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."

Comments

If you don't misplace it..

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't misplace it..

Re:If you don't misplace it..

[slashdotwannabe]

If you don't misplace it..

or drop it and scramble the positions of all those nanoparticles.

A billion years?

[GrumblyStuff]

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?

Re:A billion years?

[pipatron]

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.

Re:A billion years?

[worip]

This is definitely an issue... When it comes to archiving, the critical thing really is the lifetime of the storage medium and readers. We seem to be developing storage with higher and higher capacities, but with shorter and shorter life spans. The papyrus medium developed by the Egyptians are still readable today (although the information density is low, and the number of readers are few and far between!), compared to DVD-RWs that can hold a few GBs of data, but only has a shelf life of a few years. Paul Conway has an excellent piece on Preservation in the digital world and takes a look not only at the mediums, but also at the surrounding issues (readers, data formats, etc.).

Re:A billion years?

[MarkvW]

If something lasts that long, and can hold that much stuff, there will always be a reader available (unless we return to the dark ages, that is.

It should be sufficiently evident by now that data is much more expensive than the method used to read that data. If you build it (high capacity durable memory), they (access hardware developers) will come.

Anyway, if the stored data has no value who cares whether or not a reader is available?

Re:A billion years?

[harryandthehenderson]

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.

Re:A billion years?

[DinDaddy]

You could store instructions for accessing the data right in the device! Then you'd be sure there's a durable copy available.

Re:A billion years?

[DinDaddy]

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.

And if you read the language they are written in. Also known as recognizing the file format. So even durable papyrus only addressed half the issue.

Re:A billion years?

[PieSquared]

That's easy, you just have to include instructions on exactly what voltage/amp electricity you'll need to run it, and a clear description of the encoding format. Of course, you'll have to make sure this information is recorded for a billion years as well... so just record it with this nanotech memory! It's a perfectly reasonable and not-at-all-completely-retarded solution!

Re:A billion years?

[NormalVisual]

Even if society IS cast back into darkness, they'll still figure it out. After all, we saw in "Battlefield Earth" that men that had reverted back to a primitive state could *easily* be taught to skillfully fly aircraft, so how hard could this be?

Re:A billion years?

[berend botje]

After extensive testing to find a durable DVD-RW I can honestly say that none of the ones I tested was completely readable after two years in storage. All had defects to some extend. Most surprising find was that there was no correlation between price and low error count. At all.

If you have experience with a brand that lasts for a lot longer I'd really appreciate to hear about it.

Re:A billion years?

[Retric]

How are you storing these CD's? I have 10 year old disks that read just fine.

Note: I don't write on the back of the disk which helps them last longer.

Re:A billion years?

[harryandthehenderson]

Most surprising find was that there was no correlation between price and low error count. At all.

By cheap I didn't mean price, I meant cheap as in cheaply manufactured. And yes there are plenty of expensive CD and DVD medium that are cheaply manufactured.

Re:A billion years?

[chudnall]

Heh. Back in the day, I was once shipped a nine-track tape drive, along with the driver... on a nine-track tape.

Re:A billion years?

[default luser]

It's not discs that are cutting our data lifetimes, it's flash. Flash stores data by isolating a charged gate between dielectrics, but the isolation isn't perfect. The charge bleeds-off over the course of years. The top-end for flash lifetime sitting on the shelf is around 10 years.

If you took the drive off the shelf every few years and re-wrote all the data, that could help, but otherwise you have a VERY limited data lifetime. Compared to magnetic or optical data storage, flash sucks for shelf life.

Re:A billion years?

[Nefarious Wheel]

And if you read the language they are written in. Also known as recognizing the file format. So even durable papyrus only addressed half the issue

Perhaps less than half. How do you determine the password on those old papyrii? They're obviously encrypted. Product of two primates perhaps?

Re:A billion years?

[hairyfeet]

You know, I always here that, but I have been buying whatever was cheap at the time for DVD for 6 years now and haven't had a bit of trouble on even the oldest of them. Same with the ultra cheap Cds I have bought for,...hell i don't know, a decade or so now? I don't think it is so much the disc but how you treat them. i have always kept them on spindles in a nice and dark closet that never has any temp shifts and everything is hunky dory.

So unless you are treating your discs like hockey pucks or leaving them out in the car I really don't think you'll have a problem reading them in a decade or more. And as long as blank media remains cheap I can always burn a new copy if I feel one is getting too long in the tooth. What worries me more is that DVD will die and BD will remain high so I end up having to back up files to HDDs and hope that they'll spin up when I break them out in a year or two. I would much rather have an optical format, even if it is small by today's standards, to back up files I really care about. But I really haven't seen this "cheap discs are bad" scenario except on some ultra cheap black bottom CDs I picked up a few years back, and even then I think it was the fact that the disc color more than anything, as even the tiniest fingerprint left huge nasty smudges that were a bear to remove.

Re:A billion years?

[Anonymous Coward]

You didn't answer the GP's question...

You claim that there are some CDs and DVDs that are not cheaply manufactured. Well, what brand(s)?

Re:A billion years?

[toddestan]

Note he said DVDs. My experience is that burned CDs last a long time (at least 10-12 years, or the age of my earliest burned CDs) whereas burned DVDs can really only be counted on lasting about 2-3 years. So lesson is, if you are archiving data to optical media for long term storage, use CDs - and preferably some other medium in addition.

Re:A billion years?

[whereiswaldo]

I don't use read/write medium for long term storage as they don't seem to last as long as write-once medium. Maybe it's because R/W are handled more? Or the dyes are made for being changed over and over, not for staying the some over a very long period?

As far as brands go, I've got CDRs from 1995 that still read fine from Verbatim and Sony. I've also had good luck with Maxell. I avoid Memorex like the plague because I've lost a lot of stuff saved on that brand of CDR.

Anything I really value I save at least 2 copies of and often upload it off-site.

On a related note, I've got lots of 3-1/2" disks that still work fine as well (one brand was BASF). The no-name brands had a pretty high error rate.

Re:A billion years?

[SlashWombat]

This is known as still having the media, but no longer possessing the right hardware to read it!

Re:A billion years?

[ppanon]

Well, if the tribe in the story were getting mutations from sitting on a pile of "old" nuclear weapons, they would have a lot more people getting sick with cancer or from other genetic damage than they would be likely to get "smarter" humans. Because if they were smarter humans, you would think they might clue in that moving away from the "cursed" location that's making so many of them sick would be a good idea.

Ah well, L. Ron wasn't the only SF writer to base stories on wildly wrong interpretations of evolution and radiation. I remember at least one other from the 40's by Edmund Hamilton, which would lead you to believe that that's when most of BE would have been written. By the 1980's, when BE was purportedly written, knowledge of DNA, radiation, and how the two resulted in mutation was much better understood. If those types of stories are what has been informing the general public's perception of evolution, it's no wonder that so much of the public can be confused enough to consider it on the same level as Creationism/Intelligent Design.

Main problem

[synthparadox]

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

Re:Main problem

[fataugie]

That's why we should store info on something more permanent.....like CASSETTE TAPES.

Wait....oh never mind.

Re:Main problem

[techiemikey]

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.

Re:Main problem

[Jason Levine]

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.

Re:Main problem

[MyLongNickName]

Unsolicited advice: If you aren't going to do the work, don't second guess the tech doing the work. Likely you are right. However, say something does go wrong with the drive... now you are the one who takes the blame. Best to go "uh huh... yea... sounds good" and leave it like that.

Re:Main problem

[Ezrymyrh]

You have a good point, wait until some politician bans all particles. The problem will solve itself. And Oh, great the the Gov will now know where i shopped for a Billion years. *SNARK*

Re:Main problem

[Swizec]

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.

