Submitted 3 weeks ago by kalkulat@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/14/sphotonix_moves_5d_memory_crystal/
“the medium is silica crystal, similar to optical cable, it’s highly durable. It’s also capacious: The technology can store up to 360 TB of data on a 5-inch glass platter.”
Remember that CDs, CDRs, and so on we’re originally pitched as surviving 100 years. Turns out they last a highly naturally amount of time but potentially as little as 2-3 years before they degrade, depending on the construction.
So I’ll just say, this is clearly a theoretical value.
CD-R and CD-RW discs use different methods of data encoding, and were never advertised as having similar longevity.
I mean…sorry, but this is wrong. Mitsui CDRs for example are still being sold on secondary sites advertising 100+ (and sometimes 300+) year longevity. Similar to bitrot, internet rot makes it hard to find advertisements from the 90s, but I am comfortable that was true then too and not limited to “gold” high quality discs like Mitsui.
So it’s 2 to 3 percent of original estimate? That means it’ll last anywhere from 280 to 420 million years. Dead on arrival tech.
How can you be so sure they haven’t already done durability testing??
Because they weren’t invented in 1925? Any durability testing you do today is about assumptions where you accelerate the process for a year by heating it or exposing it to water or whatever will degrade it most to some factor above normal and then extrapolate. That extrapolation was wildly wrong with CDs and it could be with this medium too. Or it might last a lot longer. What they have not done is written to a bunch of them and stored them in a variety of ways for 100 years and concluded they last that long.
The ones with metal pigment are still waiting to fail, the ones that died used a cheap organic dye, coz profit. This is Silica (i.e. quartz, a long lived rock) with variances in polarization and intensity,( hence 5D when combined with a 3D Crystal))
OK generic marketing crap and will you have their special reader in a century, but it’s a solid way to project knowledge into the far future (gotta wonder if we need to re-examine some quartz crystals with this in mind ;}
I wonder what the read write speed is. Imagine storing your entire movie collection in a crystal the size of a coaster
If it's slow, then it's the central backup and you use anything else for regular use. Just having it as a fallback for recovery would be huge.
I’ll have a crystal collection that’s actually useful
We desperately need a non-magnetic storage for obvious reasons … But making a new thing is freakish difficult.
In case you missed it in the article, the transfer speeds are mentioned just two paragraphs prior to the one you cited:
Over the next three to four years, Kazansky said, SPhotonix aims to improve the data transfer speed of its technology from a write time of 4 megabytes per second (MBps) and read time of 30 MBps to a read/write speed of 500 MBps, which would be competitive with archival tape backup systems.
Writing 360 TB at 4 MB/s will take over 1000 days, almost 3 years. Retrieving 360 TB at a rate of 30 MB/s is about 138 days. That capacity to bitrate ratio that is going to be really hard to use in a practical way, and it’ll be critical to get that speed up. Their target of 500 MB/s is still more than 8 days to read or write the data from one storage platter.
I was so blind sided by the fact that the tech isn’t for consumers that I forgot to mention the r/w speeds
That’s the joke. The speed of a lot of these tech would require twice the time the data retention to write it.
We can place atoms in order on the head of this pin and store 30 Pb. Write speed? 1KB/min
Did you read the article? 30mbps is faster than a lot of people’s internets. It’s not fast, but for a prototype, it’s not bad.
That’s cheap enough a small business could do long term backups for individuals and other small businesses.
I had the exact same idea, you could upload your data to cloud storage, and have them write it to the doodad and send it to you.
Manipulating the atoms in a crystal to store info is extremely high-precision, as is verifying the accuracy of the write). So is reading positions down to a few nanometers, But consumers wouldn’t need a $6000 reader to get, say, 10GB dumped to a hard drive … you’d carry your crystal and 16GB drive down to the corner store and user their reader to dump sector 37BJ to the drive. No need to trust them with your platter … but are you exposing all 360TB to potential damage from the machine?
A friendly request - please de-clickbait your headlines and say what the material is (although you do mention it in your summary).
When a post is a link to an article, I would prefer that the post title match the article. Many news communities actually require that.
Ah, righto. That was an old rule in many subreddits. Seems to vary a bit by Lemmy community, though. I just cringe at clickbait!
This grinds my gears any time that a product is touted as lasting X time. Did you put it through a typical use case or scenario for that X time? No? Then you cannot definitively say that it will last that long.
Based on their bullshit statement, I can last 7 years pounding someone’s ass relentlessly without pause for any reason. Trust me bro.
The degradation of materials is pretty well understood. If it’s truly cut from a well known material with zero factors that could effect that degradation, it’s mostly safe to make en educated wish.
educated wish
I’ll remember this
“zero factors that could effect that degradation”
So in other words, only a completely unrealistic estimate can be made? After all, our sun is not going to be the same in 5 billion years, so unless the material comes along with a solution to maintain the material’s temperature (as per the manufacturer’s website the longevity is temperature-dependent) then 14 billion years sounds rather unlikely.
You can stimulate wear on different types of materials and get a general idea of how long it would last. This isn’t plastic in a dvd.
Any volunteers for testing the claim?
I could go for a good ass pounding.
If you can get me safely to .999 C, slow me down, and get me back to Earth at .999 C, sure. The entire trip for me would only be about two years, provided a consistent 1 G of acceleration. Just please make it so that reversing acceleration doesn’t completely screw me, so my spaceship doesn’t have to do a complicated flip a bit after the halfway point on each trip. I’m certain that wouldn’t be good for my stomach.
I mean, people do predict things based on evidence. Galileo didn’t actually go to outer space and verify that the earth was going around the sun.
