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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."
That's great. Will the readers and systems able to display such information be around for even a hundred? Will they even accept the same power?
Length of time is a relevant restriction. While information can be lost due to becoming obsolete, corruption over time occurs. CD's and DVD's are sometimes very fickle on how long they last, and many people are using them for backups. I believe that is the main concern, thus leading to this new technology.
The problem with CD-Rs, DVD-Rs, tapes, and so on is that they have extremely short lifetimes (6 to 3 years for most optical media, 10-20 years for most magnetic media).
I call Horseshit.
Yes, some of them die early, but I have CD's from 10 years ago that are fine. I took a stroll down memory lane this weekend and looked at some old CD's I had, so i have direct experience as of yesterday. Some commercial CD's of games (Critical Path circa 1994..wow, what a stinker) I just looked at yesterday are fine. Kirk's Comm disk from 1994....no problem at all.
I also have casette tapes from the 70's and 80's that are fine.
VHS videos from the early 80's, disk drives from early 90's....and with a few exceptions, most are totally servicable.
I would say that most will live longer than your claims, yet maybe 10% to 20% will not, instea
WTF? Over?
Hard drives and tape drives still carry data from the 1970s
Interesting side note to this. My sister's computer recently wouldn't work. She brought it to a computer tech to be fixed. (I wouldn't fix it for two big reasons. 1) They live too far away and 2) I've fixed it in the past only to have them disable the protections I put in place - firewall, antivirus, etc - because they were "too annoying.") As my sister was telling me of what the tech said he needed to do, I stopped her on one important point. He was insisting on replacing the hard drive because "they only work for 3-5 years so this one's likely to die any day now." I told her that I had hard drives work for 8 or more years and there's no reason (short of abuse) why a hard drive shouldn't last over a decade. Whether the drive's space limits will make it useful past 10 years is another question entirely, but it should still be usable. I advised her that the tech was just trying to sell her stuff that she didn't need. Of course, during my next phone call to her, I won't be surprised to hear how she replaced the hard drive because it was 5 years old and going to die soon.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
More interesting: now that we know how to make these, we might find these already on our planet (left by a super intelligent species who abandoned our planet a billion years ago :-)
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
A few years ago I had four hard drives fail within two weeks of each other resulting in near complete data loss. Luckily I went and bought a big HDD right after the first died so I saved something like 30% of the data because I had somewhere to put it ... but anyway
The thing is, those drives were never abused, never hurt in any way, they just simply died because they were about 5 years old. Clicking noises. Crashy computer. Bad sectors. Death.
That, to me, sounds like they were killed by an environmental factor, just not one you were aware of. It could be anything, but I'll name a few: Humidity, excessive vibration, excessive read/write cycling, excessive power up/down of motor, poor power supply, excessive heat, static electricity, or a physical abuse by somebody else. Assuming these were your only 4 drives (based on your claim of 'near complete data loss'), it's highly unlikely that all 4 drives would die at the same time due to regular wear-and-tear.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
A little while ago there was an article on Slashdot by someone who wrote some software that played LPs using a flatbed scanner. The resolution on a cheap consumer-grade scanner is high enough that the sound is recognisable. You wouldn't want to use it for music, but to get a rough idea it's fine, and this is using hardware that a lot of people have sitting around at home. Specialist firms will use a laser to read the disks and will copy them for you - for a much larger fee.
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