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..

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?

[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.

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

[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

[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

[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.

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

[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

[TheRaven64]

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

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?

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.

In 1 billion years...

[Eddy Luten]

nobody will give a damn about our data anyway.

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).

 

So?

[Rik Sweeney]

Nanotech - 1 Billion years
Elephant - Forever

Technology simply cannot compete with mother nature.

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: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.

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: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.

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.

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: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.