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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: 2) by takyon on Wednesday November 06 2019, @08:20PM (3 children)
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:
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.
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(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday November 07 2019, @05:31PM (2 children)
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)
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
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.