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Start-Up Claims Immortality For Data With 'Stone-Like' Disc
CWmike writes "Start-up Millenniata and LG plan to soon release a new optical disc and read/write player that will store movies, photos or any other data forever. The data can be accessed using any current DVD or Blu-ray player. The M-Disc can be dipped in liquid nitrogen and then boiling water without harming it. It also has a Defense Department study (PDF) backing up the resiliency of its product compared with other leading optical disc competitors. The company would not disclose what material is used to produce the optical discs, referring to it only as a 'natural' substance that is 'stone-like.' Like DVDs and Blu-ray discs, the M-Disc platters are made up of multiple layers of material. But there is no reflective, or die, layer. Instead, during the recording process a laser 'etches' pits onto the substrate material."
Like the fabled non-volatile memory, stone-like disks have appeared on Slashdot at least once before.
you had me at #!
I need to copy my mind onto something that will survive the heat death of the universe.
These M-discs sound like just the ticket.
Yeah ... /me rushes out and buys one tonight at Best Buy because, you know, the last fourteen computers, MP3 players and PDAs i've owned all died in the vats of liquid nitrogen around my house - for some stupid reason I keep dropping stuff in those.
I think this is how Fred Flintstone's instant camera worked.
I'd like to see this along with a disc reader that will withstand the test of time. What good is a disc if it can't be read with future technology? Imagine an archaeologist finding this disc 2000 years from now, with no way to read it. Now imagine if there was a device that withstood the test of time and could play back the information on the disc in some form. The people of the future would just need to wipe the screen down and press play.
A unique way to learn a language: http://languageloom.com
The island of Yap may have something to say about it.
Stonehenge is a data center! I wonder if they're hiring?
Also, will I need a truck to transport a box full of music StoneD's (TM) ? On a more serious note, is the "stone-like" substance less brittle than actual stone? Half a StoneD is not going to help even if the etching on it is perfectly preserved if my great-great-grandson drops it upon landing on Mars.
Edit: The Slashdot AI seems to have recognized that this is a juvenile post and the captcha it presented was "puberty".
I wonder if it's possible they could be made of some variant of Mica.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mica
bro this is awesome bro I like more awesome story please do take this seriously.
Have a nice Day
*chinkchink. pause. chink. pause. chinkchink. *
Literally lasts forever ...field tested to 250BC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Indian_epigraphy
...not to drop it.
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
I would mark more pits corrupting the data.. that is how i sanitise cd-r/dvd-r/rw media before mechanical destruction....
Wasn't tested on toddlers, just ask my 2yr old about the state of my DVD library.
I wonder what their comment on backing your stuff up to a media that will last forever will be?
His name is Moses. Wants to write commandments on a couple.
It doesn't really last forever. Given a long enough period of time there won't be any devices capable of reading the discs and even if someone digs an old DVD player out of a garage, it's unlikely that it will be able to interface with any modern equipment. What's the point of having media that will last eons when technology changes so rapidly that it will be obsolete and unreadable several times over within our lifetimes?
just think about encoding nightmares! reading the data problem is not too hard to solve even if we claw back from the stone age; the real problem is how to decode the data and then how to process it.
I can imagine them getting stumped on the DOC files they are trying open; the jpegs have to be even more difficult.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Oh great, they hired Moses...
Just witness the amount of tombstones that are unreadable due to weathering. Heck look how Stonehenge no longer has sharp corners. Nothing is indestructible.
Give a few of these to Labrador Retrievers and check back the next day to see if they are as durable as claimed.
So we have Orichalcum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orichalcum
Apparently you're also part troll.
... the CD/DVD/BD discs don't last. If only they'd used a dye layer instead.
and wait for it to be archived.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Obviously the M-Disc uses M-Theory to quantum lock the data.
You can put a normal CD-R disk in Liquid Nitrogen without any damage. I have tested it myself. Although it warps into a dome shape until it warms.
This doesn't sound a whole lot different than CDs or DVDs burned in factories. Those don't use a dye layer either, but pits etched into an (aluminum?) substrate. It sounds like this company has found a way to produce similar results at home -- but that doesn't mean the resulting discs will be any more durable or have longer life than your store-bought CDs/DVDs.
Breakfast served all day!
It can take boiling water and liquid nitrogen, but what about that Kleenex in my pocket? That's killed more DVDs than I'd like to admit.
