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Nanotech Memory Could Hold Data For 1 Billion Years
Hugh Pickens writes "Digital storage devices have become ubiquitous in our lives but the move to digital storage has raised concerns about the lifetime of the storage media. Now Alex Zettl and his group at the University of California, Berkeley report that they have developed an experimental memory device consisting of a crystalline iron nanoparticle enclosed in a multiwalled carbon nanotube that could have a storage capacity as high as 1 terabyte per square inch and temperature-stability in excess of one billion years. The nanoparticle can be moved through the nanotube by applying a low voltage, writing the device to a binary state represented by the position of the nanoparticle. The state of the device can then be subsequently read by a simple resistance measurement while reversing the nanoparticle's motion allows a memory 'bit' to be rewritten. This creates a programmable memory system that, like a silicon chip, can record digital information and play it back using conventional computer hardware storing data at a high density with a very long lifetime. Details of the process are available at the American Chemical Society for $30."
If you don't misplace it..
The main problem isn't the length of time that data can be stored. Hard drives and tape drives still carry data from the 1970s, but no one can use them. Why? Because of format changes. We recently transitioned to Blu-Ray, and there are countless codecs for video at this point in time. I don't think the problem is with the length of time for storage, as useful as that is, but rather with the format in which we store them.
An excellent anecdote was mentioned on slashdot recently: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/13/005224
Ok, while I find the tech cool and this is certainly News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters but, seriously? "Details of the process are available at the American Chemical Society for $30." Seriously? We're just abandoning any pretense that these are news summaries now and just outright turning them into ads for products? We're now outright trying to sell things? Weak. Very weak indeed.
nobody will give a damn about our data anyway.
Only if it is stored properly. There are plenty of other inscriptions on other stone tablets that are lost to us due to erosion.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
"Details of the process are available at the American Chemical Society for $30."
Does anyone else find the trend of pay-per-view science disturbing?
All too often, if you search the internet for a topic with ongoing research, you may likely find links to papers with restricted access and not generally accessible.
Any you should assume that several patents are pending based on this ongoing research, even if the idea is a seemingly obvious application of the research.
In software, it is worse. Papers are rarely written, as there are rarely any new ideas. Most all software companies reinvent the same wheels, then attempt to patent cosmetic qualities of the wheeels. Then other companies apply effort to avoid use of such cosmetic patents. and create their own similar cosmetic features (and patents).
See, this is not a problem. Unless society is cast back into darkness by some nuclear war, the future human/creature will easily understand how to power up and interface to this device. Either by locating historical documentation, or reverse engineering, which would be trivial for our future superhumans/robots.
c++;
It reminds me of the word "ubiquitous". Prior to 1997 or so no one had ever heard of this word, much less used it in a computer/business setting. Now I see even my boss, someone who does not come from an IT background, using it.
No offense, but is English not your first language? Because that word has been in use for nearly 200 years, and therefore was not originally IT-specific.
Get off my launchpad!
Lots of work? Normal weathering will destroy stone carvings, and many ancient carvings are either lost completely or so faded as to be unreadable simply because they were left out in the weather for a few thousand years. The well-preserved ones are the ones that were kept in big vaults like the pyramids and protected from the weather. Also, lots and lots of stone carvings have been deliberately destroyed throughout history for various reasons, including times when invading armies tried to destroy the relics of cultures they were attempting to subdue.
What kind of skill is required to see a billion years into the future?
Umm... how about the skill of science?
Okay, to be fair, the summary exaggerates the claim from the scientific paper quite a bit. The summary implies that they are claiming to have built a device that will last for a billion years. Not so. They are claiming that the individual bits should be stable to random thermal flipping over that timescale. Whether or not a device can be built around those bits that also last a billion years is another question. In the words of the authors:
Again, they are not claiming that they have built a device that will last a billion years. But they are saying that they have at least achieved the first step for archival storage. If you want a device that will last for, say, a thousand years, then having bits that persist over at least that long is required. Of course, there are gotchas:
-A real device may have other weak points that degrade first.
-The analysis only considers some dangers of long-term storage. E.g. electric or magnetic fields could cause the bits to flip. Elevated temperatures would reduce the stability time.
-Many memory devices would in principle be stable over very long timescales if analyzed similarly. E.g. for a normal hard drive, at room temperature without any electric or magnetic fields, the actual magnetic domain orientation is also stable over very long times.
Point being, the authors of the paper are correct in what they wrote (it's not hard to calculate the kinds of things they were considering, even over timescales of billions of years), but as they point out that's not the whole story for a real device.
The papyrus medium developed by the Egyptians are still readable today
Only if they were stored under conditions conducive to them not rotting away which was the fate of most papyrus.
compared to DVD-RWs that can hold a few GBs of data, but only has a shelf life of a few years.
Stop buying cheap DVD-RWs and you don't have that problem.
Sure, you could play it like that. But will you be able to match the right speed? How about the sound volume? And like you said - scratching problem.
We MAY not be able to read those messages.
Most people WILL not be able to read them pretty soon due to obscurity.
As you've implied - many kids today don't know they can play a record without electricity.
Heck, a dedicated tinkerer could relatively easily make a magnetic tape player from scratch.
Not so likely with CDs. Nearly impossible with DVDs.
The point of the post was that the recording mediums often become unreadable through becoming obsolete BUT that the data recorded may well be readable for a much longer time.
Attaching instructions how to read it to the device (as they did with Voyager disks) that should be readable in the distant future is a matter of adding 2 and 2.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens