhat like Morse Code, with long and short pits representing ones and zeroes.

This technology is fundamentally different, as it requires utilizing a large number of layers to achieve useful densities, and does not use the metallic dye required to make optical discs work.

So unfortunately, no, you can't apply optical disc laser technology to this problem at the moment.
 
This will be great for the Library of Congress. They have all these recordings on tapes that are slowly decaying and will be lost forever. There was an acrticle about it somewhere on the web a a year ago or so. They were looking for something to last a long time. Everyone was talking about vinyl records for audio backup as a record from 1910 if stored right will sound just as good today as it did then. But then you still had to deal with warping, pressing and size... and that didn't help much for pictures and videos. This is really cool stuff, even at 40mb a square, using the standard MP3 format for an pirated audiobook (24kbps) you could store up to 4 hours of debates from the 1912 elections...
 
I can't believe nobody made any mention of Babylon 5 yet. I'm not even into Sci-Fi and I knew about crystals being used to store data on that show.
 
Didn't Superman use these. He was sent to earth with this technology right.... before..... uh. I think we reeeally need to start up the space program again.
 
Check out m-disc (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-disc). An already production system. No, don't have stock nor any other vested interest in them... but use their technology.
 
Check out M-Disc.
Click to expand...

4d91b522553bd61e179ed0ab6cc639a4.jpg
 
Apple will surely sue Hitachi. Apple will claim they invented transparency.
 
[citation][nom]A Bad Day[/nom]There one problem though😀o you really think an average joe is going to waste hours transferring data from VHS tapes or CDs to Blu-ray or some other format?[/citation]
This is for enterprise level most likely, your argument is flawed.
 
Even if I never get an immortal "quartz drive", I just like knowing that the technology is technically possible.

I love sci-fi stories that have post-humans or super AIs that live for millions of years. Usually these are dismissed as impossible because no brain (organic or digital) could last that long. These real-world discoveries help make implausible sci-fi a little more plausible.
 
Cool stuff happening lately, like last week I think it was, they had a short article about a quantum computer being built in Australia.

On a side note, I'm a fan of Hitatchi drives, mine last forever, but they are very loud maybe with these glass hard drives I'll finally not be able to hear my hard drive going to work all the time 😀
 
Can they read the mystacl crystal skulls now? isnt information stored on them ?
 
‘Real’ computing use doesn’t revolve around video games. I can see this having massive benefits for long-term data backup and archiving/storage.
We need a new dependable secure long-term storage option now. A large percentage of places still totally depend on some form of tape based system for long-term storage and backup. We currently don’t have a solid-state media that is suitable and long-term stable enough for this task.
 
i have a question, if standard magnetic disks's data degrades over time due to earths magnetic field and the only way to keep safe is to continually keep powered up (which still adds wear & tear), arent solid state techs supposed to be the solution? if no moving parts and no magnetics isnt it supposed to preseved data indefinitely? or do solid state tech still have preservation issues?
 
All current (and past) solid-state media will/does degrade through time.
Retro-game collectors are already becoming very aware of this, as some cartridge (ROM-CHIP) based games for the older systems (late 70’s early 80’s) are already becoming unusable through degradation.
 
0.08 inches... Either adopt some logical system of measurement or kindly include a conversion so that the rest of the world (6.5 billion people) won't have to waste their time googling it......
 
rev1
...enduring extreme temperatures and hostile conditions on earth without degrading... at least until the sun begins to die and expand to consume the earth.

rev2
enduring extreme temperatures and hostile conditions of space without degrading... at least until the universe begins to disintegrate the matter.

rev3
enduring extreme temperatures and hostile conditions including the end of the universe without degrading... at least until somebody breaks it.
 
[citation][nom]_Cosmin_[/nom]Why it need to be mechanical? Can be optical very easy. In case you don`t know the CD/DVD/BD laser cut micro holes in material which then are read back by another laser. Why cant a laser read the dots in this quartz ??[/citation]

Um, a mechanical motor moves the laser. A motor rotates the material. Two mechanical devices.
 
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