=================
Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
My wife's Thesis was on this subject. Readers won't last long enough to make this useful.
http://explorer.cyberstreet.com/CET4970H-Peterson-Thesis.pdf
The material is probably mentioned in one of these Patents
I don't need to test my programs.. I have an error correcting modem.
I'm not Immortal. So... who cares?
Get back with me when you've solved that little issue, mmmk?
It's Play-Doh.
(Oven-fired, that is.)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049833/ I'll be here all week, try the veal!
they make it asbestos they can!
This actually fills a nitch, considering that most memory can be wiped easily with a magnet, and that personally burned DVD's only last a few years before they start to degrade. It's perfect for time capsules.
The data layer of manufactured CDs (etc) are pressed with a die, unlike those of recordables.
Weren't the original large-format Laser Video Discs created via this principle? I thought they etched dots into an aluminium substrate using a higher power setting.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
I think most of the faults i've had with cd's/dvd's is scratches on the plastic surface... does anyone know if these discs actually protect against that? we need discs that you can run over with a tank and they still function not something that can be stored in the cold or hot...
Slashdot editors! phew! They appear to be drunk even if it wasn't a weekend!
I can not wait to see that video. :)
religious or ceremonial, the catch all of confused scientists.
"What were all the microscopic pits for?"
"To catch their souls of course!!!"
I resent that!
Bill Bailey
but the face palm happened when i read this:
"However, the discs write at only 4x or 5.28MB/sec, half the speed of today's DVD players. "We feel if we can move to the 8X, that'd be great, but we can live with the four for now," Shumway said, adding that his engineers are working on upping the speed of recording."
they record half the speed of todays players at 4x?
thats unpossible !
"I have a 'stone-like' 'natural' substance in my pants."
Sand?
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Also can be tied to a stick and used to smack down post-apocalyptic miscreants after its original purpose is long forgotten.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
It will last forever, but it will be unreadable by future generations cause they won't remember how to break the DVD encryption. Brilliant.
I miss my old Creative CD Burner! Fast as hell, but sounded like a defective jet engine. And most everyone that I knew about died shortly after its warranty expired.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
51/4" floppy drive? oh, and my 31/2" one as well. cd? what's that? ad infinitum
maybe it's made from bones.
This is how they touted CDs in the earl 1990s. Tapes from the early 1980s are still playable (despite physical abuse), and can be repaired easily if they are not. It's a rare CD which lasts 10 years under non-archive conditions.
By the time this technology is proved useless, they will have made their money and retired!
(or perhaps this is a good thing and I'm being too cynical -- but they'd better have a self-powered player unit that will live as long as the media -- or human-readable plans to build one)
These "diamond-hard stone" discs can withstand "temperatures extending up to 176 degrees Fahrenheit as well as UV rays that would destroy conventional DVD discs."
http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/14/cranberry-diamondisc-the-35-dvd-thatll-last-longer-than-your/
"no reflective or die layer"
Does this mean that I can't record on both sides any more?
...omphaloskepsis often...
So, being part caucasian/native american, I'm actually not related to black niggers from africa at all.
Unfortunately for the rest of us you are still related to all humans.
I have a 'stone-like' 'natural' substance in my pants.
Coprolites?
We really need your help
http://www.gofundme.com/help-sherry
This technology might actually happen. Jade and Pey'j were using M-Discs in 2435.
Am I the only person who saw 'Stone-Like' in the title and immediately thought of Radiant Silvergun? Let's hope it doesn't destroy humanity...
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
put it to the mythbusters test
you can press with a die and you can stain with a dye. and you can dye a die, but you cant dye a dye because then you would just have more dye. but oddly you can press a die of a die. also if you like, you can press a die of a 20 sided die and then stain it with some dye. does that clear things up?
I think I dyed a little bit inside when I read that.
They requested modified testing to get the numbers
Basically, modified ECMA-379 testing, starting with known good discs (where the write was initially verified to be good) with testing limited to 85C temperature and 85% relative humidity profile testing, with the addition of full-spectrum light in order to make the dye substrate more vulnerable to phase-change from humidity lensing of the light.
The two key elements of the Millenniata test which differ from ECMA-379 are
consideration of the initial write quality of the discs selected for testing, and the
introduction of full spectrum light to the test environment.
...or to put it into slash-terms: any sufficiently advanced technology is equivalent to a rigged demo. I'm not saying it's not useful; it probably will be a big hit with the LDS Church, the military, and the IRS, but they had to start with good writes and then work at extreme boundary conditions on the testing to successfully destroy the other discs.
-- Terry
This sounds like an interesting technology and should spark some useful discussion.
