Optical Data Storage Squeezes 360TB on to a Quartz Disc—Forever

[Tribalinius]

Now, that's some exciting stuff. If it's as reliable as they say, I wouldn't be surprised to see companies move their archives to these kinds of media in a couple of years!

 

Quote

The storage allows unprecedented properties including 360 TB/disc data capacity, thermal stability up to 1,000°C and virtually unlimited lifetime at room temperature (13.8 billion years at 190°C ) opening a new era of eternal data archiving. As a very stable and safe form of portable memory, the technology could be highly useful for organisations with big archives, such as national archives, museums and libraries, to preserve their information and records.

Source

[Xenift]

Heard of HAMR?

Wait 6 more days and on techquickie you would know why :D.

[Tribalinius]

2 minutes ago, Xenift said:

Heard of HAMR?

Wait 6 more days and on techquickie you would know why :D.

It's pretty neat! But, I think the main appeal of the quartz discs is it's stability and durability not necesseraly it's density. I don't think we can expect a HAMR drive to survive 13.8 billion years ;).

 

Quartz disc will cater for the cold storage market while HAMR is, in my opinion, a normal evolution of our current drives toward higher density drives.

 

That article from Forbes tends to suggest that we should not expect better life time from our future HAMR drives than we do with our current drives.

 

Quote

TDK said that they have confirmed heat assisted (or thermally assisted) magnetic recording with more than 1,000 write hours in a 10,000 RPM HDD.   Seagate Technology provided the HDD. This is significant since the company says that this would allow 30 hours of HDD TV recording a day, every day, for five years.  In other words this work indicates that a HAMR HDD could be made that will support a reasonable life-time of use (5 years is a common estimate for HDD useful life).

 

[Xenift]

Cool, but aint Quartz expensive? To Find a similar sized quartz would be rare, and there is no way of melting it to make molten quartz for recycling.

Or is there artificial manufacturing ways to only coat the discs?

[carolkarine]

5 minutes ago, Xenift said:

Cool, but aint Quartz expensive? To Find a similar sized quartz would be rare, and there is no way of melting it to make molten quartz for recycling.

Or is there artificial manufacturing ways to only coat the discs?

I thought they did this on a special glass disk anyways?

[Xenift]

Just now, carolkarine said:

I thought they did this on a special glass disk anyways?

Glass is different, you could mold glass by melting it down but for quartz as a stone, melting it down changes it's structure.

[NumLock21]

There is that m-disc which last for 1,000 years. 1,000 years is not enough.

[NateGSR117]

pretty cool drive, but I doubt the average joe will get/have one

[Doobeedoo]

Would like to know the speeds of such thing

[christianled59]

10 minutes ago, Doobeedoo said:

Would like to know the speeds of such thing

Probably as fast as an average hard drive. Maybe slower actually. 

[Tribalinius]

1 hour ago, christianled59 said:

Probably as fast as an average hard drive. Maybe slower actually. 

By the time it would be available for the normal consumer, I tend to think that we will have monstruous SSD available on the market. We're already at what now, 4TB with the consumer grade SSDs when Mushkin will release it's SSD later this year. Beside, I don't think they're looking to replace normal HDDs with those quartz disc, it's really designed to be useful as a cold storage backup unit that can withstand the test of time more than anything else.

 

With these kind of technologies emerging, I'm starting to wonder if HDDs will still be relevant in, let's say, 15 years.

[rentaspoon]

2 hours ago, NateGSR117 said:

pretty cool drive, but I doubt the average joe will get/have one

I'd buy one regardless to keep some photos of my kids, wedding ya da ya da

 

I'd happily buy it for 3000/4000 quid if it meant I never lost them but had instant access to them

[Beskamir]

So basically we are one step closer to holocrons?

[Nielips]

4 hours ago, carolkarine said:

I thought they did this on a special glass disk anyways?

Glass isn't a stable material, so it would be a very bad idea to make long term storage from it. Think pane glass windows in churches, they are thicker at the bottom.

[Dabombinable]

2 hours ago, Nielips said:

Glass isn't a stable material, so it would be a very bad idea to make long term storage from it. Think pane glass windows in churches, they are thicker at the bottom.

Yep, glass isn't actually a solid (and I can't remember the type of liquid it and other materials like it are called).

[BOT Edward]

Personally I wish this could be a thing but the cost for quartz is only going to increase as companies attempt to adapt this for their own use (therefore raising demand resulting in a possible %200 increase in cost).

If we can get rid of magnetic tapes I will be so happy, having to swap them every week and put them in offsite storage is a real PITA, even more knowing that there is plenty of space left on each tape but commvault restores become corrupt depending on the tapes fullness).
 

[Agosto]

5 hours ago, Nielips said:

Glass isn't a stable material, so it would be a very bad idea to make long term storage from it. Think pane glass windows in churches, they are thicker at the bottom.

 

2 hours ago, Dabombinable said:

Yep, glass isn't actually a solid (and I can't remember the type of liquid it and other materials like it are called).

