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Do they last more than 20 years in ideal conditions?
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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the researchers claim the petabit discs can last 50 to 100 years.
Anytime you get to that length, you always have to think about whether or not someone will have a drive to read it, a computer that it works on, and matching programs to decode the data. Think about some of the formats we had in the 70’s and 80’s and how often people actually have that hardware and software in working order now.
Think about some of the formats we had in the 70’s and 80’s and how often people actually have that hardware and software in working order now.
Well yea, but it's a matter of funding and business/government desire. 99% of the time the only people who care about accessing things that old are hobbyists and enthusiasts.
If something critical to a fortune 500 company or government was stored on it and they needed it they would have the means to contract out a specialty one off device just to read it (Or contract out to a very pricey data recovery shop)
And software is software, we can still run 70s and 80s software through a myriad of virtualization technologies fairly easily and cheaply.
old family videos? old government data?
its not just for hobby.
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Aren’t most of those emulateable in dos-box or similar programs?
Assuming the software isn't lost, then yeah, typically it can be emulated or reverse engineered to work.
The bigger hurdle is the hardware, especially if the encoding of the data was proprietary, meaning that even if you could get a reading without it, you'd still need to figure out how to decode it into useful data
That's for future people to figure out
The same promises we got with CD then.
Last year I ripped my whole DVD collection.
Blu-Rays were more of a pain because of the format itself; Handbrake itself wouldn't do the job, I had to use MakeMKV to get a huge mkv file then wash it through Handbrake to compress it to an mp4. Not a single one failed.
Movies on DVD, out of ~300 discs, I had a total of 6 fail because the discs are somehow damaged, most were visibly scratched and wouldn't play back in a normal DVD player either.
TV shows on DVD, out of ~150 discs, ~40 of them partially or totally failed, many had visible disc rot. And there was definitely a pattern that boils down to "cheaper discs tended to fail." Older discs from earlier in the format's life proved more reliable, I think because, for example, my copy of Friends was purchased in the mid-2000s relatively early in the "TV shows on DVD for binge watching" era, some 60 discs in total, no failures. Smaller runs of shows that not a lot of people bought that were kind of plunked out on DVD for the nine people that bought them like Kolchak: The Night Stalker or The Greatest American Hero? 50% failure rate. An interesting one is my copy of Stargate SG-1. I own some seasons from an earlier pressing that came in individual standard plastic cases in a cardboard box, you know what I mean? Those were reliable, only one disc failed because of scratches caused by mishandling. I own some seasons from a later re-release in those slimmer 5-discs-in-a-cardboard-foldy-thing, and more than half of those are unplayable due to disc rot.
Meanwhile I have CDs made in the 80's that still play just fine.
They last very long as long as no humidity catches it tho.
Real, good quality, factory-made discs, maybe. Anything else (from bad quality factory stuff to writable discs), not so much. And backups where not done on factory-pressed discs.
Optical discs are already incredibly resistant and shouldn't be expected to fail in your lifetime. Most of the times they do, it's either old media (cd and dvd both had physical flaws in design), damage, or mistakes in manufacturing.
There's really no reason for the discs to degrade. It's just stamped plastic.
As an optical media enthusiast, I’ve done a fair amount of research into how, why, and when discs fail. Because the discs use two or more polycarbonate layers pressed together, moisture can sometimes work its way between the layers and speed up degradation, especially if a disc has been overly flexed at the center. Heat and UV can also speed up degradation.
Another problem is that plastic is petroleum-based and it breaks down over time. A lot of people think that the reflective layer (the metal layer) is actually the data layer but it almost never is. The data layer itself is polycarbonate, sandwiched between the reflective layers and more polycarbonate layers.
The newer discs like blu-ray movies are made with better plastics that should last at least 100 years. Depending on the dye layer of writable and rewritable blu-rays, they should last either at least 25 years or 100 years.
What disc is left? blu ray?
Bluray and uhd bluray are the current standard
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How long would it take to burn one? I remember when CD writers came out, and burning a disk at 1x meant the 60-70 minute wait.
As a back-up solution, I do like it. I'm wondering what the cost will be.
Since the realistic competitor here is probably magnetic tape, current-generation (LTO9) media can transfer at around 400MB/s, taking 12 hours and change to fill an 18TB tape.