What I'm trying to say is that yes, storage itself should work almost indefinitely on a hard drive, but if wear&tear occurs on the bearings or the arm the drive WILL kill itself and most commercial hard drives simply aren't made to last more than about five years of regular use.

Re:Main problem

[Lord Bitman]

Ten years ago, hard drives could last ten years, easily. (I've got plenty of drives from the late 90s that still work fine)
As of five years ago, hard drives can't reliably last five years. (I have one working five-year old drive)
As of two years ago, hard drives are not reliable for more than six months. (I've replaced enough now to know: Yeah, it 'could' last five years, but it's statistically unlikely)

Re:Main problem

[Kz]

interesting... but six months is too short. even now, most 'supposed to be serious' HDDs are available with at least 1 year warranty.

a few years ago that was usually 3 years, with 5 years available. going to 1 year is obviously a bad sign about quality and resiliency; but still more than 6 months!

Re:Main problem

[Bakkster]

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.

Re:Main problem

[nine-times]

Well honestly, I'd say that both you and your sister are just a little bit off-point. It's not at all uncommon for hard drives to die within a span of 5 years. The problem is that it's not at all predictable when your particular hard drive will die. If you have thousands of hard drives, you might be able to calculate the failure rate that you're experiencing, but any given hard drive might last for a year or for a decade.

But because of the unpredictability, you generally don't replace hard drives on a regular cycle. Some large businesses do have plans for rotating out hard drives in mission-critical servers, but generally you just keep good backups and wait for the thing to die.

Re:Main problem

[DomNF15]

I had a pair of Maxtor HDDs running in a raid 1 config for just over 3 years before 1 of them failed. The warranty period of the drives: 3 years. The machine was powered on 24x7x365 and typically used for streaming mp3s or as a remote desktop for around 8 hrs/day, the rest of the time it was probably close to idle. My point is that your experience of having 1 HDD last 8 years is no more of a valid indicator of average life than my singular case. If my machine was powered off for a few days a week, the drives would probably have lasted longer. I believe the warranty period of a HDD is a good indicator of how long it will reliably last, since if more then 10% (or 1 of 10) of drives sold are returned under warranty, it starts to become unprofitable for the company making the HDDs. Most modern HDDs come with a 3 or 5 year warranty, beyond that amount of time, I would not expect them to work reliably. If I'm doing anything critical or important with those drives, then a 1 in 10 chance of failure is probably not something I want to deal with, and I'd replace them exactly when the warranty period expires. If I'm just casually using some old machine for stuff, and my important data is backed up elsewhere, then I'd probably let the drive run until it failed.

Re:Main problem

[MyLongNickName]

Where are you buying your hard drives? Granted, we buy business class at our company, but of thirty we have purchased over the last two years, one has had a couple bad sectors, certainly no failures.

Re:Main problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Ten years ago, hard drives could last ten years
five years ago, hard drives could last five years
two years ago, hard drives could last two years

Aww Shit! The Mayans were right about the end of the world occurring in 2010!!!

Re:Main problem

[TheRaven64]

Or use ZFS and just keep adding new drives to the storage pool and throwing away the dead ones...

Re:Main problem

[Gaian-Orlanthii]

Well any magnetically based storage medium that uses moving parts and electricity and gets hot enough to need a cooling fan has a pretty good chance of failing. And by 'pretty good', I mean usually before the lifetime of the rest of the computer has passed. How we use our drives differs from person to person and the drives themselves vary from model and manufacturer. The one constant I look for is the warranties the companies offer. They're usually only good for 12 to 24 months. If my drive was the only storage for my family photos and music collection, yeah I'd replace it every 5 years or so at least.

Re:Main problem

[synthparadox]

Need I point out the irony in the phrase, "excessive redundancy"?

That aside, sure I can write concisely, but then it just isn't quite as interesting to read. I write like I would speak publicly. I've found it lends to more people reading the full post instead of going TLDR.

Re:Main problem

[hazydave]

That's "format rot"... and yeah, it's a problem. But an inevitable one, as long as we keep making better storage devices. I recently digitized all my analog 8mm videotapes... sure, with some media at 17 years+, it's not going to last much longer in all likelihood (but, being well stored, it was all good this time around). But the main reason was the realization that, not only did the Video8 camera go to that great yard sale in the sky some time ago, but the Digital8 camera (the last thing I have that reads this format) isn't going to last forever. And that format, while it's going to be on eBay for some years yet, is basically dead.

          And now we're starting to leave digital tape (DV) behind... with BD-R just arriving in time to provide a $5.00-or-so format for 16GB of video storage or more.

          We in the computer business see stuff getting replaced all the time, but the most successful formats are consumer-driven, and have a pretty long life. I mean, CD-R isn't as exciting as it was in the 90s, but my BD-R drives will read and burn one just as easily... and a great deal faster than those 1x CD-R drives did. Some of the pretty-stupid-even-when-introduced flash formats, like SmartMedia, expired long ago, but SD and CompactFlash have kept pretty healthy (and if you're worried about CompactFlash, the SDHC to CF adaptors work fine in most CF-based gear). SDXC devices will support the older formats and hold us at least through the 2TB flash card generation.

          The other clue here is that maintaining data isn't an act, it's a process. I have a bunch of stuff on a RAID... that's pretty secure, as long as I'm ready to swap out a dead drive... well, and as long as I'm protected from lightening strikes, etc. Archival-quality optical media is good, too, though it does occasionally fail. But if you have all of your important data from the 80s on a huge array of ST-506 drives, you better bite the bullet, spend that $2.00 and transfer it all to a 1GB SD card before the ST-506 controller's EPROM fails... those UV-eraseable EPROMs are only rated for about 10 years, it may already be too late!!

Re:Main problem

[nine-times]

Well, yeah. I don't use ZFS, but I use RAID 10 or RAID 50 to mitigate the chances of hard drive failure. Still, I keep good backups.

Re:Main problem

[hazydave]

Yeah... I wouldn't want to you if her drive doesn't last out that five years. On the other hand, if she's like nearly every PC user on the planet, she does nothing much in the way of backups. So you might still get to live another day if you manage to get her on a reasonable backup routine.

As far as drives go, you can't trust much. Sure, they publish MTBF numbers... that means, in the drive test jig, at the test temperature, running 24/7, half the drives they make will die before that number-of-hours and half after that number of hours. You get very little useful information out of that number, other than, on the overall, drives have improved since the 80s :-)

The other thing that's not helpful is environmental stress.... does she leave the machine on all the time, or power-cycle it.. and does the thermal stress of power cycling do more or less damage than just running 24/7. How cool is the drive... if you're running near the limit of the drive's environmental spec, it may only last 1/10th the time of an ideal test.

The very best predictor of drive life is the warranty period .. other than a few deaths due to infant mortality (drives do occasionally die very young, due to defects), virtually every drive a manufacturer makes will last out its warranty period if not mistreated. No help here if it's an OEM drive with a 3-month warranty, but otherwise, it's pretty safe to trust this. Beyond that 3-to-5 year period, though, the older drives are either in a RAID or they get replaced.

Re:Main problem

[hesaigo999ca]

Unless I agree, they were all put near a heater on the floor, and then 2 montths later, all of a sudden, all 4 drives die, (because winter hits and the heaters come on)...yes...I do have some clients of mine that have cost themselves a few bucks, because they did not understand the implications of environment.

Re:Main problem

[BikeHelmet]

I had two Seagate drives in RAID-1 die at the same time.

The culprit was shitty firmware. I didn't count on that - but luckily, everything important was also stored on another computer.

