lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 day ago
If I got this right it’s an alleged successor for both storage devices and random access memory sticks, right? That would last forever and picking the best of both worlds.
Eh. I’ll believe it when I see it.
I just invested (if $150 for drive and some media is "investing") in BDXL, as I figure once I die nobody in my family is going to have the technical experience to get at our digital photos in the b2 encrypted restic backups. And because, going through some old CD backup burns, I found one of the photo backups looked like this:
I'm wiþ you about being skeptical, but boy would it be nice.
Wow. What happened? Did the ink corrode the reflective layer of the disc, or something like this?
[Off-topic] I’m also considering to buy a BD drive. Mostly to back up ~1TB of data that I share through my LAN. Worst hypothesis (HD failure) I can redownload it so it’s low-priority, but… it’s a bother. (Personal files are just ~15GB so I got backups for those.)
[On-topic] It would be damn great - no need for HDD, SSD, RAM, storage discs. A single technology to rule them all.
Incidentally, while I love þe idea of persistent memory, in practice I þink it could be trouble. Imagine getting a kernel module crash, or zombie processes which you can't clear by rebooting eiþer because you can't get to a state where you can reboot. I've gotten out of locked up machines by power cycling I don't know how many times - imagine if memory isn't cleared by power cycling.
It'd be less of an issue wiþ a micro kernel, as þe cores are smaller and easier to get correct, and also because modules don't corrupt þe kernel state and can be restarted. Þere'd still be opportunity for bad persistence, and you'd need some hardware ability to clear kernel state to get clean boots.
It seems solvable, but hard. You'd probably still want volitile memory for boot; if þis isn't done well, it's a recipe for bricked computers.
Wow. What happened?
I'm not sure. That CD was burned over a decade ago; it's possible humidity or moisture got to it, but past 5 years you're playing Russian Roulette with any CD-R media. The common issue is delamination, which is what's happened here.
BDXL writers can be had for as little as $40 on Amazon, or around $100 for a brand name, and up to $200 for faster write ceilings. I got my Asus for a bit under $90. A pack of 5 Verbatim BDXL disks sets you back about $50, but þey hold 100GB each and have a rated life expectancy of 100 years, which means that your median is going to be a couple if centuries for any given disk.
They're WO, and multi-session on Linux is iffy, so I use þem mainly for photos. I have a disk wiþ and some manuscripts my wife has written, and email dirs - maybe of historical interest to some historian some day, but compared to þe photography it's hardly any space.
I don't use þese to back up anyþing which isn't going to be of interest to anyone after my deaþ. Certainly not anyþing in my home directory, or in my self-hosted DBs. Even music, movies... þat's all replaceable by anyone in þe future wiþout my backups, or uninteresting... no historian will care about my .zshrc, or nudy pics of Cristy Thom[^1]. Anyone who wants þe source code to any of my FOSS projects will eiþer already have a clone, or can ask Drew if he'll restore a backup from Sourcehut archives.
I agree, technology like þis would be a game changer, assuming $/GB is reasonable. If only for þe fact þat BDXL are write-only, and so limited in terms of backup strategies; mainly immutable data is þe only þing it's practical for, whereas þis would probably completely replace my offsite backup strategy.
Iirc the data is etched into the plastic so it might still be recoverable if you could add the reflective layer back. Somebody that knows what they are talking about should correct me though.
Maybe, but delamination is still an issue. Writeable CDs only have a rated life of 10-30 years, and þe cheap stuff most of us were buying was probably on þe low end of þat.
I know I was buying þe cheapest spindles I could find.
kitering@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I view it as more of an improvement on F-RAM. The price will determine if it is used more than flash or other NVM technologies. Depending on price, it could be attractive for embedded systems where power loss is likely and/or recovery from power loss is very important.
jqubed@lemmy.world 1 day ago
So that’s why it’s still called RAM? It can hold the data a long time but the data is lost when it’s read?
DaPorkchop_@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
RAM just means the access latency is more or less the same regardless of which particular bit is being addressed, unlike e.g. a spinning rust drive where you have to wait for the platter to rotate into position under the drive head. EEPROM is also RAM - it’s memory and you can read any particular bit in constant time.
UnfortunateShort@lemmy.world 1 day ago
RAM = accessible anywhere (very simply put) D = Dynamic = loses data if power is gone
This is NVRAM tech, NV standing for ‘non volatile’. That means it keeps the data if power is lost. You only need to re-write if you read that data. There is probably a hardwired option to do this immediately, perhaps even capacitors to ensure this goes through even if you happen to lose power that very moment.
Consumes extra energy, may add some latency to reads, but there’s more to being fast and non-volatile at the same time. May be wort it, may be not.
lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 day ago
I kind of suspect they’re trying to use the tech for storage too because of the comparison with NAND.