Earlier archival optical disk formats (https://news.panasonic.com/global/stories/798) claimed 360MB/s, but I believe that is six, double-sided discs writing both sides simultaneously, so 30MB/s per stream. Filling the same six (300GB) discs would take about an hour and a half.
Building the library to handle and read/write in bulk is always the issue though. The above optical system fit 1.9PB in the space of a server rack (and I didn't see any options to expand further when that was current technology), and by the looks is 7 units that each can be writing a set of discs (call that 2.5GB/s total).
In the same single rack you'd fit 560 LTO tapes (10.1PB for LTO9) and 21 drives (8.4GB/s).
So they have a bit of catching up to do, especially with LTO10 (due in the next year or so) doubling the capacity and further increasing the throughput.
There's also the small matter that every one of these massive increases in optical disc capacity in recent years has turned out to be vapourware. I mean I don't doubt that they will achieve it someday, but they always seem to go nowhere.
Oh, is that what those multiples meant? I never realized.
It's the number of times faster it can read or burn compared to the original speed of reading and burning
Does the 'original speed' mean what the natural playback would have been? So 60 minutes of audio burned by a x60 drive would take one minute?
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Just enough to run Windows 12.
It would be, but it's not certified for Windows 12, so it won't actually run it lol
Ok sure, but where's the advanced anti scratch device?
100 layers just means more data lost to a single scratch.
Listen, the idea isn't that you'll have a walkman that has every YouTube video you'll ever watch on it.
It's that you'd backup an entire fucking enterprise on one disc. Schedule it daily. Pay the support team to swap the disc out every night. Who needs infrastructure for ransomware, we got DISCS!
I suppose with that much data capacity they could halve the storage and add redundancy. My question is will it only have 1 reading head? That much data is going to take a very long time to read, unless they're doing multiple layers at a time,
With a rate 1/2 you can't expect to correct more than 5.5% of errors.
I am unfamiliar with the math used to calculate that value.
Would it not work like a parity RAID where each sector would have parity bits in a different location on the disc?
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Put it in a case like an old floppy disc.
What of you put it on an enclosure that has the disk(potentially even more stacked on top of each other) plus all the hardware needed to read the disk. Then all you would need is to provide power and plug in a data cable.
Or like a UMD or mini disc? Still have to insert it into something to read and write, but the discs themselves are enclosed and protected unlike CDs and DVDs and Blu-ray. Basically they're floppy disks, but instead of magnetic tape inside the shell, it's an optical disc.
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So optical drives will make a come back perhaps? Guess this means we'll have malware similar to in the early days where it would spontaneously open your CD-ROM drive "as a cupholder."
I used Computer Management in school and at work to pop open people's CD drives. I did a lot of dumb stuff.
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I'd said over on the Old Place back during the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD wsrs that people really liked their 7" optical media. I got down voted to hell for it then, but I'm glad to see I wasn't totally wrong.
Cheap, high density media has its applications. Tape is still the preferred long-term storage medium for backups in a lot of industy sectors because still stores gobs of data, it's dirt cheap, compact, light and it transports easily. If you don't need it to be fast, or you're regularly producing large scale data sets that are essentially disposable after some time, then it's a good compromise.
No reason this tech couldn't step into that niche when it hits the right price point.
I absolutely agree with you, hovewer lto-9 18tb tape costs same money 20tb hdd costs
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The article didn't say if it's rewritable
Even if you can just add to it, you could have some sort of journalism file system to replace or delete previous files in newer records.
How to lose EVERYTHING in one go.
Until you scratch it
This is great, I have a NAS and I still get slow data corruption for my long term data even using bit-rot resilient file systems. I would like a way to back up 5Tb of photos and videos on a single disc to bury somewhere for long term (decades) storage.
Playing the long troll game by burying your nudes for some poor sap in the future to find.
I respect that.
The long troll game with my short troll game
In the meantime, check out m-disc. You can put 100gb on one disc and it can last in storage for decades at a minimum.
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Back to spinny drives we go?
Optical media have some disadvantages to conventional HDD and SSD though, unless they have reliable scratch and shatter protection.
isn't that very much depending on the exact technology and material used?
Imagine how slow these would be
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