Re:Main problem

[imemyself]

What manufacturer only has a 1 year warranty on drives!? All the consumer drives that I've seen (on Newegg) have 3 year warranty's, and there's quite of few of the (theoretically) higher quality business drives with 5 year warranties. Man, there's no way I'd touch a HDD that the manufacturer could only offer a 1 year warranty on.

Re:Main problem

[Hucko]

1+1 backup is redundant. 1+2 backups are careful, 1+4 backups paranoid. 1+10 backups are excessive, except where one hopes to promulgate a piece of data/info/lie ah la 'survival of the fittest'.

Re:Main problem

[Lord Bitman]

I noticed that trend as I was typing it...

Sure it can

[fataugie]

Wow, what a claim. And by the time someone figures out it's bullshit, the guy who made it will be dust long ago.

BRILLIANT!

Re:Sure it can

[morgan_greywolf]

Wow, what a claim. And by the time someone figures out it's bullshit, the guy who made it will be dust long ago.

Bah! I already have a medium that can store data for a billion years. Now you kids can take your newfangled nanotech memory and get off of my lawn!

Re:Sure it can

[MyLongNickName]

Only if it is stored properly. There are plenty of other inscriptions on other stone tablets that are lost to us due to erosion.

Re:Sure it can

[Prof.Phreak]

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 :-)

Re:Sure it can

[hosecoat]

Wow, what a claim. And by the time someone figures out it's bullshit, the guy who made it will be dust long ago.

BRILLIANT!

I hope I turn to dust before my drives die....wait!?

Re:Sure it can

[OolimPhon]

And how would we recognise these?

Re:Sure it can

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry. The drives will last another three years. You'll have a whole year to turn to dust.

- God

P.S. Arrange for someone to come over to feed your cat on May 12, 2011.

Re:Sure it can

[MyLongNickName]

In that you could easily make dozens or hundreds of copies of the data, store it and play the numbers that several copies will survive over a few millennium. Not sure how much stone you would need to do that with tablets...

Re:Sure it can

[TheRaven64]

A billion years? It's managed 2205 so far, only 999,997,795 to go...

Re:Sure it can

[superdave80]

How smart can they be if they screwed up the planet so badly that they had to abandon it?

Re:Sure it can

[dimovich]

O yeah... Vernor Vinge stuff... If it's true, I'll buy you a beer.

Re:Sure it can

[starglider29a]

A) They didn't abandon the planet. We were their offsite backup.
B) They stored it in one very clever nanostructure, which, if necessary, could make copies of itself. Thus, if many zillions of them were destroyed, many, many zillions remained, steeped in a briny matrix which fostered replication. As long as the sequence didn't change, the information would be preserved as long as the planet remained.

Oooops, copy error. (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail.

Is this the plot for a book, cuz if not, I'm going to go write it. All we have to do is revert the mutations back to the original, and we have the info.

Of course, it's probably some alien language that uses only ACGT letters, and it spell their version of "All your base are belong to us."

Finally an archival format we can use.

[Rosyna]

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).

This is a solution that would finally allow our civilization's information to last beyond the apocalypse occurring in 2012.

Or think think how long Atlantis was lost to intelligent life...

Re:Finally an archival format we can use.

[fataugie]

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

Re:Finally an archival format we can use.

[beelsebob]

Yes, some of them die early, but I have CD's from 10 years ago that are fine
Maybe, but that's not what's important is it... What matters is if you record something, after how long are you guaranteed to still be able to read the data. With CD-rs I'd put that as low as 1 and a half years.

Notably, you also seem to confuse CDs and CD-rs, the dies used in CD-rs go south far far faster than the data layers used on comercial CDs.

Finally, your cassette tapes from the 70s may be "fine" in terms of listening to them, but how many scratches, pops, whirs and whistles have they picked up? If that were digital data, do you honestly think you'd be able to recover it still?

Re:Finally an archival format we can use.

[fataugie]

Actually, I did mix commercial with CD-R's, but I examined both and had very good success. Now, I would not say mission critical, absolutly HAVE to have it when I want to retrieve it data should be only on CD-R's, I will agree with you on that. But that's why I would have multiple copies on a variety of media.

My proclomation of Horseshit was on the general claim of lifespan.

Re:Finally an archival format we can use.

[mehrotra.akash]

actually, i do have CD - R's from 1999 bought from a no name brand without any protective coating on the top(the side on which you write with a pen was a thin silver layer, which if you scratched, a scratch appeared on the data side as well)

had bought a pack of 10 then, recently when i checked 9 of them were working, and i had managed to lose the 10th one

it has stuff like the entertainment pack from win 95, NFS2 and some other such software which is not all that easy to find now..

Re:Finally an archival format we can use.

[BlackSnake112]

I have CD-Rs from over 10 years ago that still read fine.

I would say it matters on two things. First the quality of the CD-R. The 5 cent ones may not last as long as the 25 cent ones (price per 100 spindle). Second how you store the CD-R. If you leave the disk loose in a drawer with a bunch of other disks and papers it may not last that long. if you store it in an actual CD case or CD binder it should last longer. Also with storing the CDs. Leaving them in an outside shed is a bad idea. Temperature extremes are no good. Indoors should be fine if you use heat and AC during the year.

Re:Finally an archival format we can use.

[confused one]

Sir, your experience and archival methodology is to be commended. Please inform the U.S. Library of Congress as to how you have managed to maintain your library without having failures due to degradation. Our experience, unfortunately, does not match yours.

Re:Finally an archival format we can use.

[TheRealMindChild]

Are you old enough to remember floppy disks? More specifically, the 3 1/2 floppy disks? The ones made early in this formats life were rock solid. You could barely bend them. I even poked a few holes in one (to blame my missing report that I didn't do on the bad floppy disk), and it read EVERYTHING. At the time, a cheap floppy would cost you ~$1. Skip forward a handful of years where AOL floppy disks were coming in the Sunday newspaper... you could practically bend them in half. The "seems" of the disk wouldn't even be glued together (only at the corners). They cost ~$1 for 20x, retail. 10% per brand new box were bad on first use. If you dropped a good disk, you likely just killed it.

What I am trying to point out here is you CAN be right without the post you are replying to being wrong. Your old media may have just been made stronger and more capable of dealing with what we consider average wear than something produced today, where the goal is driving down costs and increasing features, at the cost of less dependability. It wouldn't be the first time.

Re:Finally an archival format we can use.

[DeafZombie]

Maybe, but that's not what's important is it... What matters is if you record something, after how long are you guaranteed to still be able to read the data.

Well the answer to that is very simple... there are no guarantees that any device you buy will work for any X amount of time... no matter what the manufacturer says. Even if you could control the environment around it, there may still be manufacturing defects that will shorten the life of your device.

Yes, sure, if it fails they will be more than happy to ship you a new one but your data is lost. That is why you need to have redundancy whenever you are dealing with important data.

Re:What is the shelf life of a 5-1/4 inch floppies

[fataugie]

Well, how were they stored? Did someone use them as a coaster?
The 5.25 were the true floppy as in flexible and easily bent.
And are you sure the drive is aligned properly (i.e. it can read the other data on the disk).

I have an old 1993 Zeos 486 that I may fire back up and see if I can read my DOS disks.

Seriously?

[whisper_jeff]

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.

Re:Seriously?

[daveime]

Wonderful, lucky you. And for everyone that *doesn't* have a subscription, the article is about as much benefit as a game of Punch the Monkey.

I'm with the GP, if it's a paid article, it has no place being linked / discussed on a "free" website.

Re:Seriously?

[Prof.Phreak]

Oh, no, these places -help- to spread the word by removing roadblocks to scientific research. /sarcasm

Re:Seriously?

