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Nanotech Memory Could Hold Data For 1 Billion Years
Hugh Pickens writes "Digital storage devices have become ubiquitous in our lives but the move to digital storage has raised concerns about the lifetime of the storage media. Now Alex Zettl and his group at the University of California, Berkeley report that they have developed an experimental memory device consisting of a crystalline iron nanoparticle enclosed in a multiwalled carbon nanotube that could have a storage capacity as high as 1 terabyte per square inch and temperature-stability in excess of one billion years. The nanoparticle can be moved through the nanotube by applying a low voltage, writing the device to a binary state represented by the position of the nanoparticle. The state of the device can then be subsequently read by a simple resistance measurement while reversing the nanoparticle's motion allows a memory 'bit' to be rewritten. This creates a programmable memory system that, like a silicon chip, can record digital information and play it back using conventional computer hardware storing data at a high density with a very long lifetime. Details of the process are available at the American Chemical Society for $30."
That's great. Will the readers and systems able to display such information be around for even a hundred? Will they even accept the same power?
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
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!
WTF? Over?
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...
Ok, while I find the tech cool and this is certainly News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters but, seriously? "Details of the process are available at the American Chemical Society for $30." Seriously? We're just abandoning any pretense that these are news summaries now and just outright turning them into ads for products? We're now outright trying to sell things? Weak. Very weak indeed.
nobody will give a damn about our data anyway.
Nanotech - 1 Billion years
Elephant - Forever
Technology simply cannot compete with mother nature.
Summation 2
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.
A little while ago there was an article on Slashdot by someone who wrote some software that played LPs using a flatbed scanner. The resolution on a cheap consumer-grade scanner is high enough that the sound is recognisable. You wouldn't want to use it for music, but to get a rough idea it's fine, and this is using hardware that a lot of people have sitting around at home. Specialist firms will use a laser to read the disks and will copy them for you - for a much larger fee.
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