Thats a long write time. Also, I have to assume that most of the read/write hardware can’t live that long, so that’s all a bit theoretical. They’ll stop producing the hardware shortly after selling all the discs.
I mean, you can always make new hardware. The idea of media that basically lasts forever is really useful in my opinion. We currently don’t have anything that would last as long as regular paper. Most of the information we have is stored on volatile media. Using something like this to permanently record accumulated knowledge like scientific papers, technology blueprints, and so on, would be a very good idea in my opinion.
You could make new hardware, but realistically, it doesnt happen. The secrets get lost, the skills get lost, and the medium dies.
There is no chance that there is a working reader in a few thousand years time, let alone billions.
All that said, I agree that we need stable long term storage, my point is that billion year storage is just a fantasy spec. It looks good to investors, but doesnt hold up to reality.
Yeah, I don’t think billions of years is really a meaningful metric here. It’s more that it’s a stable medium where we could record things that will persist for an indefinite amount of time without degradation.
360TB x 500Mb/s write == 73 days to write
https://www.omnicalculator.com/other/data-transfer
Thats a long write time. Also, I have to assume that most of the read/write hardware can’t live that long, so that’s all a bit theoretical. They’ll stop producing the hardware shortly after selling all the discs.
It’s not like you’ll be writing to it more than once
Very expensive mistake if you messed up the disk during the write period.
Imagine it buffer underruns like old school CD drives
Or you drop something heavy nearby and the disk skips and aborts.
I’m sure this is most likely for archival purposes and not for general use.
Of course, but that is still a very long time.
I mean, you can always make new hardware. The idea of media that basically lasts forever is really useful in my opinion. We currently don’t have anything that would last as long as regular paper. Most of the information we have is stored on volatile media. Using something like this to permanently record accumulated knowledge like scientific papers, technology blueprints, and so on, would be a very good idea in my opinion.
Why can it not be simpler like a vinyl disk. Glass and silica are inexpensive. We couldstore less in more space so it is easier to access\read.
yeah that would work too assuming the disk was made out of sufficiently hard material that won’t degrade over time
You could make new hardware, but realistically, it doesnt happen. The secrets get lost, the skills get lost, and the medium dies.
There is no chance that there is a working reader in a few thousand years time, let alone billions.
All that said, I agree that we need stable long term storage, my point is that billion year storage is just a fantasy spec. It looks good to investors, but doesnt hold up to reality.
Yeah, I don’t think billions of years is really a meaningful metric here. It’s more that it’s a stable medium where we could record things that will persist for an indefinite amount of time without degradation.