[drinkypoo]

They need to "publish" the paper on their own web site for free as well (or on fucking rapidshare or something!) so that we can see it without paying. They paid for peer review, and a name. If they gave away the sole right to publish, they're lames.

Re:Seriously?

[daveime]

There are plenty of peer reviewed articles on citeseer, that are, get this, FREE. Link away, by all means.

Just don't say "here's a very interesting article, but you'll have to cough up 30 quid before you are qualified to discuss it on Slashdot".

My comment stands, paid articles have no place on a free discussion website.

Re:Seriously?

[The End Of Days]

It's not a problem for the general Slashdot population, just the vocal "everything should be free" contingent. Don't let a loudmouth get you down.

Re:Seriously?

[Chris Burke]

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.

Yeah and when the summary notes that a NYT link requires registration, they're trying to get you to register at NYT. Or was that warn you? I guess you could view it either way...

There are two links to free articles with the usual amount of information and details that we get in any tech-related article on Slashdot. People always complain about this, and wonder where they can get more detailed information. Well, here they tell you where you can get it, but it happens to cost $30 to get the technical information if you aren't already subscribed to the journal.

If they had just left it at the linked articles, would that have made you happier? Is it mentioning the extra information that costs money, or the fact that it costs money (which is certainly outside of /.s and presumably the submitters control)? What is gained by not mentioning this? Maybe you or someone else is at a college with an engineering/science library that carries the Nano Letters journal and can get it for free, if only they knew to look for it.

If you're going to complain about commercialization, why not complain about the fact that this is an article about what will certainly be a non-free commercial technology that you have to pay money for, and if anything the article is vastly more oriented towards making you excited about and anticipate purchasing the technology in question? But that's "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters".

Re:Seriously?

[TheRaven64]

If you went to a university, you can usually get access to these journals by going via a machine on the campus network. There are only a few journal articles I've come across where this doesn't work. If you didn't go to university, make friends with someone in your local university's computer society.

Re:Seriously?

[modrzej]

If you follow link to ACS publication, there you can find "supporting info". In this section, which can be accessed for free, you can watch footage from transmission electron microscopy camera with iron nanoparticle moving back and forth. This is the most important thing. In this paper, there are only technical details, i.e. synthesis of nanotubes and hypotheses about electron transport inside nanotube. $30+ is price when buying single paper, if you are member of academia, your university provides you access for free.

In 1 billion years...

[Eddy Luten]

nobody will give a damn about our data anyway.

Re:In 1 billion years...

[fataugie]

Trust me, if you store your Porn collection, some geek in the future will move heaven and earth to get a peek.

Re:In 1 billion years...

[sakdoctor]

Yes they will.

In a billion years, there will be a galactic war between the Church of the Holy Goatse, and Two Gods one Cup.

Re:In 1 billion years...

[houghi]

RIAA will. That way they can sue your ancestors.

Re:In 1 billion years...

[Spatial]

Obviously you aren't a historian. They'd give a shit of positively ass-splitting proportions. 'Daily life' data that you and I would regard as useless and boring would be a very useful insight to them.

Re:In 1 billion years...

[DeafZombie]

And then they will look at it, and even if they can decode the files, they will go: "Ahh, its not holographic, this sucks!" and never look at it again!

Re:In 1 billion years...

[digit1001]

nobody will give a damn about our data anyway.

I bet those lists of credit card numbers will be really cheap by then!

Re:In 1 billion years...

[Cyberblah]

nobody will give a damn about our data anyway.

Yeah, after patching systems for the Y10K, Y100K, Y1M, Y10M, and Y100M problems, I think programmers are going to look at the Y1G problem and just say "fuck it, let's start over."

Re:In 1 billion years...

[Lost Race]

nobody will give a damn about our data anyway.

Yeah, just like we couldn't possibly give a damn about billion year old data archives on Mars. Old news, booooooring!

Re:In 1 billion years...

[Schmorgluck]

Yeah, but imagine how many people we could rickroll! We could even send the data in space and rickroll the entire galaxy!

Re:In 1 billion years...

[Hurricane78]

Interestingly, just now I found a fortune cookie from the future, that fell out of a wormhole. And it said:
"If you rickroll an entire galaxy, and nobody gets it, is it funny?"

Re:In 1 billion years...

[Schmorgluck]

Well, maybe it would work better with goatse, but it's likely they would all fall in a blackhole anyway...

Unfred called it

[paiute]

I knew this had the ring of truth about it

http://www.scribd.com/doc/13855395/Weaseljumper-Read-Me-First/

Re:Unfred called it

[mark-t]

An interesting april fool's gag... I have to wonder how many people will believe it before they notice the date.

Re:Nano this, carbon nano that...

[Anonymous Coward]

Zettl is a pretty well known figure in this field. He's not throwing around the term because it's a buzzword.

do readers, computers, OS, etc... also last?

[dvorakhound]

Unless the readers, computers, OS, etc... will still be in use in a billion years, this is not very useful.

It's not a format, it's a medium.

[Anonymous Coward]

Learn the difference.

Sheesh.

Pay-per-view science

[Anonymous Coward]

"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).

 

Re:Pay-per-view science

[Artifakt]

Id rather the summary told me about a source, even if it's pay, than not mention it. Still, news is true information (the not-so-true info is called propaganda, advertising puffery, and so on). I want the Slashdot summary to be as accurate as possible, and the article it links to to be so as well. Ideally, if somebody wants to inform me of something, they will do their best to get accurate links to me for as little as possible (not necessarily free). Paying for detailed info on an interesting chemical process to compensate the preparer is one thing, but paying because the commercial article is full of mistakes, deliberate distortions or advertiser's bias, is another.

Re:Pay-per-view science

[Artifakt]

One of the signs that some of these "Creative Rights" types are missing the point is claims such as "I make it, I get to decide". Copyright law for the first 200 years or so of the US was totally about financial profit. You sued somebody who made money from your work over your loss of that money, not emotional damages or insults to your reputation. All you ever got for having made something was the right to decide (for a genuinely limited time) whether somebody else could make a profit from your work. All this "I get to decide, period" talk is European moral copyright, and often goes far beyond the limits of that. It's largely a far left position to try to extend moral copyright to cover everything these people want to decide.
      So essentially, we now have people demanding that they should have a Free Market, Capitalist, Downright John Galtian system, JUST LIKE THE LEFT WING SOCIAL DEMOCRAT PARTYS ARE PUSHING FOR IN EUROPE!

Re:Pay-per-view science

[rossdee]

You think thats bad? Imagine what they will be paying a billion years from now to read about the process, to decode our data. Even if you just take into account normal inflation, the amount of money needed after a billion years would be more than the number of psrticles in the universe.

Fabtastic!

[Quiet_Desperation]

So now the intelligent cockroaches of the far future can read our Twitters[tm]! That's stupendilicious! LOL! BRB! :-)

Or Slashdot posts! Hey, bugs! How ya doing!

So?

[Rik Sweeney]

Nanotech - 1 Billion years
Elephant - Forever

Technology simply cannot compete with mother nature.

Re:So?

[slyn]

Now we just need to invent immortal elephants and we've got the universe in our grasp.

Re:So?

[marquis111]

Easy. Just go talk to the Nildoror. They go back and forth from Nildoror to Sulidoror indefinitely, and the Nildoror is the Über-elephant. Just stay away from their bug juice.

Re:So?

[TheRaven64]

Nah, just copy your data from one elephant to another. Individual elephants last 50-60 years, so just replicate your data on a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Elephants and add a new one when one of the old ones starts to look a bit old.

Re:So?