Instead... EVERY SINGLE COMMENT RATED HIGH ENOUGH TO BE VIEWED IS FUCKING STUPID!
What the hell... This place is turning into 4chan or fark... Pedantic grammar corrections rate higher than anything useful or interesting these days. What site did all the intelligence move to? Not that i expect an answer here.. You'd just get the pedantic snarky trolling assholes to show up and ruin it.
This must be how the message of the Weaseljumper was able to survive being embedded in coal for a million years or so: http://www.scribd.com/doc/13855395/Weaseljumper-Read-Me-First
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Actually in your case I'd take a wild shot and go with Homo Erectus... ;-)
I'm guessing though, from the shallow end of the gene pool. Chlorine anybody???
Best of all, the DRM is built right into the stone.
We need to store them in huge vaults, protected by robots (golems). Perhaps some day some little guy will investigate with a band of adventurers (murderous looters, really) and they'll trip over every security measure put in place.
WOW! This is a mixed salad of mental illness
Let's see, we start it all off with a really witless attempt at a racial slur. Honestly, this is a living example of why we so need Head-Start. Then he goes for the ham-fisted attempt at sarcasm, and finally brings the whole trailer trash Trifecta home with an awkward insinuation regarding a political system that only exists any more on a backward Caribbean Island. My hats off sir, in two sentences you've regurgitated enough stupidity to lower the average IQ of the western hemisphere by 0.3%. What a monument to ignorance. What a shining beacon for morons everywhere! You must be very proud! Congratulations. ;-)
But can you put it in an XBOX 360 and then tip the XBOX over while it's running?
Because boiling water and liquid nitrogen is what I regularly expose my discs to. Not.
How 'bout testing it against my kids, that drop them on the wood floor, and then swirl them around doing their own etching.
One man's pink plane is another man's blue plane.
I actually read through the entirety of the Navy's report. Pretty amazing how much effort he went through to assemble and calibrate the test device. Definitely a recommended read for any OCD Mythbusters fans.
The report appeared largely unbiased, with the exception of a footnote explaining that it took 29 Millenniata disks to create 25 samples (i.e. he burned 4 coasters) because "These discs were supplied without the benefit of a production quality assurance program and were recorded in preproduction drives". He should have indicated that was the company's stance - there's no reason to believe that their production disks will necessarily have a better success rate. You have to imagine that Millenniata gave him the 'best of the best' disks for the test, so their production disks could even be worse. A pretty minor point, but still.
The big red flag for me in this report is the fact that Millenniata designed the stress tests. It appears that they actually made the test *more* extreme than the current testing standard (ECMA-379). The main difference is that they added full-spectrum light to the ECMA test, blasting the disks with the equivalent of direct sunlight at noon for 26 hours.
My first instinct was - "wow, they must really be confident", but after some thought I realized that adding the light really weakens the results. For all we know, the non-Millenniata disks could weather the extreme temperature and humidy just fine, and were entirely destroyed by the light. If that were the case, then these Millenniata disks are pretty worthless (who stores their archive disks in direct sunlight?!)
That concern would be eliminated if someone dug up some test results using the normal ECMA standard that showed worse performance of off-the-shelf disks over Millenniata.
Wow! I wonder if we could plate our military vehicles with these disk?? Seems very rugged!!
Sounds alot like vinyl to me, and I only just chucked out the old turntables!
It's made of diamondium! - Professor Farnsworth
The problem with archival-quality DVD blanks is that they cost too much. These cost about $8 each from Amazon.
It's not clear what the writing rate is. Etching pits is usually slower than turning a dye a different color. Despite this, it's a useful technology to have around.
The discs you mentioned are from the same source, Cranberry was just a company (that does not seem to exist any longer) that handled the marketing of the MDiscs. The technology has been around a while, I used one of the drives and played around with the media a few years ago at my former employers office and at that time I think the discs went by the names Cranberry DiamondDisc as well as the manufacturers name M-ARC disc.
Hey, there is only one Return and it's not of the King, it's of the Jedi.
Would that be "dye"?
Or have we renamed it the "die layer" with hindsight?
No sig today...
So the marketdroids didn't lie about my 4 year old dvd 16x player being the "technology of tommorow"?!
.... because 90% of all technology that makes it really big in the hardware scene has been accepted by the large corporations.
It will NEVER happen in this case. Why would they back a technology that will eventually get them all thrown in jail?
Just imagine it. Evidence that they CANNOT destroy. No way this is going to fly.
