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Japanese Scientists Develop Long-Life Flash Memory
schliz writes "Flash memory chips with a potential lifetime of hundreds of years have been developed by Japanese scientists. The new chips also work at lower voltages than conventional chips, according to the scientists from the University of Tokyo. They are said to be scaleable down to at least 10 nm; current Flash chips wouldn't be usable below 20 nm."
Given that we tend to dump flash memory whenever a larger and more compact one comes along, and transfer our data, what use is there for a flash chip that will keep data for 100 years but be obsolete in 2?
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
I just received some samples of military grade MRAM recently. 4MB, "infinite" writes, "infinite" lifetime, -55C - 125C operating range, lower power than DRAM, and 35ns cycle times.
Fairchild has been making MRAM for awhile now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRAM
"What's the use of a good quotation if you can't change it?" - Doctor Who
Of course, if wear leveling was performed perfectly, then pretty much the entire array would fail at once, right?
I have 4 wheels bearings on my Chrysler, and even though all of my wheels rotate with a perfect synchronism, only one of my bearings fails at a time, and the other ones don't follow ther brother in the next few miles...
Remember that at this scale, only an atom of difference could make some of those individual bits fail a year before the other...
Libraries are in the business of keeping old tech. I'm sure given a large enough library with the budget to gather and maintain all of our current tech we'd be quite able to access it in 100 years. That doesn't mean people other than librarians and scientists doing archival studies would want to look at it, though. Look at microfilm, which is the current standard for archival of old papery things. Its rate of use is extremely low except for a few college students and researchers. I think most technology is eventually 'forgotten' like this as the technical knowhow to use it falls out of public consciousness to make room for the next new development.
I expect in another 100 years we'll have direct-from-brain transfer of information to and from our implanted minicomputers, which would be connected to an internet-like system so mind-bogglingly huge it contained all the libraries' data already. Who would bother with the slow loading times of a usb key in a clunky old computer? Unless of course, our implants came with the appropriate ports!
In the digital computer age, 100 years is more than enough for "archival", heck we haven't even had digital storage (in practice) half that long. Like any library or archive, maintainance is the key, and to maintain a digital archive it's not more than reasonable to move contents to newer media when it becomes more practical to do so.
Storage space has followed Moore's law rather well, and if you use a building to physically store storage digital content today, in a hundred years you would need a wrist-watch to store the same amount. Hence, it would make no sense but to move the data.
Also, the demands for how easy it should be for us citizens (if we're speaking of public records) to access the data, it would make absolutely no sense to keep the data on a medium we will consider obsolete in a decade or two. However, with the current flash discs, for how long can you safely store data? A year, 5 years? An entire decade?
100 years of more or less "guaranteed" life is far enough to be comfortable storing archive materials.
However, I can't but help to think about the reasons for "archives" of digital content. Ten years ago people started to have the capacity to store an entire library of books on their computer. Today we can store all the worlds books on our computers. In 5-10 years it will be practically possible to quickly download them over the internet (legally or illegally). In 20 years we will be able to walk around with all the worlds books in our pocket computers (todays cell phones / PDA's). In 30 years we'll have the possibility to store all the worlds books on our wrist-watch. In 40-50 years maybe all the photos and movies we can possible get our hands on, on each of ours wrist-watches.
Again, I can't help but to question the reason for digital archives, when we'll in a not-too-distant future will have billions of people walking around with all books (and knowledge?) in the world in the pockets, literally.
However, with the constant decline in education amongst the youths, what's the chance people will be able to read any of these books in 40 years anyway?
One wonders for what good today's technical development is meant.
We'll probably be happier and happier, while being dumber and dumber, more and more brain washed with propaganda, all tied up and connected to an enormous corporate enterprise grid with our Level 3 RFID's, being satisfied in life as long as we can try to get the Level-9-shield-of-bogus or be swallowed up in another entertainment puddle of mud, and perhaps not even need seeing people in real life, but only through our digital and pathetic image of ourselves not understanding that we aren't just slaves to trends but slaves to what we have created.
Will a /. article cover these questions?
These are the questions...
I keep a lot of files (mostly art projects) backed up on 2 or 3 seperate hard drives, but while any current project is progress, they tend to reside on a flash drive. Oh, they get rewritten to a couple of dozen times between scanning and completion, but once complete (and backed up) I tend to just leave the project folder on the drive, and when the drive gets close to filling up, I stick it in a drawer and buy another one. Should I expect to be able to call those "retired" drives backups as well, or will the integrity of the data likely deteriorate after a few years like a late model 3.5" floppy
---PCJ