[camperdave]

Nanotech - 1 Billion years
Elephant - Forever

Brilliant! So what we do is we train the elephant the details of how to play back the nano-storage device. The only thing left would be how to get the elephant to tell our anscestors.

Re:So?

[rabiddeity]

Now we just need to invent immortal elephants and we've got the universe in our grasp.

Immortal elephants were invented some time ago, but were then superseded by immortal carp.

Re:Nano this, carbon nano that...

[gt6062b]

This just in, people use buzzwords to sound smart, get funding. I mean seriously, how else are we going to syngerize our companies to their maximum efficiency? It isn't all about the low hanging fruit, you know.

One billion years...

[Talisman]

"A billion years ought to be enough for anybody." - Me

Re:One billion years...

[the_one(2)]

You are going to regret that quote when we invent immortality.

Etch-a-Sketch?

[jiriw]

I do hope only a voltage differential will move those crystalline iron nanoparticles and they stay in place after they have been 'written' to...

Although... the digital memory storage equivalent of an Etch-a-Sketch might have its uses when the **AA/IFPI comes knocking at your door.

Re:What is the shelf life of a 5-1/4 inch floppies

[Jason Quinn]

They floppies were stored in an old protection box. There were however in a room with other computers. The storage was so-so by data preservation standards. I would have expected them to work though.

Is our stuff that important?

[tjstork]

I guess the question is, is the data of today's living really that important? I mean, sure, you might wish you had every bit of minute info from the builders of the pyramids, but, does it really undermine our life to not have it? Indeed, can the imagination and argument required to envision how the past was actually make the past more relevant to us today?

I almost wonder if, instead of having data that lasts forever, if we should have data that deletes itself when you die.

Re:Is our stuff that important?

[cowscows]

A billion years is a bit extreme, and is such a long period of time as to be mostly meaningless in the day-to-day lives of your average person. But that being said, I personally have plenty of digital photos and such that I'd like to be able to save for at least the next 40 years or so, and right now I don't have any financially reasonable way of doing that with any confidence.

Whether this nanotech memory is good for a billion years or only a million years isn't all that important to me, other than the fact that both of those are well past the 40 years I'm looking for. If the price can be reasonable and the media doesn't require a specialized storage environment, then they should have a problem finding a market.

Re:Is our stuff that important?

[Artifakt]

Superfluous data starts having negative value when it becomes common enough to make it hard to find the more essential data.
    To use your 'pyramids'. It could be pretty useful to disprove theories that UFO aliens built the pyramids. I'm not sure believing in alien pyramid builders undermines anyone's life, but realizing that regular people figured out how to do it instead gives us increasing respect for our roots and inspires us to believe we can solve new problems on our own without waiting for the aliens to come back.
      There was probably some preserved data from Egypt that was trivial by just about any standard, and certainly there was a lot of redundant data (papyri with seemingly endless inventory records for a rope maker's warehouse, such as turned up on one dig (in 1968, if memory serves), comes to mind). Maybe some of this has negative value. But I trust the archaeologists to make that decision. They will probably continue to err on the side of caution, but it doesn't cost all that much to store more than you can study.
      For our contemporary data, we probably need more data deleting itself sooner. I work with financial information that has to include SSNs, and we use systems that deliberately purge routing numbers and bank account numbers after a few months, and never print them or full SSNs to paper copies, so they literally aren't in our possession to be stolen by the time the records get transferred to long term storage. There's still some risk of abuses even with what we have to retain, but its a lot less when the thief still doesn't get all the pieces they would need to commit some financial shenanigans. Even if somebody gets a lot of other personal info and attempts to impersonate a client with all the sort of skills and resources you see in Hollywood caper films, there's no way to steal what's simply not there.
      I suppose it could be very useful if Juvenile records or Driving Violation records were self deleting after a few years, and there are probably lots of other cases where some kind of automatic deletion would be better than what we tend to now.

Re:Is our stuff that important?

[Akzo]

We're whalers on the moon,
We carry a harpoon.
But there ain't no whales
So we tell tall tales
And sing our whaling tune.

Re:Is our stuff that important?

[mgblst]

If only there was someway of having no data, and too much data, like the every bit of minute info from the builders of the pyramids. If only there was some way of, if you will, "selecting" which data to store, and which data to throw away. I guess we will never have such an advance, it is even beyond us to think of such a thing!

Its a trap!!

[zmollusc]

No way should this tech be used by anybody. It will only take a few more decades before the RIAA legally own all data everywhere, then you will be worrying how to keep your data files hidden for millions of years so that they don't sue your ass.

Refund?

[wildzeke]

Do I get a refund if the memory fails before a billion years?

Re:Refund?

[denzacar]

1. Get warranty plan that will pay interest on the value if device fails before the warranty expires
2. Wait billion years
3. ???
4. Profit!

Right.

[DarthVain]

Too bad it doesn't exist.

Also good luck FINDING it after a billion years... "I know it is around here somewhere!"

In other news, my patented Pixie Dust and Ground Unicorn Horn method for data storage may be retrievable after about 1.5 trillion years.

Next story please.

ridiculous

[Ancient_Hacker]

We live in a universe permeated by cosmic rays of very high energies. The flux is about 0.2 ray per square centimeter per second. Each ray can easily ionize a track a billion atoms long.
  In a billion years that's about 6 x 10^21 bits damaged per square cm. Not exactly legible.

Re:ridiculous

[Nerdposeur]

And that is why you wrap it up in black construction paper before storing.

Re:ridiculous

[Ancient_Hacker]

Sorry, can't tell if you're kidding.

( Cosmic rays can go through several feet of lead. )

Re:ridiculous

[Nerdposeur]

Yes, I was kidding. I didn't know what cosmic rays could or couldn't penetrate, so I aimed low. :)

Re:Nano this, carbon nano that...

[Artifex]

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.

Ken. Meet Barbie.

[denzacar]

Can. Meet Will Be. And this is her sister Should Be.

Oldest stone tools are millions of years old.
Can we still use them for hunting or whatever? Sure.
Should we still use them? Depends on the situation.
Would we still use them? Highly unlikely if there is anything a bit more modern at hand. Like a stick.

In another 50-100 years we ourselves may not be able to read those audio messages we sent out to space on those golden records.
Whose recording may outlive most of today's CDs and DVDs. Should we still be using turntables to listen to our records instead of MP3 players?
Highly unlikely.

Same with the billion-year nano-memory.
Read-Write interface may become obsolete in under a decade, but if by chance we need a really REALLY long term memory bank - the data will still be there.
Just attach the particulars for building the Read-Write interface on the packaging and make the packaging something sturdy - like gold, stone, crystal, diamonds...

Re:Ken. Meet Barbie.

[eam]

> In another 50-100 years we ourselves may not be able to read
> those audio messages we sent out to space on those golden records.

Why not? You should be able to play them back with any sharp metal wire poked through a sheet of paper or plastic. Put the disk on a turntable, poke a wire through a thin piece of plastic or paper, lay the point of the wire in the groove while holding the sheet. When you turn the disk, the needle will vibrate the sheet and you'll hear the sounds.

Of course, you'll probably scratch the shit out of it.

Kids: Don't try it with your Dad's mint condition LPs (the black disks sealed in the plastic sleeves that he only handles while wearing gloves). Ask your grandmother if your aunt's 45s are still in her attic ;-)

As long as we can still figure out that the squiggly grooves are sounds, we should be able to play them fine. Hell, if there's no wire you might be able to get it working with an oak splinter.

Re:Ken. Meet Barbie.

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:Ken. Meet Barbie.

[Frantix]

I don't know why we would underestimate the abilities of our future generations or more specifically the computers of the future. The ability to analyze the physical attributes and extract data doesn't really seem like a big deal. Then again, who cares, we only need something that will last for 3 years, right? :)

Re:Ken. Meet Barbie.

