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posted by martyb on Wednesday November 06 2019, @07:34PM   Printer-friendly
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


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 06 2019, @07:59PM (13 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 06 2019, @07:59PM (#916959)

    Is this just the next step in the CD->DVD->Blueray iteration of technologies or is there something actually different other than switching from plastic to glass?

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Freeman on Wednesday November 06 2019, @08:19PM (5 children)

    by Freeman (732) on Wednesday November 06 2019, @08:19PM (#916971) Journal

    This is a niche area of the market. Personally, I thought it beyond corporate thought patterns to actually care enough about things like archival storage. There's a difference between, saying you have an archives, then filling it with film/tape of some sort and actually thinking about how that film/tape will stand the test of time. Plastic isn't a great long-term storage media, metal rusts, and paper leaves something to be desired. Glass seems like it could fit the bill for serious long term storage. Personally, I'd be a bit pessimistic with regards to the longevity of a glass platter, but I would be open to it as part of a comprehensive archival system.

    --
    Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday November 06 2019, @08:39PM (1 child)

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday November 06 2019, @08:39PM (#916989) Journal

      There's a niche demand for storage with a 1,000+ year lifetime. That's perfect for stunts like putting a "Library of Alexandria" on the Moon, but it's also good to have something you can stick in a box unpowered for decades without experiencing any data loss. You can't do that with a penta-level cell 100 TB SSD.

      Capacity is also a draw. Microsoft's 75 GB is cute, but an optical/holographic technology could store hundreds of terabytes [wikipedia.org], and potentially petabytes or exabytes. There's already zettabytes of annual Internet activity, and astronomers are producing exabytes of data. If you can put a petabyte, exabyte, zettabyte, yottabyte, etc. on a glass medium, someone will find that useful.

      The main risk they identified was shattering. So don't drop it during removal. With the right containment system, it could survive a plane crash or earthquake.

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      [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday November 07 2019, @07:51AM

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday November 07 2019, @07:51AM (#917246) Journal

      Personally, I thought it beyond corporate thought patterns to actually care enough about things like archival storage.

      It is beyond their thought patterns still.
      Selling them for a profit is inside those patterns.

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday November 07 2019, @06:05PM

      by Freeman (732) on Thursday November 07 2019, @06:05PM (#917411) Journal

      Also, from the aritcle.

      The speed of both reads and writes to Silica currently leave something to be desired—it took approximately a week to etch Superman's roughly 76GB of data last year, and Rowstron estimates it would take about three days to re-read the data, with advances made since.

      So, yeah, this is very much scientific in nature, as opposed to practical usage.

      --
      Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
    • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Saturday November 09 2019, @11:08AM

      by TheRaven (270) on Saturday November 09 2019, @11:08AM (#918208) Journal

      This is not intended as a distribution format or for end-user deployment. This is intended for large-scale cold / archival storage in Azure. It's a niche market, in that it has a single customer (Azure), but that customer currently has data centers in 54 regions around the world and stores a phenomenal amount of data. A lot of that is for off-site backups by other people, so most of it is never used (you only need the backups if the local system fails and you only need the off-site backups if the on-site backups fail). The vast majority of the data will never be accessed, you just don't know which small fraction will.

      The glass is very durable write-once storage, for exactly that kind of use case. It doesn't matter if the readers are bulky and expensive, because you're building a small number of them for each data center, it matters that the media are cheap (and can be made in a form factor that makes sense for a warehouse deployment, not a home office) and don't need periodically reading and writing back onto other media. The glass is cheap and does not deform or wear out. You can bake it in the oven, scratch it with wire wool, and still read back the data. You can even drop it on the floor without breaking it. Just don't hit it with a hammer. For a data center, ensuring that the storage is physically secure against that kind of attack is pretty easy, and if the glass is sufficiently cheap then geographically replicated copies are also very cheap.

      --
      sudo mod me up
  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday November 06 2019, @08:20PM (3 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday November 06 2019, @08:20PM (#916972) Journal

    There's no pressing need to create new generations of 12 cm discs anymore. We might see new standards beyond Ultra HD Blu-ray [wikipedia.org] and BDXL [soylentnews.org], but I doubt it.

    This is about creating WORM or cold storage with as much capacity as possible using technologies like holography. See the related story [soylentnews.org] which is similar to this concept. The choice of the Superman movie is not an accident since this kind of technology has been referred to as the "Superman memory crystal" [wikipedia.org]. It doesn't necessarily need to spin, so the circular shape could be abandoned.

    From the Verge article:

    Microsoft is using infrared lasers to encode the data into “voxels,” a three-dimensional equivalent to the pixels we’re used to seeing on screens. The data is stored within the glass, and machine learning algorithms can decode the patterns to read the data back. Microsoft is still developing this technology, and the company has released new research papers on Project Silica today. If Microsoft has its way, we’ll all be storing our precious digital data on glass, and data centers will be processing petabytes of data under the sea in the future.

    I think we will eventually see petabytes or even exabytes stored in a format similar to the one shown here. It could compete with hard drives or tape depending on if it is re-writable.

    --
    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
    • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday November 07 2019, @05:31PM (2 children)

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Thursday November 07 2019, @05:31PM (#917394) Journal

      With exabytes capacity, rewritability is no issue in normal use. Just write the replacement at a new position, followed by an updated directory. You'll not even come close to filling it during your lifetime.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
      • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday November 07 2019, @06:09PM (1 child)

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday November 07 2019, @06:09PM (#917413) Journal

        It is useful at the terabytes level, which is what has been demonstrated (not by Microsoft).

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        • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday November 07 2019, @06:57PM

          by maxwell demon (1608) on Thursday November 07 2019, @06:57PM (#917434) Journal

          I was replying to your last paragraph, where you explicitly mentioned exabytes, but conditioned on re-writability. My point is that at that size, for usual purposes re-writability of the medium doesn't matter.

          --
          The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  • (Score: 2) by progo on Wednesday November 06 2019, @08:30PM (2 children)

    by progo (6356) on Wednesday November 06 2019, @08:30PM (#916982) Homepage

    Recordable Blu Ray discs aren't designed to store precious archives in libraries. When I decided what to use to archive my home video projects' source files, I decided on Blu Ray, with the understanding that recordable DVDs last maybe 5 to 20 years, and if you write two copies and verify often enough, you might be okay -- and maybe Blu Ray is like that.

    You don't archive precious data owned by an organization with a lot of money, on a system like recordable Blu Ray.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @12:26AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @12:26AM (#917064)

      I don't know if they use a glass substrate in one of their layers, but the m-disc discs are designed for the exact archival purposes Microsoft's claim to be for, are already on market, and are available in 4.7, 25, 50, and 100GB formats. Microsoft's in comparison is more complicated, requires machine learning and a different drive, and is likely to be patented up the ass for as long as possible, even above and beyond Bluray.