... years ago:
http://lalists.stanford.edu/lad/2008/01/0446.html
For some reason I got accused of being silly about the issue of selling media containing GPLed software...
Will it blend?
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
Quick! Get the Ikaruga!
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".
- Shelley
It's a "CD-R" so still clunky, cumbersome for transport of big amounts of data and write-once read-only. Personally I'm sick of CDs and DVDs mainly because the CD and DVD drives still have problems with them (not all DVDs are recognized/can be read) and they represent an era I'd like to leave behind. This may be great for archivists but for normal users it'll be like a step back.
Next thing, you'll, be saying, there are, too many,,,, commas.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
do you know of any other indestructable mineral deposits that come in disk-form?
http://www.crystalinks.com/dropa.html
While I like the idea of long term storage only half the problem is solved as when the hardware goes obsolete there will be nothing to read them on. The BBC 1986 Domesday project stored data on laserdisc, while the laserdiscs survived very few players capable of reading them survived. Now this was a high profile project that people made the effort to recover, but what about all the stuff that is not considered valuable until it is to late. Who is going to find something that can read a DVD in 100 years time ? And even if you did, will the file formats be readable by anything or will the 1000 year copyright laws that we will have by then prevent someone writing software to read a long since defunct file format ?
Seeing as how an irreplaceable demo CD got destroyed when the cat crapped on it (really) I welcome this new development.
A good old fashioned piece of sand paper? I mean it can be super cooled and heated and survive but what if i sanded those pits off the disc? Would it last forever then? Thinking of what happens to my disc usually and it usually is they get scratched to heck and unreadable is this Disc scratch proof?
Why oh why is there not a data archive format at the file system level for optical media?
Why isn't there enough redundency and enough scatter to the information.
I should be able to:
1. Break a disk in half, glue back together with crazy glue, and read the disk.
2. Cover up to 45% of the disk with paint. ANY 45% and still recover my data.
Sure, reconstructing would be difficult. Capacity would be down. But I'd like to have an archive format that I can write to, and put in a box along with a reader and be reasonably confident that my grandkids can read it.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
Hand the disk to a 3 year old kid to play with for an hour. Bet it won't work then. - Marketing BS IMO.
Don't take your data's longevity for granite.
This is a great article, I'll just program my current computer to copy the article using these punch cards, and record it on this handy wax cylinder.
I'll just plug my wax cylinder and punch card readers into my serial port, its so easy!
Well, you can easily do it. The technology needed is: A CD pen. Write your data on the CD with the pen. You don't even need glue, or a drive to read it.
Of course the data capacity is not very high. But then, think of the advantages!
For more durable data storage, you also may consider scratching the data onto the disk.
SCNR
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Perish the thought. But possible. Homage to commedienne who was born 100 years ago this week.
In the cases you've cited, it's not so much about data redundancy as it is about the laws of physics. If the surface of the disc isn't smooth enough, that sucker isn't going to spin and you're boned. If we want backups that last, we should really use some sort of non-optical media, if you think about it. At least, that's my opinion.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
The Flinstones had this technology a long time ago, however it was not played with a regular DVD or CD player but with a Pterodactyl
So its laser etched on this special disk, but will a good scratch kill the data readability. One careless nimrod can really make for a bad day. and where are these "data crystals" babylon 5 promised us .....and my light-weight Jet pack lol
"But there is no reflective, or die, layer." I think you meant "dye."
And I suppose you think you should be able to fix the broken screen on your iPhone with Scotch® tape, too.
I imagine that a stone disk burner could be disassembled to make one hell of a laser-pointer!
Dismissing things like dipping in liquid nitrogen etc.. is fair game for but you should read the Navy test report and learn a little about environmental testing before proclaiming that rigged to get numbers. I am the navy engineer who helped Millenniata refine their proposed light/temp/humidity testing and performed the NAWCWD (Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division) test. I can assure you there was nothing rigged about it but learn a little about environmental engineering and read the report, then decide for yourself.