[Tenebrousedge]

I don't care if the music is listened to on an mp3 player or gramophone, as long as it was mastered for vinyl and not compressed to the limits of the digital format. From mp3s, radio, and car stereos, deliver us, O lord!

You may snort in derision of this audiophile nonsense, and assert that "No one can actually hear the difference!" but I'd challenge you to a little experiment. There are LP rips of beatles albums on TPB, and probably also the Beatles One album. Find a common track and compare them.

Whether we should or should not listen to our music on vinyl as opposed to iPods is something I'll not debate, but our music would sound better if it were the former.

Re:Ken. Meet Barbie.

[default luser]

Specialist firms will use a laser to read the disks and will copy them for you - for a much larger fee.

It's not all that large, if you take advantage of the fact that almost nobody wants to buy these things. Sure, purchasing a laser turntable costs around 10k, but did you know you can "rent" one for ten days if you put-up a (fully-refundable) 5k deposit?

As far as I can see, the only cost to you would be:
* %4 service charge (if you use a credit card).
* Lost interest on $5,000 for a month (if you use cash).

Not a bad price for archiving your vinyl library.

Re:Ken. Meet Barbie.

[SlashWombat]

Actually, a long (200mm) thin rod sharpened at one end, and the other end clamped by your teeth worked well for the old 78 RPM records. (You hear it quite loudly due to bone conduction.) Getting the speed right isn't as hard as you might think either.

Re:Nano this, carbon nano that...

[Tablizer]

So Nano this and nano that is the new buzzword.

No, Mork from Ork was using it in the mid 70's ("Nano Nano").
       

Re:Nano this, carbon nano that...

[ByteSlicer]

Also "temperature-stability" : I'm sure if you light a match to it, these carbo nanotubes will have no problem oxidising to carbondioxide. So they're only stable in a very carefully controlled environment. And even then they will degrade because of cosmic radiation.

Heard This Before ... CDs Last Forever. Not!

[Ron Bennett]

Back when music CDs first came out, many made similar claims; would basically last forever, which turned out to not be true, as many early CD adopters found out the hard way by the late 1980s.

I'd doubt such nanotech memory, especially at the extreme densities mentioned in the article summery, would last (as in being easily readable and having zero uncorrectable errors) even 50 years.

What about the stability of the substrate / packaging, cosmic rays, etc? Still too many unknowns for any credible longevity claim.

Ron

Re:Meh, Good start...

[eln]

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.

Re:Nano this, carbon nano that...

[ByteSlicer]

Make that "carbon nanotubes" and "carbon dioxide". My keyboard is eating my letters. Yeah, I'm sure that's what happened ;-)

Re:Ah, the psychics are here again

[JustinOpinion]

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:

To determine the lifetime of the memory device, we consider the motion of the iron shuttle at room temperature and zero bias over an appreciable enough distance to cause loss of information ... Although truly archival storage is a global property of an entire memory system, the first inescapable requirement for such a system is that the underlying mechanism of information storage for individual bits must exhibit a persistence time much longer than the envisioned lifetime of the resulting device. A single bit lifetime in excess of a billion years demonstrates that this system has the potential to store information stably for any practical desired archival time scale.

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.

Re:What is the shelf life of a 5-1/4 inch floppies

[drinkypoo]

360kB floppies can last damned near forever, if they're not subjected to a lot of cold/hot cycles. If they are, fuggedaboudit. Still, you might try aligning the floppy drive, as was suggested, if you can't read ANY of them. 1.2 MB floppies (which you don't have) don't last for shit.

Re:Citation needed

[Lord Bitman]

I think you'll find that if you had the ancient systems required to read them, knew the formats involved, etc, 40-year-old tapes are still going to be tough to read from. The fast pace of "progress" making things obsolete before they even wear out, only serves to hide the fact that old things /do/ wear out, even if old things wear out more slowly than new things.

Re:Meh, Good start...

[peragrin]

You know I am sick of people saying the Egyptians had us beat. Sure the data was there but they didn't leave any way to read the data. A lucky find hundreds of miles away called the rosetta stone is what allowed us to crack their encryptian.

Format matters little if you don't leave a method of retrivial. I have tons of programs written back in the early 80's. However since they are all for a TI 99/4a on 5 1/2" floppies I can't use them anymore.

1 billion years

[Seranfall]

Wow, I never thought that I'd be able to save my porn collection for my descendants.

Re:1 billion years

[cashman73]

Wow! This is impressive! Technology has progressed to the point of being able to store my porn for longer than 35,000 years!

Rebuilding civilization.

[Oricalchos]

Something like this memory could, for example, hold the data of all mankind's science, history and so forth, with gradual ways of relaying information to people surviving any major catastrophe that could happen(nuclear winter, ice age, asteroid crash et cetera). Or some alien civilization could pick up some details of why this planet is so f*cked up long time after the mankind is gone. The point is, for someone this data will matter. Even from a historical point of view.

Re:Ah, the psychics are here again

[holophrastic]

I'm not caring about the real device even. Just the single bit isn't stable for a billion years. It's merely theorhetically stable from a single influence for a calculated billion years. That's pure bullshit.

Hey, when did the first sun spot or solar flare start to break things?

Tell me, what _does_ affect nano-scale devices? The answer is that no ones been looking for very long. I promiss you that within a billion years, some effect, some dynamic, some event will break the device.

Rocks used to be stable -- until general weathering was observed. And it wasn't observed on the first day.

nanoSETI?

[Ektanoor]

Could this mean that we should be looking for crystals instead of radiowaves?

Oh!.. We may even find data from the very beginning of the times! And the message is: "Oooops... Sorry..."

ubiquitous

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually Bell Telephone popularized the term "ubiquitous" in a series of nationwide print advertisements in the mid-1960's.

proof of no extraterrestial intelligence

[hort_wort]

If this tech works, then this is proof there is no other intelligent civilization out there... otherwise every meteor would be examined and found to have several TB of alien porn produced over the past billion years. Then again, maybe it does and we just don't realize it.

*gurgle fritz zelly* (Earth translation) "Is that a unique type of crystallized lithium? hubba hubba!"

OR...

[192939495969798999]

Or, it fails after a million years. How would anyone know?

Re:A billion years from now...

[bwian]

Hey it's an audio recording ... "640k should be en..." .... hey can you find volume 2 ?

Hasn't this been done before?

[Ed Avis]

I think there is prior art on this one:

I also have invented a process for creating a rock inside of a computer, one that all of the people in the world could artificially engrave in a tombstone-style text whatever they wish. If built, this rock would enable all people on Earth to store one paragraph or more worth of information that would be permanently stored on the computer. The information stored would outlive the person whom engraved the rock because the rock would be of a 0.8 micron process with 500,000 transistors in the space of a 486 Central Processing Unit. A 486 Central Processing Unit actually has over 800,000 transistors. My design would be more reliable than a 486. Some people may think that a 0.8 micron process is too slow - this is incorrect if it is a 1024 bit or higher processor, then it could do more in increased volume than a smaller processor. The processor would last many hundreds of years and this is why the space shuttle uses similar technology - where failure is not an option. The information engraved in the rock which is purple and blue and marble-like and is black in some areas where the operating system blocks out information that a person may chose to remove from the rock. The information people place on the rock is permanent. Data is stored in the style of something similar to a Nintendo video game cartridge which is Read Only Memory (ROM) and will almost certainly last many lifetimes before failure. The rock is rectangular and information within it could be searched through or zoomed in and out of viewing range. The rock would cost based on the price of data storage media. For instance: an 80 GigaByte hard disk can hold 80 billion characters of information - this would give every single person on Earth approximately 13 characters of information on the rock for about $50 worth of failure prone storage like a personal computer hard disk. The design intentions are to make the rock outlast 10's of lifetimes before repair, to be redundant in all ways and last for eternity. The rock is for love letters, poems, eulogies and anything at all. This rock is free and will remain free and will never cost monetary values to use the contents of it or place information on it. Light from the fiber optic inter-connects would be magnified and sent to to solar panels and then that energy would be used to power the system. It would be electrically efficient. This idea was invented by Shampoo.