Didn’t they think in those days that your eyes sent beams out to touch whatever they were looking at?
I wonder if he thought his eyes were sending beams out into space.
Oddly specific fetlife bio
Unsure if joke or not, ha. I don’t even remember what I set in my bio for FL, its been a couple years since I set that account up…
Beyond that, the sun has about 5 billion years before we might not be able to starlift it back to a “younger” state, so The Earth and Venus may not exist at all if we don’t get our asses in gear for sustainable intragalactic life in the next century or so.
I am failing to connect the two time scales you mention.
How hf can you have 5D space within 3D space? This sounds like marketing bullshit.
The 5D Memory Crystal stores data by using tiny voxels – 3D pixels – in fused silica glass, etched by femtosecond laser pulses. These voxels possess “birefringence,” meaning that their light refraction characteristics vary depending upon the polarization and direction of incoming light.
That difference in light orientation and strength can be read in conjunction with the voxel’s location (x, y, z coordinates), allowing data to be encoded in five dimensional space.
Oh, I get it now. It’s a five-dimensional mathematical space which is given by the three physical space dimensions plus the difference in light orientation and the difference the light strength.
5D is the wrong term, the correct term is multiplex.
It is the correct term if you look at it from a Hilbert space point of view. You have 5 probe options (vector 5D) that give you 5 read options (vector 5D).
Pondering my backup orb
What if some civilization in the past already had something like this, and there are ‘plates’ or pieces of rock out there (under sand dunes? written in the sides of those vases from ancient Egypt?)
Could they make portable readers that can at least spot old pottery chunks that are probably FULL of videos?
Given that it’s the engine Egyptians, they’ll be cat videos.
Excellent, I will catalog my journals of my metamorphosis into a giant worm on these.
Giant worm that shits mind enhancing drug, to be more specific
Best prank idea: Put someone’s browsing history on one of those.
See, now this is the tech I would understand pouring billions into. Give every nation on earth a durable copy of the last 100 years of medicine, physics, biology. That’s what a reasonable ruling class ought to do.
At least give them to the nations which aren’t currently trying to ignore and undo the last 100 years of medicine, physics, and biology. (Sorry, United States.)
those are the places that most need it though
Eh, we earned it.
if they were reasonable, they wouldn’t be a ruling “class”
Once you have the tech fully worked out, the budget to make them is going to be cheaper
and just like every other storage medium, it will last for eons…and die about .5 femtoseconds before you have a critical need to pull data off.
prints article out
places it on an overflowing, ancient pile of documents of promising, science proved data storage methods that haven’t made it to public use yet
Remember Memristors? They’re commercially available today, at 200 EUR per bit.
wow, sign me up for a couple of dozen terabytes of that!
I also remember people burning pitts on scotch tape, then rolling it up and reading it in 3d :)
Nor ever will
I’m up to 45TB of actual used storage. I just want another tape analog. I want inexpensive, slow, long-term storage I can move off-site easily. This paying double to keep disks around and then moving them in boxes is just bad, and online storage is stupid expensive at those sizes.
Was running on Backblaze for years until they screwed around with my client enough that I can’t backup my NAS reliably. I’m not a company, I’m not going to pay the cost of my disks every year to store the content of my disks.
I’ve been considering for a few years standing up a 2u box in colocation.
Finally some worthy storage for memes!
Eat your heart out Ea-nāṣir.
Those aliens from the future will be so amazed when they find a disc with 360 TB of cat videos.
You mean various levels of fucked up porn.
But is it safe from the cats? 😼
glass shattering sounds
Is anything, really?
Not even cats are safe from cats.
Oh good it can fit the next Call of Duty game.
It will not.
For real, what am I going to do when the sun swallows the earth in 4 billion years?
Open AI just bought out all the glass platter production. Not only will consumers not be able to store their data for 14gy, they won’t have anywhere to set down their drinks either
Oh yeah? Well take a look at these Elder Scrolls over here.
Wait no, not literally! 😵💫 🔥
Good luck finding a reading device for it in 100y, let alone 14 billion years. I doubt there will be a human civilization a few thousand years from now. :)
It’s OK to make fun of non-existing/ not yet market ready devices, no?
Is it rewritable to an extensive degree? If not its just a backup medium, not day-to-day storage. Still useful, but more disposable.
Waiting for the consumer reader and writer of those things, call me then
Time for some Horizon: Zero Dawn style Vantage points.
Every year or so some company comes along and announces some new storage technology that exponentially increases capacity or lifetime or both. Then nothing more is ever said about it and it never appears.
Meh…. Japan’s been pitching holographic data storage since the early 2Ks — at least —LMK when I can buy a magic holographic zip drive and I’ll be back.
Permanent storage. Like the Wayback massive and internet archive I hope will fully take advantage of these. As well as project Gutenberg. So much else. I’ve been waiting for something like this for a long time
…but only one million years into it’s life span the human race is gone and aliens are unwittingly melting them down for raw material.
It’s amazing to see all the effort we all put in perfecting technology to long-term store our porn. 360TB? I’d like to order 2 please.
“We are a technology licensing company”
This is good news from the point of view of being able to create devices that can read these crystals; as a comment on the linked site says:
The realistic lifetime of storage is the life of the last manufactured or surviving retrieval device.
I need this for my Star Trek collection!
AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
@remindme@mstdn.social 14,000,000,000 years
alias_qr_rainmaker@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I will remember to check my lemmy inbox right after the earth gets eaten whole by the sun
Fuck_u_spez_@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
And then again 13,000,000,000 years later.