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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."
I just acquired an old 8088 computer that I am trying to bring back to life. It has no hard drive and only two 5-1/4 inch floppy drives. I had access to a set of floppy disks and 4 of them, according to the labels, were various versions of DOS boot disks. However, most of them, the computer rejected as "not a system disk" and one of them just said "bad or invalid command interpreter". So either all the disks have gone bad over the years they were unused or my floppy drive is bad. I think it's the disks. These disks were lasted used about 15 years ago. What is the normal storage life of a 5-1/4 inch floppy disks, that is, the time before the data is compromised?