Why

[LinuxOverWindows]

A billion years, really? Sweet I can be sure my Data will be available for my Great Great Great .... Grandkids. :-)

Re:Why

[Locke2005]

Not sure if people would be interested in your data that far in the future... surely somebody would have come up with better porn by then!

Where do they get the figure for stone?

[argent]

The oldest information-bearing material we know of are fossil stromatolites over three billion years old.

More crap from "Physorg"

[Animats]

It's another one of those crap articles from Physorg. They regularly report some minor advance in chemistry or device physics as a new product available Real Soon Now. Then somebody posts it to Slashdot, whose "editors" post it as news.

Wikipedia has better editing than this.

Error in summary

[ausekilis]

Details of the process are available at the American Chemical Society for $30.

I think they meant:

Details of the process were available on The Pirate Bay a month ago.

Re:Nano this, carbon nano that...

[Dragonslicer]

It reminds me of the word "ubiquitous". Prior to 1997 or so no one had ever heard of this word...

Some quick and dirty research tells me that it comes from the Latin ubique ("everywhere"). I'm fairly certain that Latin existed before 1997.

Re:Ah, the psychics are here again

[JustinOpinion]

Just the single bit isn't stable for a billion years. It's merely theorhetically stable from a single influence for a calculated billion years. That's pure bullshit.

If you're saying that there is always room for us to discover new effects and revise our calculations, then I agree. But if you're saying that we cannot make any kind of predictions, with useful error bars, about events over long timescale, then I have to disagree.

Rocks used to be stable -- until general weathering was observed. And it wasn't observed on the first day.

That's a good example. Apparently you accept the general theories of erosion and weathering, even though we have not measured them over the timescales we think they operate. It wasn't observed on the first day, but we also have not watched a mountain for 100,000 years... and yet we accept explanations and predictions that invoke those timescales. Similarly for plate tectonics, star formation, radioactivity, chemical stability, and so on. The long timescales certainly have effects on our predictions (e.g. error bars, predicting details, etc.), but we can still make statistically-significant predictions.

Tell me, what _does_ affect nano-scale devices? The answer is that no ones been looking for very long.

Okay, the last decades or century of science is nowhere near the billions of years timescale. But we can still make sensible predictions. We know what forces are operative on nano-scales (quantum mechanics is quite well-established). If our theories didn't account for some really-longterm effect, then we would expect to see measurable deviations from our predictions in the composition of the universe, decay rates, chemical stability, or something else. Are you suggesting that an N2 molecule isn't stable over billions of years? Are you saying that there is some as-yet-undiscovered process that causes it to break-down over a timescale of billions of years? If so, where's the evidence? On the other hand, if you accept our theories can make sensible predictions for some nano-objects, why can they not make sensible predictions for other nano-objects?

I promiss you that within a billion years, some effect, some dynamic, some event will break the device.

I am certainly willing to accept that some future scientific discovery will modify our current best theories. But absent such evidence, why should we not trust a spectacularly successful physical model? Just because the timescales are long? (The timescales of plate tectonics, star formation, cosmology, etc. are long, and yet we trust our theories because they work...) Your declaration that "something" will happen, without any particular evidence, isn't scientific and isn't convincing.

Precision? Speed?

[master_p]

Some questions arise:

1) Some data like movies can suffer a certain degree of data loss. But some other data (code, for example) can not. How precise is this new storage technique?

2) what is the performance? can we use it as main memory? or it is to replace hard disks?

Re:Some one please pay the 30 bucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Full article is available at the University of California, Berkeley website in pdf format.

Re:Meh, Good start...

[OctaviusIII]

And how many bytes of data were left by the Egyptians? How much can you fit on a square inch? Square foot? I'm talking text here, of course, but I don't think rock carving is a very high-bandwidth means of data transfer from present to future.

Re:Nano this, carbon nano that...

[Chris Burke]

This just in, people use buzzwords to sound smart, get funding.

Shit, you can use buzzwords to get funding too? I never thought of that! I guess that's the downside of only sounding smart.

Re:Meh, Good start...

[adonoman]

Or when the next king / emperor / pharaoh decides that his predecessor never existed and sets out to "relabel" all the monuments.

May... Meet Will.

[denzacar]

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.

Re:May... Meet Will.

[icebike]

We MAY not be able to read those messages.
Most people WILL not be able to read them pretty soon due to obscurity.
 

Obscurity is not a problem for any sufficiently advanced civilization.

Its not like the records on Voyager were meant for your teen-ager to play on your old dusted off turntable from the attic.

The point made by the GP is that it is easily readable by any society likely to recover Voyager (unless it crash lands on Planet of the Apes).

Yes, they might initially mistake it for a Religious symbol, or random etching by a long gone microbe, or dismiss it all together because its JUST a physical object and the physical was long abandoned in their society.

But in the fullness of time any civilization capable of and interested in investigating wandering engineered objects would be able to read it.

And if they got the speed exactly right wouldn't matter a bit.

Re:May... Meet Will.

[eam]

Last time I did it the volume from a needle through a piece of paper was sufficient to hear the sound clearly. However, I did cheat and use a turntable to spin the record. I think if you've gone as far as laying a needle to the track, you're expecting to make a sound, so you'll adjust the speed until it sounds reasonable.

Ooo...Just paper:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRMDaOBxUXk

No electricity:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPWyTBUYolo

Given the time frame you suggested, it seems highly unlikely that we wouldn't be able to play records. I think it would require a catastrophic failure of civilization. Otherwise, in 100 years there would still be people who knew people who played records and told them how they worked. You'll still be able to see the equipment. People own phonographs that are already 100 years old. I doubt we'll lose them all in the next 100 years.

Now, if you find an ipod 100 years from now...good luck with that.

Re:May... Meet Will.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you can't scratch if you use laser to measure the depressions on the disk (the current "obvious" way of measuring things like that). The GP used the needle to show how simple it is, but a more advanced society will be able to use complex tools.

Also, rotation speed is obvious once you know it is sound, you just calculate the FFT of your data and you'll see how it ends abruptly near a certain distance. That distance is 22kHz, so, adjust rotation accordingly. Even the fact that it is sound is probably easy to discover, since what is pressed at the disk is a smmoth wave. It is certanly not digital, and has 2 channels.

The only non-obvious thing about a LP that I can see is that there is some information in it. Everything else comes naturaly once you know humans.

FINALLY!

[stonetony]

A medium that can store internet porn for posterity's sake!

Re:Meh, Good start...

[FireFury03]

...but nothing today comes even close to the reliability of carving information into stone if you want to store it for 1 billion years. And its easily accessible/readable to anyone or I guess maybe at this point in time, anything alive and aware of it.

Wake me up when you figure out how to store video on a stone tablet and have it easily accessible to anyone...

Screw that...

[denzacar]

Build nano-elephants.

That way we will be combining nano-technology and nature and we will have a device that stores data for billion forevers.

