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SanDisk WORM SD Card Can Store Data For 100 Years
CWmike writes "SanDisk has announced a 1GB Secure Digital card that can store data for 100 years, but can be written on only once. The WORM (write once, read many) card is 'tamper-proof' and data cannot be altered or deleted, SanDisk said in a statement. The card is designed for long-time preservation of crucial data like legal documents, medical files and forensic evidence, SanDisk said. SanDisk determined the media's 100-year data-retention lifespan based on internal tests conducted at normal room temperatures. The company said it is shipping the media in volume to the Japanese police force to archive images as an alternative to film. The company is working with a number of consumer electronics companies, including camera vendors, to support the media."
For non-repudiation purposes, digital data can have a cryptographic hash computed on it. It can also be signed with a timestamp by a trusted third-party. If you're concerned about data being tampered with after it is on the card, the police can simply publish a cryptographic hash of every card they archive after they have written to it. In fact they can do that regardless of how they store the data.
To me this is kind of a technology regression, unless one is only concerned with archiving. I used to work at a Title Company where scanned documents were stored on a WORM drive in the mid-90's. WORM as a technology in itself tends to err on the side of retention time vs. speed. Think about it, CD-R, DVD-R and every other -R is technically WORM media.
I'm more worried about the fact that much electronics may suffer from natural changes in soldering. Especially lead-free solder is suffering from this since tin (used for soldering) changes characteristic when it's stored too cold.
The chip may be good for 100 years but the carrier for the chip may not.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
with a useless bit of trivia
Kodak- 100+ years
http://www.kodak.com/global/en/service/faqs/faq1632.shtml
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
And on top of all that, who knows where SanDisk will be in 100 years. Possibly bankrupt from having to refund everyone's WORM SD card.
No it's not. This is a high priced flash-based SD card with only 1GB of storage that requires you to write to each card. It's too small for video, too expensive for consumers, and not useful for media mass production.
Besides, if the content mass production industry wanted to use a transistor-based solution they'd just mass produce a much cheaper ROM cartridge. But they won't, since DVDs and Blu-Ray disks can be pressed for pennies.
Quantum entanglement is a reasonably well-understood phenomenon which isn't a method of communication. Please don't use it as a name for your unrelated hypothetical future technology.
"Quantum entanglement is a reasonably well-understood phenomenon which isn't a method of communication."
Except you're wrong and we've been trying to build single-bit quantum radios for quite some time, now.
And guess what Quantum Computing will involve? Communication. That data isn't just going to magically appear.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Also, we moved from 20 to 24 pin not very long ago...
. . . we called them PROMs. If you have an original IBM PC, its BIOS was in PROM. I bet most PROMs still are readable.
While not as sudden or dramatic as Mission Impossibles discs, there are the read-only for 48 hours dvds.
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
Glass would deform in that time scale...
I'm guessing your talking about the urban myth that glass can flow and melt? Sorry, but glass doesn't melt, it would hold it's form as long as it isn't shattered.
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
I find it funny that people actually think we won't be able to recreate old technology and we would have to go to museums to get the latest working readers.
This story was on /. just last week:
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/06/18/162204/80-Year-Old-Edison-Recording-Resurrected
Two engineers spent two years building a machine to playback some recordings they found.
They had to look at the original patent and work from that, because no players had been saved.
We should be so lucky that every last player + software will get saved in a museum somewhere.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
TFA article is wrong. If you look at sandisk's actual press release they say the 100 life span is "based on reliability data from internal, accelerated lifespan testing for cards stored at normal room temperature, with humidity and static protection".
[FUCK BETA 2.6.2014]
The "serial" you lived through is likely RS-232-C, defined in 1969, and not exactly hard to find support for today.
The parallel interface is likely IEEE 1284 from 1994, but backward compatible with the Centronics interface introduced sometime in the 70s. You won't have to look far to find a IEEE 1284 connector either, even if it is slightly less common.
USB 1.0 is from 1996. Finding a PC that doesn't support it will be more difficult than either of the above challenges.
General purpose data connectors seem to be long lived.
Storage media less so, finding a reader for 8" floppy disk (the standard of the 70s) is much more difficult.
The chances are they will be using this to store records of arrests rather than evidence. Evidence tends to have a short lifespan anyway - except in a very few rare cases where the crime is solved decades later, most evidence is utilised within a couple of years (when the person is either caught or the case is marked unsolvable).
True, but modern (E)EPROM programmers / readers will still read EPROM chips dating to at least the late 70's.
A SD card has a lot more in common with a ROM chip than it does with a 30 year old spinning disk, the way I see it. You call pull data off it using SPI interface, which pretty well every microcontroller made in the last decade has in hardware, and if not, you can bit-bang it half-drunk and blindfolded. All the information is available, I just can't see it being lost to the sands of time if you can bang up a reader for peanuts.
Guys have hooked these up to (home) routers, bitbanging the data off GPIOs that were originally relegated to flickering LEDs, and are able to use them as storage. (under linux)
Here is a pdf on the interface.
http://www.sdcard.org/developers/tech/sdcard/pls/Simplified_Physical_Layer_Spec.pdf
Section 7 is what I'm on about. The speed is reduced in the simple SPI mode, but if the data is important, I suppose that is irrelevant.
Sent from my PDP-11
Who knows what "room temperature" will be in 100 years... I mean, did they take global warming into account?
If the average temperature fries electronics any time soon, we'll have bigger problems than data retention.
Btw, room temperature means "comfortable for human beings".
Wrong. It is indeed an urban myth, read the damn link that GP posted!! The church example of thicker glass on the bottom is explained much more simply than by the glass slowly moving over time: Glass manufacturing wasn't sophisticated enough to make a flat piece of glass like it is today. If you were given a piece of glass with a thick side and a thin side, which side would you put on the bottom of the window? The thick side, of course, as that will offer better structural integrity.