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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.
Related: "5D" Laser-Based Polarization Vortex Storage Could Hold Hundreds of Terabytes for Billions of Years
(Score: 3, Informative) by Snotnose on Wednesday November 06 2019, @07:36PM (5 children)
if it's round why give it's dimensions as 7.5 x 7.5 x 2mm? Wouldn't it be better to say it's a 7.5 cm diameter disk 2mm thick?
Or I dunno, there aren't any pictures. Maybe it is a glass square.
Bad decisions, great stories
(Score: 2) by progo on Wednesday November 06 2019, @08:26PM (1 child)
Looks like a rectangle to me in the Variety story attachment where someone is holding a glass recording object in their hand. That page's title is also where "glass disc" comes from.
This is the state of journalism.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday November 06 2019, @08:44PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_disc [wikipedia.org]
Good enough for Wikipedia.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Wednesday November 06 2019, @10:01PM (1 child)
Disks, especially blank business card sized CD-R disks [amazon.com] can be rectangular. Square disks.
These were fun back in the day. There was a distribution, DSL, I think that was designed to fit into the capacity of this small CD-R.
If a lazy person with no education can cross the border and take your job, we need to upgrade your job skills.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nuke on Thursday November 07 2019, @02:27PM
Yes, real fun. One wrecked my boss's CD drive with some very entertaining sound effects.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 06 2019, @11:16PM
you are you calling square, disc hipster.