Re:Ah, the psychics are here again

[holophrastic]

We need to distinguish two very different types of scientific predictions. Weathering and erosion over long periods is very different than stability over long periods. Predictions regarding niagara falls eventually producing a canyon larger than the grand canyon certainly doesn't take into account a meteorite stopping the falls, or their being dammed artificially. Instead, it simply predicts the continued effects of current observations. In other words, we see it eroding slowly, if this continues, and we don't se why it wouldn't, then it will grow a larger canyon.

But that's very different than the opposite. On day one of the niagara falls, to see them, and say wow these falls sustain themselves from mountains and rain, and hence they will be here just as they are now for the next billion years.

When the prediction is based on "we can't see what might happen" then a billion years is too long. When it's based on "we see what's happening and expect it to continue" then a slightly longer time-frame is acceptable.

In this case, something only just discovered -- nanoscale in general, and especially artificial nano-scale -- to say "we don't see what could change it" is ridiculous. Of course you don't, you haven't had the opportunity to look, yet.

But all of these types of predictions, the early-ignorant ones gets turns upside down by odd-ball perspectives. It's happened many many times. Things like: "the human gastro-intestinal tract is outside of the human body", and "pregnancies are simply parasites". Each of these brought a wealth of existing knowledge to a table that thought it knew everything. The former allowed for treatment of the tract as though it were a skin rash, the latter brought centuries of "how to kill parasites" as a what not to do for babies. So I ask you, what's the largest organ in the human body?

Finally, "billions of years" is worthless. To say that something will last for a billion years, and that's better than a million years is totally useless. Would you pay more for a car that lasted 300 years over one that is guaranteed to last 200 years? It simply doesn't matter. It's like companies guaranteeing their product for life. It's their life that they mean. Not yours.

Thinking ahead

[Locke2005]

I love to use this for a time-capsule, but I'm not sure somebody reading my time-capsule data 1 billion years in the future will understand the phenomenon of "rick-rolling".

Re:Meh, Good start...

[Locke2005]

Try leaving a CD-ROM out in the weather "for a few thousand years". Turns out they disintegrate rather quickly.

This isn't going to work for me...

[arpad1]

I need storage media with minimum data retention period of a trillion years.

Maybe when they start using adamantium nanotubes....

Sorry

[zogger]

No can do! That will be a super DMCA violation by then, circumventing protection features, with penalties like exile on Rura Penthe for a first offense and they get nasty after that....

guarantee

[Device666]

I hope that when this stuff becomes commercial, it's all backed by a guarantee of 1 billion year.

Re:Meh, Good start...

[KC7JHO]

just carve the pictures in it and make the viewer run real fast...?

Re:Nano this, carbon nano that...

[Culture20]

I read that too; was wondering if the "temperature-stability" was around liquid-oxygen temperatures or something. If it's not at least room-temperature stable, it's not worth as much as it sounds.

not possible due to 1/f noise...

[nellahj]

I'm not paying the $30 to read the paper, but how do they overcome 1/f noise? You can get arbitrarily high noise disturbances if you wait long enough. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_noise Though I guess this can be fixed with an error correction protocol involving copies stored at long distances, but you can do that with any media.

I'm holding out for the 10 Billion years version.

[Funk_dat69]

I'm holding out for the 10 Billion years version.

Technology changes so fast!

Re:Nano this, carbon nano that...

[commodoresloat]

He's right about that word being used everywhere now, though; it's just ubiquitous!!

For the people complaining about 'paid' links...

[thousandinone]

Check the citations in just about any 'free' work- You are bound to find that some of the cited works are copyrighted or otherwise protected material. In these cases, you have the choice of purchasing said material yourself, or trying to find a library or other party who has a copy. So whats the big deal?

Regardless of whether the work in question was paid for by taxpayer's money, the actual ground work for the research still deserves some recompense. How many industries in the US are partially or fully subsidized by taxpayers dollars? If you've got gripes about this article, I suggest you direct your ire towards a more deserving target- attacking this sort of thing only worsens the already piss poor state of research these days.

Re:Meh, Good start...

[ardle]

A lucky find hundreds of miles away called the rosetta stone is what allowed us to crack their encryptian.

Hieroglyphics ;-)

/. Rule #657: Comments in the firehose don't work

[tqft]

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1244909&cid=28091617

$30 is a carton of beer, a pdf is much cheaper (Score:1)
by tqft (619476) on 01:48 AM May 26th, 2009 (#28091617) Homepage Journal

http://www.physics.berkeley.edu/research/zettl/publist.html#bottom [berkeley.edu]
http://www.physics.berkeley.edu/research/zettl/pdf/361.NanoLet.9-Begtrup.pdf [berkeley.edu]

The highlights
http://www.physics.berkeley.edu/research/zettl/highlights.html [berkeley.edu]

Re:Nano this, carbon nano that...

[BikeHelmet]

Computer wasn't originally IT specific, either. :P

My sorry life

[SpaghettiPattern]

So I'll be able to archive parts of my sorry life. But who would care?

If I were great a few people would be interested in anything I wrote in my life. The odds are nobody will be.

The problem with being able to store anything almost indefinitely is that the sheer amount of data will overwhelm and hence reduce it's significance. Much like the million monkeys producing works of Shakespeare and that you'd have to wade through so much crap before recognizing a work. (And then you just have a copy.)

Re:Meh, Good start...

[peragrin]

It sounds geekier my way. maybe the slashdot readers will finally understand.

Re:douchebaggery

[Bakkster]

Methinks you don't understand the term "regular wear and tear" or that "environmental factors" count as such.

In that case, regular environmental factors count as regular wear and tear. I'm referring to those outside the manufacturers recommendations.

CD/DVD ReReRedundentttt recording

[ResidentSourcerer]

Would someone explain to a simpleton why there isn't a multiple redundent opensource backup system for using recordable media?

My understanding of the failure mode of CD's and DVD's is that they go bad a bit or a sector at a time, not all at once everywhere.

Given that, it should be possible to design a multiply redundent data scheme to make recovery possible.

My prof told a story of one of the early vacuum tube computers. A 'bit' was stored in a shoe box sized module that had 7 tubes in it. ANY 5 of the tubes could die and the device would still work. (Everything was drawer mounted Grad students with shopping carts full of vacuum tubes would run through the halls replacing tubes on the fly)

E.g. Reed Solomon codes can make it possible to correct an X bit error, and detect a Y bit error in a block. I don't know if these are the best encoding scheme for redundency.

Record onto two disks, both with RS error detection. If you know which block is bad, you have good odds to recover the corresponding block form the other disk.

Use a format so that losing one sector only loses you one sector of a file, not the entire file/directory/disk. This requires additional redundency for meta data, and it will mean don't use compression or encryption schemes that require the previous block to be read correctly to read the current block.

If someone does this I suggest a tier of standards, based on the desired probability of full recovery, and the probability of a read error on the media.

So for example Level 1 is based on making 2 copies + RS codes + redundant metadata on a single disk.

Level 2 is based on making at least 2 copies, and enough recovery code so that ANY one scratch across the face of the disk can't delete all the data.

Level 3 is based on making two copies of the disk, and labeling appropriately.

Level 4 is based on making 3 copies of the disk, with one labeled for cold storage.

It may be to do this, you will need to modify the media writer to access arbitrary locations on the media -- e.g. if the chunk of the disk that says what the disk is is bad.

So why isn't this done?

Or is it, and I've just not heard of it.

Re:Meh, Good start...

[ardle]

I liked it but didn't know how to say "that's funny" and keep it funny...

Star Gate's Crystal Technology?

[TemporalBeing]

Looks like we'd have found it without the Ancients or Goul'ds too...

Well...someone had to say it.

Re:Nano this, carbon nano that...

[Artifex]

Computer wasn't originally IT specific, either. :P

I wonder if we could say the reverse, though? :)