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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 TheRaven on Saturday November 09 2019, @11:08AM
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