 

lol, you two are making the same wrong statements my Materials professor talked about in his course

 

Glass IS a solid. Period. The whole "old windows are thicker at the bottom because glass is a viscous liquid" argument is completely false, they're thicker at the bottom only because glass makers couldn't produce flat panels like current ones. So they obviously put the thicker part on the bottom.

[Comrade_Dave]

 

4 hours ago, Dabombinable said:

Yep, glass isn't actually a solid (and I can't remember the type of liquid it and other materials like it are called).

 

6 hours ago, Nielips said:

Glass isn't a stable material, so it would be a very bad idea to make long term storage from it. Think pane glass windows in churches, they are thicker at the bottom.

How is glass not stable? Hard drive platters are made of glass.

[Tribalinius]

19 hours ago, rentaspoon said:

I'd buy one regardless to keep some photos of my kids, wedding ya da ya da

 

I'd happily buy it for 3000/4000 quid if it meant I never lost them but had instant access to them

I would not pay that much but yeah, that's the point of that kind of technology.

15 hours ago, BOT Edward said:

Personally I wish this could be a thing but the cost for quartz is only going to increase as companies attempt to adapt this for their own use (therefore raising demand resulting in a possible %200 increase in cost).

If we can get rid of magnetic tapes I will be so happy, having to swap them every week and put them in offsite storage is a real PITA, even more knowing that there is plenty of space left on each tape but commvault restores become corrupt depending on the tapes fullness).
 

That would certainly drive the price up for the raw material, there is no doubt about that. But, would you pay 100$ for a 360TB storage unit that is virtually indestructible in a controlled environment? I'd do it ;).

[Nielips]

18 hours ago, Agost said:

 

 

lol, you two are making the same wrong statements my Materials professor talked about in his course

 

Glass IS a solid. Period. The whole "old windows are thicker at the bottom because glass is a viscous liquid" argument is completely false, they're thicker at the bottom only because glass makers couldn't produce flat panels like current ones. So they obviously put the thicker part on the bottom.

Have you looked at any of the recent studies into glass? The materials scientest that are a t the putting edge of glass science don't even know exactly what it's physical form is. So either you are way beyond science, or your talking out of your arse. But the glass pane windows thing is wrong know I remeber, but your other statement is bullshit.

[Halkenguard]

On 2/16/2016 at 1:21 PM, rentaspoon said:

I'd buy one regardless to keep some photos of my kids, wedding ya da ya da

 

I'd happily buy it for 3000/4000 quid if it meant I never lost them but had instant access to them

I doubt these will ever realistically be available to the common consumer. Making a hard drive that never fails will drastically decrease sales for any major HD manufacturer in the long run. They'd be shooting themselves in the foot with it basically.

 

It'll probably only ever be used for specialized government projects and historical record keeping. Or some HD manufacturer will buy the rights to manufacturing and never do so, keeping the tech out of the market.

[Agosto]

1 hour ago, Nielips said:

Have you looked at any of the recent studies into glass? The materials scientest that are a t the putting edge of glass science don't even know exactly what it's physical form is. So either you are way beyond science, or your talking out of your arse. But the glass pane windows thing is wrong know I remeber, but your other statement is bullshit.

 

Glass is an amorphous solid, just like lots of stuff you use everyday, take many kinds of plastic as an example.

 

Pure silicon glass internal structure is composed by silicon ions surrounded by oxygen ions arranged in a tetrahedral way; these tetrahedrons are bound together but not in a precise order, leading to a non cristalline random structure which creates a kind of isotropy ( don't know the exact English term, however a direct translation could be "isotropy by compensation" ). In non-pure silicon glasses there are many other ions (usually metallic ones) between oxygen atoms

[BOT Edward]

8 hours ago, Tribalinius said:

I would not pay that much but yeah, that's the point of that kind of technology.

That would certainly drive the price up for the raw material, there is no doubt about that. But, would you pay 100$ for a 360TB storage unit that is virtually indestructible in a controlled environment? I'd do it ;).

Definitely, but the more time goes on the more the price goes up, possibly making it go from $100 to $10,000.
Although an exaggeration, price is reflected on demand

[Fetzie]

On 16/02/2016 at 2:33 PM, Tribalinius said:

Now, that's some exciting stuff. If it's as reliable as they say, I wouldn't be surprised to see companies move their archives to these kinds of media in a couple of years!

 

Source

 

The disk might last for thousands of years, but you won't be able to get the data off it after the drives die

[MoonSpot]

On 2016-02-16 at 9:06 AM, Xenift said:

Cool, but aint Quartz expensive?

No.  Not even a little bit.  Only when dealing with liars and contractors does quartz mysteriously become an expensive commodity.

Quartz makes up about 12 percent of the land surface and about 20 percent of the Earth's crust

 

https://uwaterloo.ca/earth-sciences-museum/resources/detailed-rocks-and-minerals-articles/quartz