SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday November 06 2019, @08:39PM (1 child)
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.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @02:33AM
Financial motivation explained here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire [wikipedia.org]