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from the what-is-the-read/write-speed? dept.
Why Microsoft and Warner Bros. Archived the Original 'Superman' Movie on a Futuristic Glass Disc
Microsoft has teamed up with Warner Bros. to store a copy of the 1978 movie "Superman" on a small glass disc about the size of a coaster. The collaboration, which will be officially unveiled at Microsoft's Ignite 2019 conference in Orlando, Florida Monday, is a first test case for a new storage technology that could eventually help safeguard Hollywood's movies and TV shows, as well as many other forms of data, for centuries to come.
"Glass has a very, very long lifetime," said Microsoft Research principal researcher Ant Rowstron in a recent conversation with Variety. "Thousands of years."
[Image] The piece of silica glass storing the 1978 "Superman" movie, measuring 7.5 cm x 7.5 cm x 2 mm. The glass contains 75.6 GB of data plus error redundancy codes.
Microsoft began to investigate glass as a storage medium in 2016 in partnership with the University of Southampton Optoelectonics Research Centre. The goal of these efforts, dubbed "Project Silica," is to find a new storage medium optimized for what industry insiders like to call cold data — the type of data you likely won't need to access for months, years, or even decades. It's data that doesn't need to sit on a server, ready to be used 24/7, but that is kept in a vault, away from anything that could corrupt it.
This is not the Superman memory crystal we need.
Also at The Verge.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 06 2019, @09:25PM (1 child)
Since TFA mentions the use of error-correcting codes this is unlikely to be a microfiche-like storage medium.
Many years ago I read about a project which did store microfiche-like images on glass, along with instructions on how to use it translated into many languages, which was visible as large text starting at the outside edge and spiralling inwards getting progressively smaller (intended as a hint that you should be looking at this thing under a microscope).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 06 2019, @09:31PM
Ah, this was it: http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/ [rosettaproject.org]
In this case the images were actually etched on a nickel substrate and then encased in glass.