New 'Stone-Like' Optical Disc That Lasts Forever?

H

HardOCP News

[H] News
Joined
Dec 31, 1969
Messages
0
This new "stone-like" optical disc that lasts forever sounds a little too good to be true. If it wasn't for the fact that Hitachi-LG Data storage was involved, I wouldn't have believed it myself. Thanks to Samson4EiT and Joe S. for the link.

Start-up Millenniata and Hitachi-LG Data Storage plan to soon release a new optical disc and read/write player that will store movies, photos or any other data forever. The data can be accessed using any current DVD or Blu-ray player. Millenniata calls the product the M-Disc, and the company claims you can dip it in liquid nitrogen and then boiling water without harming it. It also has a U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) study backing up the resiliency of its product compared to other leading optical disc competitors.
Click to expand...
 
Ok, so you have a disc that can basically last forever right, so what happens in 150-200 years or more after the players are long long gone?
 
Media development has been focused entirely on increasing performance and capacity, no matter the cost in durability. I think we're at a point now where performance and capacity is good enough, but the media is so very fragile. If you think CDs and DVDs are durable, just put them in any environment other than room temperature for a few years.
 
STrooperTK421 said:
Ok, so you have a disc that can basically last forever right, so what happens in 150-200 years or more after the players are long long gone?
Click to expand...

If you're having to retrieve data from 150-200 year old archives then you have ALOT of other problems to deal with besides whether you can read the discs or not.
 
STrooperTK421 said:
Ok, so you have a disc that can basically last forever right, so what happens in 150-200 years or more after the players are long long gone?
Click to expand...

Electronics makers seem to be finally learning a lesson about making media backwards compatible. USB is the best example of this; the latest USB 3.0 is still able to read USB 1.0 that was developed in the mid-1990s. Blu-ray players can still play DVD and CDs.
 
How can they be destroyed? Any good data storage medium needs a good destruction path.
 
Optical discs...really? I filed mine away with my old floppy's. Let them go...:eek:
 
Forver eh? Entropy is a bitch. In a few trillion years at the heat-death of the universe when there are only photons streaming away into nothingness something tells me these won't be around.
 
The irony is, we take a thousand times more photos than our parents did, but their photos will outlast ours.
 
STrooperTK421 said:
Ok, so you have a disc that can basically last forever right, so what happens in 150-200 years or more after the players are long long gone?
Click to expand...

I don't think that is really that relevant. firstly cas in that timeframe you'll be dead and your data likely obsolete. if such media is truly that resilient then your data will be safe(r) until you require to transfer it to a newer media format. not to mention in that timeframe likely that you'll have to update the data containers themselves as the programs that wrote them would no longer be compatible with any os compatible with the future hardware and if new versions of the software do exist then likely they'd've dropped support for such an archaic file format.

the key here is that digital has verbatim replication and with this media degradation won't occur over time. this isn't like copying your old vhs collection over to dvd with quality being lost to degradation to the original media and lossy replication and encoding.

but anyways i believe they said the same thing when CDs came to the market and they were shithouse. i'll believe it when i see it.
 
King of Heroes said:
If you're having to retrieve data from 150-200 year old archives then you have ALOT of other problems to deal with besides whether you can read the discs or not.
Click to expand...

Like what? We routinely retrieve environmental observation data which is 100-120 years old. Some of it only exists in original field books.

Honestly, part of science and research is the requirement to create data products which can last hundreds of years so that generations to come have a better shot at forming a more complete picture of how Earth / Space works.
 
Holy CRAP I am just blown away by how much press this thing is getting all of a sudden. I worked on it at the beginning of last year before I changed jobs. It's interesting but holy moses it's not the most amazing thing since sliced bread that everyone is making it out to be.
 
A recordable media that lasts forever without losing data is the most amazing thing since sliced bread!
And since it's compatible with DVD players, I know I'd be able to read it for as long as I need to.
I knew there was a future in clay tablets, just make them round!

It's very low capacity, but on the other hand, that's enough for an individual use, to store personal data, source code and other important pieces of work.
At enterprise level, I am not sure how usable such a small capacity media can be, at least until they upgrade to BD 50 GB capacity.
The current BD-R optical solution has a very low life expectancy compared to CDs or DVDs. The LRH media with organic dye is even worse, it starts losing data weeks after being written.
 
Have you all forgotten the lies about CDs lasting 100 years? The manufacturers kept reducing the expected life until they just stopped talking about it.

I've had write once CDs and DVDs that died within two years. If these things will be reliable for even twenty years, that would be a big deal. We'll see.
 
Zangmonkey said:
How can they be destroyed? Any good data storage medium needs a good destruction path.
Click to expand...

You should be able to shred them still...it's not like they can't be broken...it's just that the data doesn't wear away under normal use, right?
 
TheArTcher said:
I've had write once CDs and DVDs that died within two years. If these things will be reliable for even twenty years, that would be a big deal. We'll see.
Click to expand...

This.