For the sake of correct information here are few answers to some of your points for those who are not sufficiently interested to investigate further:
1) Starting with known good discs: This was not a special treatment for Millenniata discs. The number of initial errors after writing a new DVD is influenced by a variety of things like temperature, write drive characteristics, DVD manufacturer/lot number, DVD age etc... Some archival quality DVDs are quite difficult to write because the dyes are optimized for stability making them harder to change during writing. This is important and well worth a study in it's own right but the focus of this test was longevity of the data that was recorded to the disc. To give all manufacturers an equal chance only discs which met a reasonable error rate to begin with (a pi sum 8 max below 175) were tested. To show this was not an unfair advantage I have listed below the number of discs of each brand required to obtain 25 sample discs:
Mitsubishi 25
Taiyo Yuden 25
Verbatim 25
Millenniata 29*
Delkin 51
MAM-A 64
*In order to meet schedule pre-production discs from equipment setup runs were used. Not only was the equipment not fully set up yet but none of the standard DVD quality control scans were in place yet. I would expect this number to be much better with the currently available discs.
2) 85C temperature and 85% humidity: This is one of the test levels in ECMA-379 and is not outside reasonable limits for accelerated testing of optical media. It is not in the range of dye phase change or unnatural failure modes. It only accelerate the degradation mechanisms found in the real world.
3) including light in the test: The inclusion of light in the test was intended to more fully capture the natural degradation mechanisms present in reality. This is a known factor in DVD deterioration. Here is a quote from Delkin about their archival gold DVD-R which was used in the test: "Our specialized Phthalocyanine dye withstands the threat of UV light, humidity and heat."
The light used was not anything special meant to degrade dyes unfairly either. The light intensity and spectral distribution on the surface of the discs was equal to natural sunlight during a summer day and was only turned on for 24 hours. The total light energy during the test was only equal to 1-1/2 days outside or about one year of sitting in an office indoors.
3)"humidity lensing": I am not sure exactly what is meant by this. Light passing through humid air loses some energy in the infrared spectrum because it is absorbed by the water vapor and turned into heat. There is no amplification or concentration of any other wavelengths, only the loss of some energy in the infrared spectrum. The discs were exposed to the same light that would be present on any humid summer day.
Ivan Svrcek
While dismissing showy "tests" like dipping a disk in liquid nitrogen is fair game I think you should take the time to understand the fundamentals of environmental testing and read the Navy report before proclaiming it rigged for numbers. I am the Navy engineer who helped Millenniata refine their proposed light/temp/humidity test and performed the NAWCWD (Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division) test. I can assure you there was nothing suspicious or rigged about it. If you don't believe me read the report and study up on environmental testing then decide for yourself.
For the sake of those who aren't interested enough in the general topic to read the paper I feel I should answer some of your points:
1) Starting with known good discs: This was not a special treatment for Millenniata discs. Some archival quality DVDs are quite difficult to write because the dyes are optimized for stability making them harder to change with the laser. This is important and the topic of initial write quality and errors after burning is well worth a study in it's own right however it was not the prime focus of this test. To remove this variable and give all manufacturers an equal chance in this test only discs which met a reasonable error rate to begin with (a pi sum 8 max below 175) were used. To show this was not an unfair advantage I have listed below the number of discs of each brand required to obtain 25 good sample discs:
Mitsubishi-25
Taiyo Yuden-25
Verbatim -25
Millenniata-29*
Delkin-51
MAM-A -64
*In order to meet schedule pre-production discs from equipment setup runs were used. Not only was the equipment not fully set up yet but none of the standard DVD quality control scans were in place yet. I would expect this number to be much better with the currently available media.
2) 85C temperature and 85% humidity: This is one of the test levels in ECMA-379 and is not outside reasonable limits for accelerated testing of optical media. It is not in the range of dye phase change or unnatural failure modes. It only accelerate natural degradation mechanisms found in the real world.
3) including light in the test: The inclusion of light in the test was intended to more fully capture reality. This is a known factor in DVD deterioration. Here is a quote from Delkin about their archival gold DVD-R which was one of the discs used: "Our specialized Phthalocyanine dye withstands the threat of UV light, humidity and heat." Obviously it is a known factor that is considered by all manufacturers
The light used was not anything special meant to degrade dyes unfairly either. The light intensity and spectral distribution on the surface of the discs was equal to natural sunlight during a summer day. The total light energy during the test was only equal to 1-1/2 day/night cycles outside or about one year of sitting in an office indoors.
4)"humidity lensing": I am not sure exactly what is meant by this. Light passing through humid air loses some energy in the infrared spectrum because it is absorbed by water vapor and turned into heat. There is no amplification or concentration of any other wavelengths, only the loss of some energy in the infrared spectrum. The discs were exposed to exactly the same light that would be present on any humid summer day.
Ivan Svrcek
I'll give it to my granddaughters for 2 minutes. Or less.
There goes Gartner's credibility, right out the window.