If the media is good for at least 20 years (>99% chance everything will be readable), and cheap enough, then I'd start trusting DVD media again. Otherwise I'll stick to multiple, large and cheap SATA drives stored in multiple locations.
 
STrooperTK421 said:
Ok, so you have a disc that can basically last forever right, so what happens in 150-200 years or more after the players are long long gone?
Click to expand...

Well, if the media is actually that durable then the readers will not be long gone. Here's why:

I don't think folks quite grasp the magnitude of the issue here: unlike previous generations we are generating huge volumes of data, much of it valuable to future generations, and we have yet to devise an archival solution that matches the simple book or photograph in longevity.

Case in point: "Restoring the Moon" an effort by huge nerds and NASA gray beards to recover data that was thought to be lost: http://www.space.com/6110-restoring-moon-lunar-orbiter-images-recovered.html

Read that. They had to rebuild vintage tape drives. And with modern processing get better images out of the original data than was possible back in the 1960s. That's amazing. But it should not be the way things are going forward.

TL/DR: as a society we need a long lasting, standardized digital archival solution.
 
From the space.com article:

This photo provided by NASA shows Earth as seen by Lunar Orbiter 1 on Aug. 23, 1966, from a distance of 240,000 miles. This image is part of a larger image restored by NASA and the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project from 42 year old data tapes. The old moon never looked this good before. Mankind's first up-close lunar landscape photos have been rescued from four decades of dusty storage, restored in an abandoned McDonald's to such a high resolution that it rivals anything modern cameras are taking.
CREDIT: AP Photo/NASA
Click to expand...

081114-lunar-photo-02.jpg
 
stone disc -> ST-Disc -> STD
i cant wait to buy some STD's, they will keep my data safe forever
 
Stone Cold said:
The irony is, we take a thousand times more photos than our parents did, but their photos will outlast ours.
Click to expand...

I'm an optimist I hope they get it right this time, for some reason I remember the industry saying the same when cds first came out. 10 years later they said it would be smart if we made new copies every 5 years, one of the reasons was bad quality control. the material between the plastic could oxidize. I would like to see what the story on these disks will be even in 10 years time.
 
This is kind of weird. Last week I was looking for a disk to dip in liquid nitrogen then pour hot water over. CDs/DVDs suck at this and SACD and Blu-rays are probably the best, but laserdisks are just terribad. :(
 
So we all really care about how well these stand up to temperature extremes. Uh, no we don't. What I want to know is: Do they scratch? Why do you throw out a disc and re-record it?
 
Uncle said:
I'm an optimist I hope they get it right this time, for some reason I remember the industry saying the same when cds first came out. 10 years later they said it would be smart if we made new copies every 5 years, one of the reasons was bad quality control. the material between the plastic could oxidize. I would like to see what the story on these disks will be even in 10 years time.
Click to expand...

This is what I was thinking. Though if the material between the plastic was gold they would probably last until someone destroyed it. I haven't seen a gold CD in a long time.
 
verteron said:
So we all really care about how well these stand up to temperature extremes. Uh, no we don't. What I want to know is: Do they scratch? Why do you throw out a disc and re-record it?
Click to expand...

I'm not even sure, given the price, that any consumers will use this. They're also not particularly high density.

I just don't see these lasting all that long. Someone's going to come up with something better for storage (ie: higher density or lower cost) pretty quickly.
 
King of Heroes said:
If you're having to retrieve data from 150-200 year old archives then you have ALOT of other problems to deal with besides whether you can read the discs or not.
Click to expand...

Be nice if we could read those stone disk the Mayans used, huh? ;)
 
overclock said:
But if it is so indestructible then how to you write to it in the first place?
Click to expand...

Maybe I'm dense and didn't get it but it seems the cd burning process isn't much different then what we do now:

Shumway explained that within several months, all models manufactured by Hitachi-LG will be M-DISC compatible
Click to expand...

The cd writers can't be all THAT much more expensive if they are planning on making all future drive compatible right? And by "compatible" I'm assuming they mean they can write the discs, because they earlier said any drive can read the discs?
 
ianken said:
"Well, if the media is actually that durable then the readers will not be long gone. Here's why....."

"...They had to rebuild vintage tape drives...."
Click to expand...

In the case of NASA, I'm betting those tape drives were also fairly unique. ( very few in the public sphere outside maybe IBM, Lockheed, etc)

DVD drives?? JILLIONS!!! Hell they'll be mining old landfills a thousand years from now for parts!
 
Youn said:
Maybe I'm dense and didn't get it but it seems the cd burning process isn't much different then what we do now
Click to expand...

nope, you're very dense, it's TOTALLY different....
NOW lasers hit the organic dye layer and change it's color slightly, the readers read this change in color..... what happens with the NEW discs, is the laser uses about 5 times more power and actually ETCHES the data surface permanently changing it....

like... i could write on your arm with a marker and leave a mark... or i could carve your arm with a knife and leave a mark....

totally different ways to achieve the same goal, one more permanent than the other...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top